Hello and welcome to series inquiries only. This is episode 509. I'm Thomas Smith. I'm so excited for this one. Have you seen the movie Project Hail Mary? Or maybe have you read the book, or maybe both? Well, I hope so, because that's what we're going to be talking about today. We've got Dr. Eric Jaffe here to break down the biology of Project Hail Mary. What does it get right? What does it get very wrong? And then because I'm me, I'm also going to suggest that you got quite a few space things

wrong, but that's okay. Still a very good movie. I had fun. I liked it. A lot of people are really loving this one. Here's the thing. I tried, I set about to try to do it in a non-spoiler way. That was my goal. And then I quickly realized because of the specific science we needed to talk about, there's basically no way to do

that non-spoilers. I don't think the spoilers are like super important plot points. So if you haven't seen it and you still want to see it, I don't think it would be horrible to listen, but you might want to consider if you're anti-spoilers, I know some people don't care. If you're really anti-spoilers. You might want to pause this one, keep it handy for when you do see it. But yeah,

normally try to keep it spoiler for when you do see it.

But yeah, normally try to keep it spoiler-free just wasn't possible with the specific science that we want to talk about. That said, I'm really excited. This is a really fun one. A couple of nerds nerding out to a nerd movie in the best way. and I'm so glad Dr. Eric Jaffe was back on the show.

It's been far too long.

All right, we're going to take our quick first break.

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All right, after this, I'll be on with Dr. Eric Jaffe's been far too long. How you doing?

I'm doing pretty well. We just finished up our third of four report periods in school.

Kids did really, really well on their biology exams. So take that Charles

Murray and the bell curve. Did you have to explain to them how the sun is dying? And you're like,

hey. Luckily, we haven't been attacked by like alien neural tubes yet. So I haven't been called

into higher service yet, but I'm on the lookout. Yeah. Because apparently, none of the kids

will know anything. And you'll be breaking the news to them. Why? I don't know. But that's how movies work. That was really weird. Yeah. Although I will say like kids will ask me about current events. So that does kind of track. We're like because you as a teacher, you're a trusted source of information. They'll still process things through you even if they get their news from other sources. Like the dire wolf stuff I was talking to my students all at the time, for instance. Oh yeah, the dire wolf stuff. Man, I forgot about that. Are they eating this son? How are they doing? We are going to have some callbacks in this because we're going to talk about the history of life on earth. We're going to talk about probably Brett Weinstein because what's an episode without dropping his name? Well, yeah. So we watched Project Hail Mary. Well, you read and watched? I read and watched, yes. I literally just minutes ago walked in the door from seeing it today. Oh, nice. Because I really wanted to see it. Once I saw that I was like, oh, I want to watch watch this before I do it because I don't want any spoilers.

And so we just watched it. I enjoyed it. We're going to talk about some of the science. I will warn that we have to talk about something that it does happen later in the movie. I don't think it's like that big of a deal as a spoiler, as spoilers go, just in my evaluation in terms of enjoying the movie. it's not like he's dead the whole time and he's a ghost or something.

It's not like that level of kind of thing, but it is a plot point later. Unfortunately, we got to spoil it, but spoiler warnings issued. I'm talking enough to give people time to turn it off if they don't want to, but I don't think you should have to. Okay, we just watched it. I don't want to do the thing where I say a bunch of general thoughts first because I always get caught ADHD-wise talking for an hour before digging into it. So why don't we just dig into it, though I will say, I liked the movie. I liked it. I thought was like a solid B-plus. Did you like it? I also really enjoyed it. It's going to sound like I'm yucking people's yum in a couple of minutes, but I want to be very

clear, right? Yeah. This is the scientist using this as a way to talk about things and all science

fiction movies. There's a reason why there's the fiction after science, right? So obviously there's

some things that don't kind of jive. I will say, there are things that Andy Weir did that made

things harder for himself that we'll talk about. But overall, I also really enjoyed the movie. I thought a lot of the things they did science-wise. In the book in particular, were really well done. The movie flattened a lot of those things. So there's a couple of things we can talk about. They kind of remove the things that made it very good at science in the movies, but it was still a really wonderful, wonderful movie. I want to ask you a question. I haven't looked up. Why do I know the name Andy Weir? He must have written something else that I know. He also wrote The Martian. And not to give away the whole thing, the Martian was a much more grounded, obviously, because it didn't involve quite the scale and stakes, but it also allowed that to be much

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