Sometimes I just must squeak

"What if Stratt didn't force Grace to go?" Then the Earth dies.

"What if Yao and Ilyukhina had survived?" Then they all would have died in space, not enough food to get to Earth or Erid

If the Taomoeba hadn't escaped then Grace would have never seen his best friend again. Returning to a world he loves but no longer recognizes.

If the stars weren't dying then Grace never would have met his best friend at all. Living content but alone.

Project Hail Mary is a hopeful story. It is a story of friendship and what it means to be brave. It's a story about saving the world.

One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is when he’s IN the Petrova Line, and he’s having a moment. Because it’s beautiful. It’s destroying galaxies, uncountable lives, but it’s still beautiful.

change in sun / change in grace

change in grace / change in rocky

change in crew / change in grace

and then a little later on he learns that it had nothing to do with sound at all! purely by chance this composition of xenonite lets light pass through it! and humans have this special organ that lets them detect invisible radiation to such a fine and accurate degree they use it to navigate a room and sometimes to communicate with each other, without even needing technological augmentation!* at one point when looking at planet adrian grace is like wow, i know from our readings this planet has a surface, but the atmosphere must be really dense, i can't see anything past the clouds! and rocky is like YOU CAN NORMALLY SEE PLANET SURFACE FROM SPACE QUESTION??

(*mostly. giving movie grace glasses makes this retroactively very funny)

and then there's an initial smaller taumoeba leak before the catastrophic one (not due to the xenonite, due to a lot of stuff around the ship breaking during the adrian mission), which mostly just succeeds in draining the hail mary's non-vital power system and turning all the lights off

which drops grace's ability to navigate his own ship to zero

Breaking through the atmosphere, And things are pretty good from here.

What the fuck did you mean by "A below middle C major fifth". Andy there is no such thing as a major fifth. Did you mean a perfect fifth? Or were you trying to say that it's an A Major triad? At some point he mentions "G minor diminished", which also isn't a thing and could be referring to like three different chords (G°, G°7, or Gø7)

Also, Grace's ability to intuit pitch names without a reference point, with no musical training, after only a few months of listening to Eridian speech, is crazy. This man has perfect pitch and an incredible (untrained!) ear and he seems to have no idea that he possesses this gift.

For one, humans on Earth likely continued to breed astrophage, trying to minimize its range or damaging effects - any number of things. Rendering it sterile would be ideal, of course, but it was likely impossible until the mission succeeded. You can damn well bet your ass Stratt was out there chaining scientists to workbenches, trying to find or force a silver lining. She wouldn't be wrong: Astrophage IS an excellent source of fuel, which means it has great potential. PLUS!! the discovery of Taumeba gives you a way to control it.

Erid is only 16 light years away.

Imagine humanity pulled back from the brink, striving together to produce not one but TWO (at least!) huge joint efforts to save ourselves and each other. Project Hail Mary was followed the Taumeba Project, surely. The world comes together again.

I, however, like to imagine there was a third plan.

I think meeting Eridians became a worldwide obsession. Ryland Grace's legacy can be nothing but a collective triumph, though his contact with intelligent alien life is somehow second to saving the Earth and who knows how many other systems. Once saved, the next major project would surely be meeting our interplanetary friends. How would we say "hello"?

Let's say Earth's initial overture is a simple probe, Voyager style. What do you send? Well, they know Grace may still be out there, or at least was/is known to Eridian culture. He's the one link; the only common element.

The probe launches, and what it's full of is love for Ryland Grace. His childhood pictures. Interviews with his students. Thousands of statues and dedications and documentaries. Videos of worldwide celebrations of the Day of Grace. Kids' drawings of Rocky with laboriously-written thank you notes, thick with crayon so the Eridians can see. We love him too. We love you already.

Given their longevity, I imagine Rocky and Adrian opening the probe together, trilling over memories of their old friend. Stories they only heard about secondhand or not at all. Joy and triumph and thankfulness and hope, all in one small interstellar package. Amaze amaze amaze.

I like to think that once Earth receives the beetles and fixes the sun, they then send another beetle to Erid full of seeds, food, spices, and other care package stuff for Grace.

At that point, they won't know he's still alive, as far as they know, he probably starved to death by then. But Stratt insists they send it anyway. If nothing else, it can be a gift for their newly discovered neighbors, the Eridians. Afterall, what's more friendly than sharing food?

The Eridian scientists study the contents of the care package. It's full of shelf-stable human food that they do their best to clone/replicate for Grace. There are also some seeds that store well for the years of travel they experienced. Radish, lettuce, tomato, beans, etc. (Potatoes would be a great callback to "The Martian")