What if Normandy/Enterprise

if you're wondering what & where it is before i start yapping, it's durdle door, in dorset

some background context, my first exposure to project hail mary was when folks started freaking out on the local facebook groups - ryan gosling's coming to town for filming a new movie!! i thought to myself ahhh fuck. the city that i go to uni at is gonna cameo in a gosling film. fml i guess i have to see this now

anyways i forget about it for ages until the movie drops and i finally go see it and imagine my surprise when i'm expecting miserable fuckass portsmouth and instead. i snap upright like-

"is that durdle door?!" "yes i think so-" "the dorset fieldtrip?!" "yep" "ohh my god. they went there?!" "i guess so" "what the fuck" <- live reaction of me and my bf who both have done fieldwork there related to our respective degrees (geology & palaeontology)

anyways now for some fun facts:

the arch structure you see is part of portland limestone formation, and is going to eventually to erode away entirely

the arch itself it estimated to collapse anytime from 100 years time, to several hundred years time - depending on ongoing weathering/changes in weather patterns (woo yay climate change)

the cliffs are mainly cretaceous era chalks, and this area is so prone to landslides it's not even funny. we went for a day and literally i think the week after? there was a landslide

fun extra fact about the chalk, they contain loads of coccoliths which are great for dating rocks + analysing the palaeoclimate during deposition

whilst the directors cut implies the reason behind the beach being shingle is because the eridians can't figure out sand particle size, the reason why the beach is flint is literally because of geology; it's been eroded out of the cliffs

sidenote it would be much nicer if it was a sandy beach but unfortunately that wouldn't make much sense geologically

at the very end of the movie, we see some beds extending into the water and the camera panning out as he begins teaching the little eridians - this is in man o' war cove is is on the other side of the archway!

this is visualised in the little diagram i made at the very start of the post, so ryland's house sits atop where the pathway down IRL is located, and the beach where he and rocky sit on is the western side, and the classroom is on the eastern side

the line in the movie where ryland says "the beach is always changing. you could go to the same spot every day. you're always looking at a different beach." is so especially true because durdle door is (like i said before) constantly changing both from erosion, landslides, and just the result of it being a tourist location

it's been different everytime i've been, in fact it was closed? earlier this year because the paths were badly damaged from storms

so it's like the paths you see in the film are the old ones, and if you visited, they'd look different/they'd be new

sidenote not confirmed at all but i wonder if they chose durdle door because of its "proximity" to portsmouth because of filming locations in hampshire... it's a 2hr drive but ig that's not far if you've got a film crew

anyways here's some pictures from when i went for fieldwork a few years ago:

--edit 07/05/2026 some more facts that my bf said i should add!--

durdle door's eastern cliff face, the one adjacent to the eridian classroom, is specifically purbeck (Purbeck) limestone and features some awesome preserved wave ripples

kinda like the ones you'd see on a sandy beach, except they're from the late jurassic-early cretaceous

the beds i spoke about in the last post, the one that ryland/the eridian classroom is situated on, is the cinder bed - which is a mass mortality shell bed, and we have a cobble of it*:

the thin part of durdle door, where ryland grace's house + tree are, is the wealden (Wealden) group, which is composed terrastrial sandstones that represented a period of sea level regression :)

the wealden group is characterised as a freshwater (no ocean) fluvial (rivers) floodplain, so lots of water stuffs!

oh also the wealden group has small deposits of limonite which is a neat yellow mineral that derives from iron (the whole wealden group is quite ferric)

sidenote it'd be sooo cool if people drew the eridians with textures like the local geology (maybe i should do this... but this is all chalk and limestone soo they'd kinda just be grey. interesting textures tho!)

*durdle door is a sssi (site of specific scientific interest, protected by law) we did NOT hammer a chunk of it off, it is illegal to take pebbles or samples from a sssi without explicit permission :(

Aka everyone say hello to my personal Grace headcanon you will not see me drawing him without a granny chain ever.

The mom thought that entire formation was Adrian

i just think it would be funny if in the middle of an arguement with her taskforce leaders shes like “i’m sorry, i overreacted. my wife is divorcing me”

and in several order, grace is like

1. wow holy shit she said sorry

2. SHE HAS A WIFE?

3. AND IS GETTING DIVORCED?

*quickly double checks the calendar *

Rocky was maybe not the best person to ask

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .