I'm alive, some times

Counterargument: that is way too much data unless it’s on a crystal storage matrix or whatever that those Bay Area guys still have not iirc perfected. The internet is probably a vague sketch of itself, missing most video and images.

Some relevant book quotes:

But the real boon is the library! As far as I can tell, this panel can bring up literally any scientific textbook ever written, every scientific paper ever published on any topic, and a whole lot more. There’s one directory just called “Library of Congress,” and it appears to be the entire digital catalog of everything that’s ever been copyrighted in the United States. No books about the Hail Mary, unfortunately. And the reference manuals. So many reference manuals. Data on top of data with data in between. I guess they figured solid-state hard drives are light, so there was no reason to be stingy with information. Heck, they may have just burned the data into ROMs. They gave me reference material on stuff that can’t possibly be useful. But hey, it’s nice to know that if I need the average rectal temperature of a healthy goat, I can find that out! (It’s 103.4°F / 39.7°C.)

Interesting points:

They use SSDs instead of HDDs for whatever reason. AFAIK SSDs degrade when not in use for several years, and they if fail the data is harder to recover. On the other hand, SSDs have no moving parts, which is probably why they were chosen.

This description highlights two distinct kinds of materials: selected for being scientific and potentially useful (textbooks, papers, manuals), or imported wholesale as a preexisting collection that wasn't trimmed down (Library of Congress).

“During this trial, we will show that Project Hail Mary has overstepped its authority in the matter of digital data acquisition and licensing. They have, in their possession, a gigantic solid-state-drive array upon which they have copied literally every single piece of software that has ever been copyrighted, as well as every single book and literary work that has ever been available in any digital format. All of this was done without payment or licensing to the proper copyright holders or intellectual property owners. Furthermore, many of their technological designs violate patents held by—”

"Literally every single piece of software that has ever been copyrighted" kind of implies that they didn't archive the software that wasn't copyrighted. On the other hand, maybe the plaintiff didn't care. On the other other hand, he does specify "every single book and literary work that has ever been available in any digital format", so why didn't he say the same about software? Is there FOSS on board or not?

The files described here are all 1) relatively small and 2) already available in digital format. No info about everything else, specifically the large media like video.

Grace already knew about the books, this flashback exist to makes him (and the reader) aware there's also software.

“We are building a ship to literally save our species. And we have very little time to get it done. It will have three astronauts—just three—to do experiments we can’t even conceive of now. We need them to be prepared for any possible line of study they deem necessary. So we are giving them everything. The collected knowledge of humankind, along with all software. Some of it is stupid. They probably won’t need Minesweeper for Windows 3.1, and they probably don’t need an unabridged Sanskrit-to-English dictionary, but they’re going to have them.”

Interesting mention of Minesweeper, presumably as an example of software. Do other games counts of software too? Are there 200 GB modern video games on the Hail Mary?

Stratt is focusing on "any possible line of study" rather than entertainment.

So why do they have "every single book" and not just the scientific materials? Surely the crew wouldn't need either Homer or Chuck Tingle to study astrophage.

"All software" implies not just copyrighted but all. So yes to FOSS.

Again, no mention of video.

“It would take a ridiculous amount of time and energy to work out licensing agreements with every company. So we’re not doing it.”

Does this imply that filtering and organizing the archive would be too much work too?

Maybe it was just easier to save every book ever to Mary's servers than to sift through them and try to filter out fiction.

Btw, for scale: according to Wikipedia, "As of August 5, 2026, Anna's Archive includes 68,692,002 books and 156,186,028 papers, and its unified list of torrents totals roughly 1.1 petabytes in size." And the Hail Mary presumably had more.

If memory serves, I should have pretty much all the software lurking around somewhere on the ship. The trick is finding the one I need. I wouldn’t even know what it’s called. Fortunately, one of the books in the digital library is a list of software applications. So that helped. Ultimately I find something that will work: “Tympanum Labs Waveform Analyzer.” There are all sorts of waveform-analysis software packages in my library. This one just has the highest reviews according to a 2017 computer magazine that reviewed waveform analyzers.

Grace references "a list of software applications" "in the digital library" and "a 2017 computer magazine". Notably, he doesn't seem to have an offline, usable snapshot of the internet. No offline Google here. Not even an offline archive of Reddit or forum threads. We don't know if the "computer magazine" was an archived page from its website or a PDF scan or something else.

“Good good. And thinking machine have information, question? Science information from Earth, question?” Ah, of course. I’m an advanced alien race with knowledge far beyond Eridian science. I think the laptops have terabyte drives. I could copy the entire contents of Wikipedia over to him.

Laptops have regular size drives. (The beetles also have regular 5 terabyte drives.) No near-future super-storage.

The archives have an offline copy of at least Wikipedia. Presumably, some other useful websites too.

Would all Wikipedia fit onto a terabyte drive?

Wikipedia itself says: "As of 16 October 2024, the size of the current version including all articles compressed is about 24.7 GB without media." "As of June 2026, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 142,471,025 files, totaling 1,085,665,611,155,968 bytes (987.41 TB)." Apparently, a 2026 offline copy of the English Wikipedia with images is 115 GiB — perfectly feasible even for a laptop.

“Thank you for laptop. Centuries of human technology all for our scientists to learn about. You have given greatest gift in history of my people.”

"Centuries of human technology" implies more than Wikipedia.

I wonder how much it would take to make a flash visible from 40 Eridani. We could talk in Morse code or something. They have a copy of Wikipedia now. They’d work out what we’re up to when they saw the flashes.

Wikipedia again.

Thanks to my Earth scientific journals, they know all my nutritional needs and how to synthesize the various vitamins in labs.

The only Earth media now available to Erid that was mentioned in the epilogue: "scientific journals".

So, in the book version, it's all very dry and realistic. A reasonable amount of storage space, a lot of lightweight files, archives of some important websites. Nothing specifically for entertainment. And clearly no video. Wikipedia and the Library of Congress? Canonically yes. FOSS? Presumably. AO3? Debatable. Youtube? Clearly not. Pornhub? Absolutely not.

The simplest and most efficient solution for astronaut entertainment (including porn) would be just to tell them to bring their own. Maybe they had space allocated on Mary's servers, or they could have just brought an HDD along with other personal items. And obviously nobody would censor the crew's belongings. So whether they had porn in space or not would be entirely up to them.

Now, the movie, of course, throws the storage space concerns out of the window. There are movies and karaoke. Grace, inexplicably, declares that the tiny laptop he gives Rocky somehow contains "all human knowledge". I mean, the movie ship is bigger, so I guess they had more space and allocated mass for the servers. How many kilograms is storage space for a copy for every movie in, for example, the Netflix database? Maybe in the movieverse they did figure out futuristic super-storage. Go wild I guess.

A bunch of props and costumes from Project Hail Mary have been put up for auction, so I took the time to save all of the images from the site.

These could be some really good references for cosplay and artwork; I hope you find them useful!

🧑‍🚀🪨👎💫🪐

The gdrive includes a .txt file with links to all of the auction items if you'd like to have a browse (and cry with me when they eventually sell for thousands of dollars).

guhhhim busy you get doodle ofthe not-there-rrator