The Doctor

>>Link to Theta<<

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

"So who's that? The Architect? The Captain?"

[Plain text: Every named Project Hail Mary character]

Note: This is for the book! Not the movie! I didn't miss Carl he's just named something else (sorta) don't worry <3

Irina Petrova - Discoverer of the Petrova line

Marissa - Ryland's ex-roomates ex-girlfriend

Sandra Elias - Reporter

Dr. Browne - Head of Planetary Sciences for NASA

Jeff, Larry, Abby, Regina and Trang - Some of Ryland's students

Doctor Ryland Grace - Main character. Sent on the Hail Mary as their scientist.

Eva Stratt - Part of the Petrova taskforce, and is it appropriate to call her the leader of Project Hail Mary?

Hail Mary - Project Hail Mary's spaceship

Commander Yáo Li-Jie - Hail Mary's pilot

Olesya Ilyukhina - Hail Mary's engineer

Theresa, Michael, Tamora, Harrison, Luther and Tracy - Some more of Ryland's students

Honorable mention - John, Paul, George and Ringo - The beetles on the Hail Mary

Honorable mention - Larry, Curly and Moe - The three Astrophage Stratt leaves Ryland

Steve - Army guy

Honorable mention - Shemp - The Astrophage that Moe "birthed"

? - Air force guy that Ryland forgot the name of

Dr. Matsuka - elderly Japanese man at the PHM meeting

Minister Voigt - Germany's minister of foreign affairs

Ms. Xi - Chinese lady that had already replicated Ryland's results

Dr. Dimitri Komorov - Heads up the Russian Federation's research into Astrophage (also responsible for Spin Drives)

NannyBot - The medical arms in the ship

Blip-A - The alien spaceship

Dr. Lokken - The Norwegian scientist that suggested turning the Hail Mary into a centrifuge

Rocky - The Eridian Ryland meets

Justice Meredith Spencer - The judge

Theodore Canton - Plaintiff/counsel for the Intellectual Property Alliance

Mr. Easton - the Kiwi head prison guard

Dr. Robert "Bob" Redell - The prisoner and inventor of the blackpanel

Dr. François Leclerc - The climatologist

Honorable mention - Erid - Rocky's planet

Dr. Lamai - Thai doctor in charge of making NannyBot

Linda - Ryland's ex-girlfriend (from college)

Captain Yang - Captain of Stratt's (borrowed) ship (?)

Martain DuBois - Primary science expert

Annie Shapiro - Backup science expert

Adrian - Rocky's mate

Honorable mention - Adrian - Tau Ceti E's new name

Forrester - The person radio-ing Ryland as he tests out the clamp tool for the space suit

Steve Hatch - The guy who designed the beetles! Also, he's me! He's so so me!

Honorable mention - Pete - The prototype beetle

Honorable mention - Threeworld - The third planet in the Eridian solar system

Private Meknikov - Russian soldier present to "protect Stratt" (really present to restrain Ryland)

short answer: (leclerc voice) who the fuck even knows

long answer: looking at the various climate simulations run by worldbuilding pasta (which is a fantastic site for worldbuilders btw), we have a few good case studies to compare. first, the modern earth looks like this:

nice and cozy. gotta love home sweet home (no offence, erid!)

then, here’s what earth will look like at several degrees celsius cooler than it is now (cooled by removing co2 from the atmosphere):

now, exoplasim tends to underestimate glaciation, so the amount of ice cover here is probably less than would occur in reality. however, even at a chilly average temperature of -10 C, life as we know it would continue to exist with the caveat that there would certainly be a major mass extinction event. for reference, during the last glacial maximum (the ice age), earth got to about 10 C on avg. -18 C might be enough for snowball earth and exoplasim is running too warm, but it also might still be habitable.

however: it probably wouldn’t be this bad.

according to wbp, reducing earth to an avg of 15 C to 0 C meant reducing co2 levels from 300 ppm to 80 ppm. this is roughly equivalent to reducing insolation by about 220 W/m2 (going off of wbp’s old climate scripts), which, if I haven’t fucked my math, is around the reduction level predicted in phm.

now, seeing that i’ve said that this amount of reduction in the sun’s strength would be enough to cause a mass extinction event, you might be thinking something along the lines of “wait, how the hell can you be saying that it’s not going to be that bad?” and there are two answers:

1. it takes ages for the climate to change because thermal inertia gets in the way. even if there’s a sudden, massive change in greenhouse gas or insolation levels, it takes upwards of several centuries to start seeing changes on a global scale. i don’t know if 30 years would be long enough for the climate to reach equilibrium — if exoplasim is accurate, it would take something closer to a century before earth settles into a colder global temp — probably longer, because ecoplasim doesn’t model ocean currents.

2. earth is a tricky, inconsistent bitch when it comes to climate.

the sun’s level of insolation has increased as she’s aged — current insolation is about ~1367 W/m2, but 1 Gyr, it was closer to ~1100 W/m2, which is about the reduction that an unmitigated Astrophage infection inflicts on the host star (i think?? I may very well be fucking up my percentages here). however, this is where we run into the “faint young sun” paradox — despite the fact that the sun used to be dramatically cooler than it is today, earth’s global temperature has been shockingly consistent. during the boring billion (1.8 - 0.8 Gyr), despite insolation being ~1100 W/m2, the planet was actually warmer than today (about 20 C on avg) — which is where the paradox gets its name. the climate was so stable, in fact, that there probably weren’t even any major ice ages despite the milankovich cycle presumably functioning as normal during the boring billion. so. wtf, earth?

the reason for the “faint young sun paradox” is poorly understood — the planet had something to the effect of 7-11 times more co2 than it does today, which sounds significant but is still an order of magnitude less than we would anticipate to be needed to keep the planet that warm despite the reduced insolation. all i can really do is shrug and copy leclerc — climate science is very young, and there’s still plenty we don’t know. however, considering that methane is something like 2-4 times as effective a greenhouse gas, things should play out much like weir described, if not even better: adding that much methane might prevent global temps from dropping by any more than 5 C by the end of the 30 years of cooling at worst, and it’s actually entirely possible that the planet will end up heating up for a bit before the methane is destroyed during the hail mary’s apology tour.

the primary problem isn’t actually going to be global temperatures — it’ll be the combination of insane storms and fear-mongering leading to wars. a sudden drop in global insolation won’t be enough to turn earth into a snowball with the addition of the methane, but it is going to majorly fuck up things like the enso cycle, and the ictz is probably going to wander like crazy.

by the end of the thirty years of waiting for the hail mary, the planet probably won’t have cooled by any more than 5 C, potentially not even 2 C, just because the amount of greenhouse heating added by the methane should lead to temperatures proportional to what we saw during the boring billion when the sun was as luminous as it is current day after astrophage infection. if anything, it’s possible that adding so much methane could cause the post-hail mary earth to be warmer than when it left, because methane is way better at warming up planets than co2 and off the top of my head I don’t know if it’ll be depleted enough after 30 years for it to be safe to immediately release the taumoeba without causing global warming.

however, there’s no way the combination of reduced sunlight and blackpanel heating won’t have serious effects on global climate. there will be wild, unpredictable storms globally, and surface temperatures will drop low enough that people probably will die as a result. it’s easy enough to say that in the long run things will even out, but, in the short term, there’s going to be a lot of casualties when people have to deal with infrastructural inadequacies. look at texas, for example, where many people die as a result of the infrastructure not being able to protect them in the cold. that’s going to be happening globally —not cold enough to make any one particular country uninhabitable outright, but enough that i would predict probably upwards of a few hundred million casualties over three decades (although that’s just a very, very loose guess).

it’s just that, as always, most of the people who will die will be the poor who won’t be able to afford the cost of improving their own infrastructure or the cost of moving somewhere easier to live. which is nice and depressing…

the one caveat to all of this is actually pretty interesting: in the phmverse, it’d probably be really easy to make hyper efficient power plants? the problem with astrophage was, ironically, that it stored way too much energy. however, assuming the blackpanel farms continue running, they should continue to produce fuck-off high amounts of astrophage that can now go towards creating power for infrastructure instead of the hail mary.

it’s basically nuclear ii electric boogaloo, except somehow both better and worse, because on one hand astrophage can just straight power stuff, no steam and turbines required, but on the other hand, if 1 mg is enough to blow up a warehouse… what would 1 kg do if you dropped it somewhere? there would probably be an insane arms race immediately following as everyone tries to get as much astrophage as possible both for power and for weapons. which… ironically would probably cause a second cold war and, like the cold war, another space race, since now colonizing the solar system is a cake walk and there’s shit loads of resources to be gained to whoever figures out how to monopolize the first asteroid mining colonies.

phm sketchesss (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)