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That's an interesting angle.
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I haven't seen that.
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I wrote a brand new sci-fi story with Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir.
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Andy is one of the most popular science fiction writers alive.
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He also wrote The Martian.
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And what's special about his work is how real his fake stories are.
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He showed me the secret spreadsheets that he uses to calculate all of the science in his stories.
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And the reason that that matters is that great fiction can help you see the real world more clearly.
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Sci-fi is huge if true.
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This show is about real science and technology, but we've used a little bit of sci-fi to start to explain complicated things.
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So I wanted to learn from Andy.
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In this conversation, we go deep inside his fictional worlds to see exactly how he makes them feel so real.
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And we play out our brand new sci-fi story together in real time.
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Welcome to Huge Conversations.
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Just my bump.
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Success.
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Just my bump.
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Exactly.
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Hello!
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Hello!
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Thanks for doing this!
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Sure, happy!
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Nice to meet you.
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Please!
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I am a fan.
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Likewise!
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Oh, this is going to be so much fun.
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I never thought you'd start out that way.
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Well, I saw that video of like, just a short of you with like a light- lightsaber.
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It's like, and just the look on your face is like...
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Oh, that's cool.
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Just this delight, it's like you were 10 again.
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It felt like that.
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And you see it come out, and you can't help but make the noise.
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Of course, immediately you're like, I can't.
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Well, they had to edit out when you and McGregor, when they were filming The Phantom Menace, they had to edit out because they found on the things he was making lightsaber noises during the fight scene.
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Oh, this is going to be so much fun.
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Thank you so much for being here.
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Great to meet you.
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And congratulations on escaping Alcatraz.
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Thank you.
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That was way harder than I thought it was going to be.
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Well, I mean, the prevailing theory is that those guys died, right?
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Yes, yes, and now I know why.
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We were like hour four in the freezing water, and I was like, so these guys definitely died.
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These guys died.
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They died.
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Definitely, definitely they died.
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Maybe, who knows?
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I have so many questions for you.
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I have so many answers.
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I feel like I've been preparing for this interview my whole life.
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Great, whatever you want.
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Let's talk about whatever.
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So just whatever your first question is, my answer is seven.
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Awesome, I'll make sure.
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Well, it's six plus.
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OK, so it sounds like maybe you know a little bit about our show.
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Yes.
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Taking a step back, Huge Conversations is a show about possible futures.
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And often we're interviewing tech CEOs and scientists and folks like that.
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You spend all day every day imagining possible futures and sharing them with other people.
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And you have written some of my favorite books of all time.
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So first, I just want to say thank you.
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I know I speak for millions of people
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when I say how much joy I have gotten out of the stories that you've written.
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Exactly.
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But on behalf of the millions of nerds around the world, thank you for your service.
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So this is not a list of PR questions about the Project Hail Mary movie.
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We'll get into it in some ways.
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But I'm hoping to have a larger conversation about science and science fiction.
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And we could not be in a better place to do it.
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Yeah, exactly.
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We're in the American Museum of Natural History.
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That is a real meteorite.
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It is the largest meteorite in any museum anywhere.
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Excellent.
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Why are we here?
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Because it's cool.
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It's cool.
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It's cool.
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It's cool.
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I just thought, what a perfect spot.
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I love meteorites.
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I have a sugar tight at home.
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Do you really?
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I have it.
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It's about the size of a walnut.
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Can you buy them?
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Yeah.
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It's perfectly legal.
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Buy.
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Buy a sugar tight.
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Yeah.
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It's a Mars meteorite.
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Oh, awesome.
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And it's about the size of a walnut.
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It costs an absurd amount of money, but I had just gotten paid a bunch for the Martian, so I'm like, wants it.
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And so I have it on display in my house.
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It's like, yeah, this unremarkable looking rock is from Mars.
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This was on Mars.
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That's so awesome.
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That's really cool.
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I have three things that I want to do in this conversation.
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The first is I want to get into the details of what you've called your favorite part of the whole process, which is world building.
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And I want to do some of that together.
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I think the best way to do that is to do it in real time a little bit.
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So the second category of question I want to ask you is about a sci-fi story that I am working on.
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Okay.
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And then I want to zoom out and I want to talk about what I love most about your stories, which is the optimism.
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You don't write dystopias.
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You write about good people solving hard problems.
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Thank you.
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And I want to talk about that.
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Yeah, I'm an optimist.
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I'm a bit of a Pollyanna in real life.
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Me too.
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That's how I am.
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I wish this was going to be great.
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And I think humans are neat.
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Yeah.
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I think we're pretty neat.
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It's easy to lose sight of that because you watch the news and you see all this misery and stuff.
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But the reason that you're seeing all this bad stuff on the news is because bad stuff is newsworthy.
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Yeah.
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You don't report like people doing good stuff because it's so incredibly common that that's the norm.
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Like so somebody slips on a street corner and breaks their leg and seven total strangers crowd around, bring them to safety, maybe give them a bottled water,
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call an ambulance, ask if they can call any family, try to stabilize his leg.
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You know, that happens all the time.
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It doesn't make the news because it's expected, ordinary, normal human behavior.
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But I think it's beautiful that the kind of compassion
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and empathy and selflessness that humans have is so ordinary that it's not newsworthy.
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That's the feeling that I want people to have when they watch my show as well.
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And that's the feeling that I get from reading your books.
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Thank you.
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I want to start with Project Hail Mary.
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I want to summarize it really quick.
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Please interrupt me in any question, but especially when I'm summarizing one of your books to you.
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In Project Hail Mary, our sun begins to dim.
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Scientists figure out that there is a space bacteria called astrophage that is dimming our sun, and that not only our sun is infected,
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but all of the stars in our near vicinity are infected to, except one.
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And so your main character, Dr. Ryan Grace, needs to go on the world's longest space adventure to discover what's happening with
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that star to maybe save Earth.
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Okay, I want to start by talking about these.
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Yes, yes.
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This is like one of my many spreadsheets that I use in writing Project Hail Mary.
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And this has mostly do with the physics of astrophage.
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At the bottom here, there's a bunch of tabs.
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This tab, Hail Mary, has all the information about the ship and this one.
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Beetle, nav, tau seti.
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Yep, yep, Fortier Adani.
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And then there's even one that's called like wrong math
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because I had to calculate how much fuel the iridians brought along with them because they didn't know about relativity.
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So they assumed they would have pure Newtonian physics all the way from Fortier Adani to Tau Ceti, so their math was completely wrong.
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So I had to calculate all of that to know...
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You did their wrong math for that.
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I did their wrong math and figured out how much extra fuel they would have as a result of their wrong math, which is why Rocky can have some left over for Grace.
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So this is all about astrophage.
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This is the temperature that astrophage needs to be, which is 96.415 degrees Celsius, is what it works out to be.
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This is the temperature astrophage needs to be to be able to generate neutrinos, which is what it uses to store energy.
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So the way it makes neutrinos is it has a temperature, that heat energy causes some hydrogen ions inside the astrophage to be bouncing around,
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just, you know, mean square, calculate their their velocity that they will have at any given temperature.
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And that is the velocity they need to have to have the kinetic energy equal to the mass energy of two neutrinos.
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So you back calculate, okay, if they're going to be going this fast to have this much kinetic energy on the collision, then what is the temperature?
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If you know the average particle speed, you can calculate the temperature in kelvins and then work it out backwards.
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And so that is the minimum temperature required because if the particles are hitting each other slower than that, there's not enough kinetic energy to create two neutrinos.
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And you have to make two because they have to be going opposite directions to balance momentum.
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And this informs how they build the engines And all kinds of other things.
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Yeah, all sorts of stuff.
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And is it that you came up with an idea like astrophage and then do all of the math to,
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if something that could actually, you know, act like this around the sun exists,
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then these are all of the second order effects that you would see and that's how you build the story.
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How do you use, actually use these spreadsheets in the process of telling the story as you write it?
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Well, I mean, so first I need to go, I love the research and making this stuff up,
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but I go on a deep dive into the math to find out what is the effect of all of this.
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Like, what is the effect?
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It's like, okay, doing all this math tells me, oh, astrophage is 96.415 degrees.
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Okay, great.
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And I know it's how much mass it can hold before it does that.
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And as a result of that, plus its own black body radiation when it's going through space, I can calculate how long it takes before it starves.
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if it's just out in space, just going in a straight line, it'll radiate away heat, and then it will eventually run out of all of its heat.
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So you know how far the stars could be between each other that couldn't get infected.
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Right.
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Got it.
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And I had to account for the fact that it's moving in its own inertial reference frame.
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So it's only living for a few months away from its star, but it can go up to eight light years away because of special relativity.
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So that's why the infection distance is eight light years.
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And so I didn't decide that, I derived it.
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Yeah, that's what I think feels so satisfying.
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So speaking of the ways that the stars all get infected or don't, one of my favorite moments in an interview
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that you've done before is where you played out how you invented the character and the species, rather, of Rocky.
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This will be a spoiler for the book, but not a spoiler for the movie because it's in the trailer.
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Everybody knows at this point that Rocky exists.
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I'm gonna call you Rocky.
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It's now or never.
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So Dr. Rylan Grace gets to the star that's uninfected, and he sees another spaceship there,
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and that spaceship has in it an alien that becomes the cutest best friendship of all space-time.
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It's a bromance.
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And it's just the most wonderful thing, and they have to save both their civilizations.
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But what I'm really interested in is how you worked into what the alien of Rocky would be like.
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was a real star, a real planet, and then you had a flow of logical decisions that worked into a whole rich creation.
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Could you walk me through that flow?
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Sure.
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Well, first off, I have to give a disclaimer.
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Since writing Project Hail Mary, it has been shown that that planet doesn't actually exist.
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But at the time I wrote Project Hail Mary, it was believed that 40 Eridani AB was a real exoplanet that had about eight Earth masses
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and was orbiting Fort Eridani around once every 46 days.
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And that's all we knew.
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So I figured I'm going to start with that and then I get to do whatever I want beyond that.
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Anything that we don't know, I get to define, right?
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So I said, all right, I want life to be on this planet.
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And also, giving a little bit more information from the book here, we later learn that all of the life in the entire book,
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Earth, Erid, and Tau Ceti, all of it, astrophage, everything, has common ancestry.
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Life, within my fiction, life only evolved once and it only evolved on Adrien, planet Adrien.
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Primordial astrophage, it really just evolved to go back and forth between Tau Ceti and Adrien.
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That's it.
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It wasn't supposed to be an interstellar species.
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But then what happened was occasionally it would miss.
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And this would cause a panspermia event because occasionally it would miss, most of the time that would die, but sometimes it would end up hitting a planet, Most of the time it would die,
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but sometimes it was able to survive long enough to reproduce a little bit, and that's what seeded life on Earth and Earth.
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So that's why when they take apart the cells, they find out that astrophage has, like, ribosomes and RNA transcription and everything.
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Stuff that it is impossible to believe would parallel evolve.
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It has to be there.
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So we are descendants of life that evolved at Tau Ceti.
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That's one of the reasons I chose Tau Ceti.
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It was kind of perfect for it because, first off, Tau Ceti is a solar analog,
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And so I figured it is more likely that life would be able to seed in environments similar to where it started.
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So I wanted solar analogs across the world, Tau Ceti.
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Also, Tau Ceti, I forget exactly how old it is, but it's got a few billion years on us.
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Like, it's much older than the sun.
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So it had more time to evolve life.
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That's why, like, we got seeded with life, like, when the sun was only, like, half a billion years old.
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It's like, how do you explain that?
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Well, because Tau Ceti was already, like, three or four billion years old.
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And so that's how we got seated with life.
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So all that having been said, this Arid, the planet Arid, had to have water.
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Had to have liquid water because we're all related.
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It's all you have to have water for this to work.
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And I'm like, okay, so this is a planet that is really close to its star.
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Closer to its star than Mercury is to ours.
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It's a 46-day year.
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I mean, it's very close.
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So I thought, how do you have liquid water on a planet that's that close to a star?
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It's going to be really hot.
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Yeah, pressure.
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If you have really high pressure, the boiling point goes up.
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So their oceans are like 200 degrees Celsius.
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Their air is also 200 degrees Celsius.
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And in fact, they have a fairly constant temperature on their planet all the time, which is what we see on Venus, where it doesn't even matter if you're on the day side or the night side of Venus.
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It's always about the same temperature because its atmosphere is so thick.
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So now from that I'm saying I want liquid water, so that means I have to have a thick atmosphere.
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Now what's my next problem?
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My next problem is how do you have a thick atmosphere when you're that close to a star?
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If you're right next to a star, the solar wind is just gonna just blast your atmosphere off.
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That's why Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere at all.
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Really strong magnetism.
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Part of it, yeah.
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Two things can help you with this.
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One, you may remember that Venus has a really thick atmosphere and it's close, fairly close.
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Right.
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So the answer is two things.
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One, your atmosphere can be made out of really heavy molecules.
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Earth's atmosphere is mostly just N2, nitrogen.
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It's not very heavy, right?
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Venus's atmosphere is carbon dioxide.
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It's much heavier.
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So the sun can't really knock those out of Venus's gravity well as easily.
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So that's why Venus gets to keep its atmosphere and Mercury doesn't.
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So I said, arid has an atmosphere of ammonia.
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We see ammonia all over the place in our solar system.
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Gas giants are made of it.
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So it's plausible to assume, okay, that there's a bunch of ammonia.
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So that's a heavy molecule that's hard to knock out of the gravity well.
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And it's also a bigger gravity well, which helps.
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The next thing is a strong-ass magnetic field, just like you said.
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So I decided that ARID has a liquid, you know, ferromagnetic core and also rotates really, really fast.
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The faster you rotate, the stronger your magnetic field will be.
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So it has a magnetic field that's about 25 times as powerful as Earth's and it rotates.
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I did all the math.
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It takes about six hours to do one revolution.
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So it's whipping around.
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Fun stuff that never made it into the book Yes, please.
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Is this creates such an oblong shape for the planet.
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Yeah.
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It's below the Roche limit, it's not going to rotate itself apart, but it creates such a deviance
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so the distance from the center of Arid to its equator
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is significantly different than the distance from the center of Arid to its pole.
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And so much so that it would be like measurably different gravity.
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Oh, wow.
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So they could have a whole sort of culture around like where they end up in there.
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It's not by much, but it's on the order of centimeters per second per second.
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It's like different.
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Cool.
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It's like to their ancient world, notably different.
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So that's interesting.
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Yeah.
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So I said, okay, we got a planet that spins really fast, got a thick-ass atmosphere, it's got a very, very strong magnetic field.
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Now what evolves there?
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And I decided, well, for starters, I mean, maybe the ammonia would be clear all the way to the surface, but I decided it wasn't.
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So I decided that their atmosphere acts kind of like an ocean.
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There's life that absorbs light, you know, sunlight, and reproduces that way up in the upper parts of the atmosphere, then life below that that eats that, and then life below that that eats that,
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kind of like our oceans.
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Like, sunlight only gets, what, 10, 20 meters into the ocean?
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And that's as far down as it goes.
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But there's life in the ocean all the way down to the floor.
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So that biosphere can filter down.
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And so that's the same thing that happens in arid atmosphere.
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and then the larger fauna live on the surface.
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And that's, iridians are one of them.
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So I thought, well, what do you need to be like to live on the surface of arid?
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Okay, well, it's nice to know that there's liquid water, but there's no oxygen in the atmosphere.
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So your body has to basically be not like Earth's system where, you know, animals exhale carbon dioxide,
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then plants consume the carbon dioxide and give off oxygen and it goes back and forth.
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that entire system has to be internalized to each animal.
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So Iridians are like a biosphere.
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They need energy, so they need to eat, you know, other animals.
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They're omnivores, just like we are, and so they need to hunt and kill and eat other animals.
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I mean, like caveman Iridians did that.
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And so that's how energy enters the system.
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But as long as you have energy entering the system, they can maintain their biological biosphere.
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I said no light gets to the surface, so there's no need for them to evolve vision.
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instead they evolved echolocation so accurate
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that they can get you know they can fully understand their room
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and what's funny is people are like wow that'd be really it's hard to imagine having
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that level of detail
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and echolocation I'm like try explaining animals yeah yeah try explaining try explaining how vision works to iridians yeah
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and iridians like let me get this straight okay
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so electromagnetic radiation is just kind of bouncing around
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and you have an organ that gathers it
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and then kind of like bends it and moves it around a bit
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and then from
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that you know your 3d environment there's a bunch of intervening steps here I do not understand yeah
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so this is so much fun I know like did you know
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that you were trying to get to some kind of animal
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that had a different sort of more musical way like no
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it just really was like that's where it came from yeah
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that's cool I said like well one thing is I genuinely wanted an alien species that was alien.
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Like I wanted it not to be like a Star Trek forehead bumps.
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No diss on Star Trek.
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Love Star Trek.
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Love Star Trek, love Star Wars.
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My number one true love is Doctor Who.
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So those are where my loyalties are.
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But obviously soft sci-fi doesn't bother me at all.
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But I wanted my alien, my hard sci-fi book to be really alien.
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I wanted him to be, I wanted our environment to be completely incompatible with theirs.
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And because I mean, even on earth, if you exchange the positions of a shark and a camel, both gonna die, right?
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So it's like why would an alien be comfortable?
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So anyway, so I, it wasn't so much that I was going out of my way to make something specific, it's that I was saying like, there are no rules.
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I don't have to follow any rules for narrative purpose.
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I'm creating a life form and then that's what he's gonna meet.
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And so now I have Iridians that I went way deep dive.
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I mean there's, there's the spreadsheets I have on Iridians, I posted a whole document online of iridian biology and how their bodies work.
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You've seen it, did you think?
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Yeah.
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Broadly speaking, an iridian isn't like, we are mostly made of biological material.
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We're mostly cells.
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The only thing that's not like leaving biological tissue on you is your hair, your fingernails, the irises of your eyes, parts of your teeth, that sort of stuff.
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But that's about it.
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But for an iridian, it's mostly inorganic material that was assembled by its worker cells.
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So an iridian is kind of like if a beehive could walk, right?
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Yeah.
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It's like the little things inside build it.
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But they also look a little bit like crabs.
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Crabs.
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Carcinization.
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Carcination.
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I was curious if you were drawing from Earth's history of everything kind of evolving into a crab.
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Everything eventually becomes a crab.
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Yeah.
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And that's what I did.
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I decided that arbitrarily that, you know, in evolution something happened like a billion years ago
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and then all of the species since then are formed by that.
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It's like the ideal body type.
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But also in evolution it's like, okay, why does DNA spiral this way instead of that way?
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Because that's how it started and now it can't change, right?
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So I decided that for whatever reason, iridium life tends to be very pentagonally symmetrical.
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So everything's in fives.
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It's just fives.
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Why?
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I don't know. Because.
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That happened at some point in the evolutionary tree and then everything is like very pentagonal.
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Yeah, okay, so now I've defined how their bodies work
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and I'm like well if they're not exchanging with the outside air How do they make noise
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because since they have such incredibly good hearing their hearing they don't have ears they have every like
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Hearing is almost like touch every part of their carapace can hear yeah, wouldn't it be neat if you clapped and it made light?
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Because that's what it is for them.
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Yes, it would like oh, it's it's completely quiet in here.
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Give me a second.
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Oh Okay, I see all right.
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Yeah, I get it It would be as though we could glow.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And then also this led to all sorts of other fun things about how their brains work, which is because they use echolocation,
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they have a 360 degree constant input of their 360 degree environment.
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We have to have parts of our brains dedicated to remembering what's behind me.
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Iridians don't have that because they don't need it.
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So they are constantly getting that input.
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And so if for some reason they lose that input, they won't remember the layout of the room.
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they've never had any need to memorize their 3D environment like we do.
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If you close your eyes, you can probably still tell me a bunch of stuff about this room.
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Like, maybe not every last little detail, but you know there are stairs there.
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You know there's a camera there, there, there, a lighting thingy there, and so on.
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But an Iridian would be like, uh, I got nothing.
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Yeah, this is one of my favorite things about science fiction generally, I think, which is that as you were describing the different way in which Iridians work,
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and you're describing how we work, I'm appreciating being human in a different way.
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It allows you to really appreciate the world that we live in by reminding us that it is also strange, reminding us that it is also cool,
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like that the animals that live in the deep sea are fundamentally alien too in some way that you can appreciate.
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And I really love that.
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And I want to play that out if you're okay with it with a new story.
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I think one of the best ways to see potentially how your process works is to offer you new examples.
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Oh, wow.
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I don't get nervous very often.
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I'm nervous to tell you about my sci-fi story.
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Okay, here we go.
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Ultimately, our goal is to educate people about science.
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And we want to share with people the real science and technology that we're using to search for aliens right now.
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The Europa Clipper is on its way all of the cool telescopes
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that are looking for signs of life in different atmospheres, right?
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And so one of the ways that we've started to do this is with small fiction stories.
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They're sort of intercut into our videos.
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We did it with a video about finding near-Earth asteroids by playing out what if an asteroid were coming for Earth.
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And we go through all the real steps that we might take, and we went to an observatory and looked at the way that they discover near-Earth asteroids.
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It was very fun.
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And Mark Rober voiced the fiction sections of that video.
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Okay.
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So we're doing another version of that where we're playing out what if we really find aliens?
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What if it works, all of this science that we're doing right now?
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Sort of like if we catch the squirrel, what would we do next?
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And so I have some parameters here.
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It's I really don't want it to be that they're sending us a message.
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I want it to be that our ways of searching work.
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That feels different to me.
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I think one of the struggles is that a lot of the things
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that we're doing will just take an enormous amount of time.
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And I want to sort of speed it up.
437
So one of the things that I'm thinking is that we will set this character,
438
this scientist, in a future world where we have already discovered microbes on maybe Venus or Europa or somewhere nearby.
439
And all of a sudden there's all of this investment because we think, wow, if we discovered life arising in two different places, maybe it really is everywhere.
440
Maybe we should really invest a huge amount of money in finding aliens, intelligent aliens, far away.
441
So that gives me the excuse to kind of speed up the technological process here.
442
I can sort of imagine, like, if the physics say that this telescope is possible, if someone at NASA says it's a good idea, then we could conceivably make it.
443
I didn't even bother to explain why people, why they sent people to Mars in the 2030s.
444
I just said they did.
445
Yeah.
446
Like, okay, so they have all these.
447
I didn't work on the funding aspect of it.
448
That's way less fun.
449
So if I've set up this premise, I've set up these goals, I want to pull the string as you just told me that you did.
450
What are the questions that you're asking yourself at this point?
451
Well, okay, so my first questions would be about the world that you've already set up.
452
Okay.
453
What your characters already know.
454
Okay.
455
So the microbes they found on, say, Venus and Europa.
456
Yeah.
457
Were they a separate genesis?
458
Yes.
459
Okay.
460
In both cases.
461
They only discovered one.
462
I'm saying Venus.
463
Okay.
464
And yes, we have reason to believe for reasons.
465
It's just the cellular mechanisms are so completely different to ours.
466
Yes.
467
The Drake equation has changed dramatically, and we now believe that life arises.
468
The Drake equation approaches one.
469
Yes.
470
Okay.
471
It's everywhere.
472
It's everywhere.
473
And so we're super motivated to go find it.
474
So we have established that there's microbial life on Venus, and it is its own genesis.
475
We're positive of that.
476
Furthermore, there's no multicellular life, or at least none that we found on Venus.
477
Not that we found, no. Our scientist character is not working in that particular field.
478
So he's like the guy who is in my wildest dreams.
479
This is voiced by .
480
Okay.
481
He's like an expert in transmission spectroscopy or something.
482
His thing is like, he's like, yes, I fully agree that there are microbes on Venus.
483
Microbes aren't my thing.
484
I want the intelligent aliens.
485
And now I believe that they really are out there.
486
So I am just trying to find it.
487
So how do we find intelligent aliens?
488
Well, and he's thinking of looking at other stars or just in our solar system?
489
I think he's looking at, so I think that we pick a star system.
490
I'm imagining that the planet is an invented one that we discover because of all this investment in new telescopes.
491
Okay, well then the first thing that comes to my mind is
492
if we had like all this awesome technology is look for a planet, and it would be very slight,
493
but look for a planet that is not emitting as much radiation as it's absorbing.
494
Huh, why?
495
Because the radiation it's absorbing is going into the form of life.
496
Yeah.
497
Because if you think about Earth, a lot of sunlight is coming in and not bouncing away because plants are absorbing it and turning them into complex carbohydrates,
498
and that energy is being stored in the form of chemical bonds.
499
But it's happening at a global scale, on algae, forests, everything like that.
500
So if you saw a planet absorbing, like, because a dead planet,
501
like Mercury, like Mercury, will be emitting exactly as much radiation as it is absorbing from the sun.
502
Because it has to, otherwise it would be heating up or cooling down or something.
503
It has had a few billion years to reach that stasis point, and that's where it is.
504
So if you see a planet, you know, absorbing more radiation than it's emitting,
505
then that is probably a planet that has not just life, but fairly complex life.
506
life, like plant life, like multicellular life, not, or either that or a whole lot of algae.
507
Yeah.
508
Right.
509
But you could see, that's my first hint, I think, would be that that's a planet worth checking out.
510
How much detail is too much detail?
511
Well, that's, that's where you're getting into the, the made up science part.
512
Yeah.
513
Like how much should I pull a thread versus like.
514
The way I do it is I try to do one thing and then everything derives from that one thing. so
515
if you say oh they've got really good you know exoplanet
516
like investigation technology then you should the way I would do
517
it rather is I would say I would spend a lot of time defining exactly what
518
that exoplanet detection technology you have is what it can
519
and can't do and then work from there and then
520
if you find out that it's not doing enough for your plot to happen then give it little more gas, but don't come up with like 12 different things.
521
Come up with one thing that you can amp up.
522
So what I'm taking from what you're saying is let's imagine that the telescopes are really that much better.
523
And there are real plans.
524
I was talking to a bunch of NASA folks and scientists
525
that are working on plans to block out the light of stars
526
that are more sun-like in order to learn about more Earth-like planets that are near them.
527
So there's one called Star shade for example and by doing
528
that you would be able to see more earth-like planets
529
but also more planets on other orbits that don't perfectly transit
530
so let's imagine just just pulling on this thread like you
531
said of like saying okay they have better telescopes what does
532
that mean that means they can identify more new earth-like planets around more sun-like stars
533
that means that our character is exploring a lot of them
534
and identifies one with not just a biosignature but but let's give it a technosignature too.
535
It's got lots of CFCs in its atmosphere.
536
It's like, you look for, okay, there's no natural process by which, like, there's a bunch of carbon monoxide and CFCs and other stuff like that in atmosphere.
537
So that must be like a civilization generating that as waste.
538
Yeah.
539
And then I think if you go by, NASA has this wonderful scale called the Cold Scale that allows you to think about, okay, what would the process be to rank different discoveries?
540
And so you increase, you go up the levels on this scale if you are, you know, checking with a secondary piece of evidence.
541
So let's imagine our character sends this information to all the radio telescopes
542
and now they're looking for radio signals from this planet.
543
Right.
544
And they actually find something.
545
They could be blasting like a signal meant to be detected by other...
546
Well that's SETI.
547
That's getting really close to your initial prohibition, right?
548
That's true.
549
So let's assume they're not doing SETI.
550
How about something like this?
551
We have this system-wide array, the SWA.
552
Come up with a cool acronym for it, whatever.
553
The system-wide array, and we've been watching lots of planets, let's say.
554
Yeah.
555
And we've been watching for radio signals, we've been watching for anything like that.
556
It's just we have much more advanced one.
557
Then one planet, one time, there's a burst, and then nothing.
558
And we're like, the hell was that, right?
559
Or there's just like a burst of electromagnetic whatever from that, and it happens over the course of like, you know minutes and that's it and then
560
and then they're like what was that and then
561
so then you turn you turn your guns on it
562
and you're really super and then then you discover
563
that planet has an atmosphere and it you know it has a life signs
564
and pollution and all that stuff like that
565
and then what happens is they just had themselves a nuclear
566
war oh yeah you can back into like why now there's oh, there's radiation.
567
Yeah.
568
Oh, they just failed the cosmic filter, I'm afraid.
569
Oh, yeah, so then we get to explain, like, the great filter.
570
The great filter, yeah.
571
One of the things that a lot of science fiction misses
572
if they're contacting you is the moment when humanity has to decide whether or not they say hi back.
573
Right.
574
That feels very rich to me.
575
That feels like a...
576
Well, these people just blew themselves up, we think.
577
Yeah.
578
Or maybe they invented some new form of energy and made a mistake.
579
did something on purpose and they're fine.
580
But there was a sudden massive burst of electromagnetic radiation that came from not the star, but the planet.
581
Should we say hi?
582
Should we say hi?
583
Did, and yeah, in fact, make it less obvious.
584
Say like, did they just have a global nuclear war?
585
Or is that their new technology for launching spacecraft to their moon?
586
Or is that like a test of their new energy system that's fusion based that we don't even understand?
587
At what point do you add a character with specific personality traits
588
that has to make decisions in this world that you've built?
589
Well, okay, so in a scenario like this, I would have the discoverer character.
590
He'd be the guy, I'd be like, there was like a burst at this planet or something like that.
591
Like one thing that annoys me in fiction is
592
when the main character is like the only person who believes something
593
and then goes on to be vindicated over and over again.
594
The, Oh, this guy is right all along.
595
That annoys me.
596
It could just be the guy who happened to notice it.
597
Yeah.
598
Like you've got some Tico Brahe equivalent dude who's just an amateur who just happened to be like looking
599
that way that day.
600
You know, whatever.
601
It could be something as simple as that.
602
Like he could be just out stargazing.
603
He's an amateur astronomer.
604
Maybe you make him more interesting.
605
He's a rich guy.
606
He's actually built a little astronomy dome in his home.
607
I know some people who have done that, who have their own straight up massive telescope, like that they go from their living room into their telescope room and stuff like that.
608
And he's just stargazing, and that's what he loves to do.
609
He likes to take measurements and stuff like that.
610
And he happens to be looking at that moment.
611
He sees this little visible light.
612
He's like, that was odd.
613
And of course, he has, you know, he records everything.
614
He sees it.
615
He's like, let's play that back.
616
He's like, yeah, that was over there.
617
Okay, were there any satellites in the area at the time?
618
were there today nope it was from there talks to other amateur astronomers anybody see
619
that anybody anybody see that over at this star over here this little bloop
620
and and people are like no i wasn't looking
621
that way it's like i don't know i don't know he's like there there was a something happened there
622
and maybe maybe there's some guy in australia who says like i saw
623
that too and then then they then they they say okay well we've got two independent corroborating sources like
624
so then the people who run the great system-wide array say like okay we've got two corroborating sources
625
that say they saw an event in this solar system and they have this new telescope technology.
626
It's accurate enough to kind of tell it didn't happen at the star.
627
It happened away from the star.
628
Not on the star, but next to the star.
629
And maybe because maybe this planet is a little further away than 1 AU.
630
Maybe it's like 5 AU away.
631
Maybe it's bigger, maybe whatever.
632
It's a brighter stars, whatever.
633
So it's five aeons away and they can tell with their telescopes, yeah, it didn't happen at the star, it happened near the star.
634
So that gets the powers that be to go like, well, let's look at it with the great array.
635
And okay, yeah, okay, we call it, what's your name again?
636
Steve.
637
Okay, Steve's world is, you know, whatever.
638
We look at Steve's world and yeah, now we're seeing these evidence in the atmosphere of like, you know, there's like free oxygen and methane and pollution
639
which implies like intelligent life and we don't know what
640
that flash was
641
and then you can get to your question of like should
642
we say hi I think I'm okay with the idea
643
that they would be signaling somehow so one of the problems well though
644
so what I was saying is you know I think you're
645
on to something identifying it for sure well I think you're
646
on to something with they aren't trying to contact us they don't even know about us we spotted them first Yes.
647
That's an interesting angle.
648
Yes, that's what I want.
649
And so, and that's where I haven't seen that, you know, outside of like space opera.
650
Narrated by .
651
There we go.
652
But I haven't seen that outside of like, like space opera, like Star Trek and stuff where we are the ones who detect them first.
653
But then it's like, okay, so there's this planet Steve's world.
654
They put the big array to work and they say like, yeah, it has oxygen.
655
It has methane.
656
And we don't know what that big flash of light is.
657
And there's pollution in the atmosphere.
658
So maybe they're inventing fusion.
659
Maybe they invented fusion wrong.
660
Maybe they just didn't like a mountain range because it was unsightly and wanted to get rid of it.
661
Maybe it's something completely different.
662
Maybe this is their reproductive molting cycle and it happens every 500 years
663
and we just happen to see it for the first time now.
664
We have no idea.
665
And so then comes the, should we say hi?
666
We have the technology to say hi.
667
And then the question would become, so inevitably you would have to have them decide to say hi because it's boring if they don't.
668
And, uh, no. No, no thanks.
669
No, no thanks actually Just freaking ghost them The end we decided No,
670
we're good and we're banning all radio broadcast from Earth.
671
We're shutting down city.
672
We are done with this bullshit No, um so they they decide to contact him and so then the next fun question is how do you contact him?
673
Yeah.
674
How do you, how do you, you said like 20 light years away?
675
Okay.
676
How do you send a signal 20 light years?
677
I want it to be something that could plausibly be within a human lifetime.
678
Okay.
679
That like you could, in theory, expect.
680
Maybe bump it a little closer.
681
There's a lot of stars out there.
682
You can get, you know, closer than that.
683
Yeah.
684
So yeah, that's an interesting question of like, how would you send that, how would you send information?
685
So now I'm deep in my spreadsheet.
686
Now you're deep in your spreadsheet.
687
I have lots of options for what would be realistically powerful enough.
688
And also, I guess, what would we say?
689
Are we sending prime numbers or are we actually trying to communicate?
690
We want them to know we're here.
691
That's step one.
692
It's high.
693
That's what we're saying.
694
We don't speak their language.
695
We don't know anything.
696
Prime numbers is the Carl Sagan way.
697
Digits of pi.
698
Sure.
699
Well, then you have to wonder what base would you like to do that in?
700
If we received a signal and it was just a bunch of random numbers, it would take a while before some mathematician was like, oh, that's pi in base 27.
701
Yeah.
702
I think this is what I appreciate
703
so much in your stories is you could write a whole set of chapters on how do you say hi.
704
There's a rich, earnest debate in just the idea that, okay, we're going to say hi,
705
but there's a bunch of decisions that have to be made about how you would best do that.
706
There's debate, real debate.
707
And then there's actually doing it that is difficult?
708
How do you do it?
709
Well, I mean, so the first thing that came to my mind, talking about the ultimate swords to plowshares, is set off nukes in space.
710
They're very bright.
711
Fair enough.
712
And then some other people might be, should we be worried about them knowing where we are?
713
Why don't we send nukes to Mars and set them off there?
714
Yeah, so we'll give them a little sort of...
715
That way if anybody thinks that's where we are.
716
And then someone would say, yeah, but if they can look at us, they'll see our cities, they'll see our whatever, they'll be like, nice little, like, yeah.
717
Yeah, nice try, you can.
718
But you could send nukes far away from Earth, not to disguise our identity, but just because if you're gonna set off nukes, you want to be far away.
719
Send them away in a line, have them so that they go off in sequences and stuff like that.
720
That's really bright.
721
If you're giving off a nuclear explosion in space, the light just goes and goes and goes.
722
That's where my spreadsheet would come in.
723
I'd be like, what would a one megaton bomb being detonated out in space?
724
You know, like, you'd probably want to get further away from our star, away from the sun, so that it's more visible against the background.
725
So maybe you, I mean, at this point, we're like very excited and willing to spend whatever it takes, right?
726
So we're sending something out, like way out, orbit of Saturn, Neptune, like way the hell out there,
727
so that it has more contrast against the background of space, because if we're really close to the sun, they might not notice it.
728
So we'd be sending nukes like way out there and set to blow up in a sequence.
729
And so that'd be a whole thing.
730
And then that's where my spreadsheet would come out.
731
I'd be like, okay, how much of a light from a one megaton nuclear explosion would be visible to somebody who's however many light years away?
732
And how would that compare to, you know, the arc distance from our star?
733
Would we be able to detect that with today's technology if somebody did that?
734
And if it needs to be bigger or farther, that drives your plot because then we need a bigger ship.
735
We need a bigger boom.
736
Or maybe nukes are not a good way to do it.
737
But it seems like that's a good way for us to release an awful lot of light all at once.
738
Yeah.
739
So when I'm telling stories, I'm publishing them on YouTube, and I'm getting lots of comments.
740
Some incredibly helpful, some very pedantic.
741
When you were publishing The Martian, you published first as chapters online.
742
And I have some of them.
743
These are the original chapters as you publish them.
744
And this is my published copy of The Martian.
745
And I'm curious, it seems to me both like an enormous privilege to have the public fact checking of making things in public,
746
but also difficult to figure out, okay, how do you as an individual creative person make changes or not make changes
747
based on what you want to get super close to reality versus what you're saying like, no, this is driving the plot.
748
This is deliberately my choice.
749
Tell me about the difference between this and the book that you finally published.
750
I think there's not much, but it looks like you have like some sort of secret, like, deviance.
751
I do have a spreadsheet.
752
One of my favorites is, this is a whole published paper on the differences, by the way.
753
I don't know if you've ever seen this.
754
I did not see this.
755
One of my favorites is the table that they have at the back about the difference between the cursing.
756
Oh, cool.
757
They have a whole chart for you.
758
They have me dial it back a little.
759
Yeah, these are all the differences between the versions for how many times you curse.
760
That's awesome.
761
When we made the classroom edition of The Martian, so we have a classroom friendly edition for, you know, schools and stuff like that.
762
All of the swear words are replaced with PG alternatives.
763
Oh, fun.
764
Yeah.
765
And because they're not allowed to change text without me allowing it, right?
766
And so in most cases, you can almost do a search and replace, but not in all cases.
767
It was funny because like they had a copy editor.
768
They said, we want you to flag every swear word in the manuscript that is like not suitable for like classrooms.
769
Like so basically anything that you couldn't put in a PG movie, right?
770
And so she was just went through the whole thing and she said, that's the most fun I've ever had.
771
She said, that is the most fun I've ever had.
772
She said, it's just because every single one of her notes is like, Amazing.
773
Did you enjoy, like, sometimes I wish I could publish my videos and then have an opportunity to get, you know, sometimes they make good points.
774
Sometimes they say things that I wish I included.
775
Like, you didn't do that with your other books.
776
And I'm curious how that process.
777
I did with the Martian as I did a chapter at a time people would email
778
and say okay you got this wrong you get this right
779
and so on yeah the biggest one was like I had just spaced
780
and forgotten that air like will completely mix together like and
781
so like yeah yeah the hydrogen then earlier chapter my original
782
chapter where he had the hablet had a bunch of like free hydrogen in it
783
and he was like worried about how to get rid of it
784
and it was all up at the top of the hab because it's hydrogen.
785
And so he went up and just had small amounts of oxygen that he had to burn it.
786
And he was hit wearing and stuff like that.
787
But of course, that's not what happens.
788
That happens at the planetary scale.
789
But inside of something like the Hab, the hydrogen would be evenly distributed throughout the air.
790
And someone emailed me that.
791
I'm like, oh, yeah.
792
So I got to come up with a different thing.
793
Yeah.
794
I remember thinking about how you published The Martian.
795
And what I appreciated was, obviously, there's so many people that help and support you now.
796
Obviously, it seems like you're really close with your team and have that wonderful collaboration.
797
It also was inspiring to see that you didn't need anyone to say yes to you writing the book.
798
You wrote the book and then you put it online.
799
And to some degree, I always felt like that was the key to what we're doing, too.
800
Like we just began making videos that we thought were great on YouTube
801
and it's sort of gotten its own audience and it's worked from there.
802
Fist, bum, bum, success.
803
Fist, bum, bum.
804
Exactly.
805
Yeah.
806
Thumbs down, baby.
807
We promise this is irrelevant.
808
This matters.
809
This is a saying in love.
810
Thumbs up.
811
No, that's thumbs down.
812
We do the thumbs up.
813
It's close enough.
814
That freaked me out.
815
I saw somebody on a YouTube review of Project Hail Mary, and the guy's on it going like, and I'm like, oh no, he didn't like it.
816
And I'm like, oh no, I get it.
817
Okay.
818
Yeah.
819
One of the things that also feels similar is the optimism that you bring to your stories.
820
Can you tell me about the way that you bring that into your process?
821
Like, for example, I really love the way that the astronauts in The Martian all believe in their commander.
822
There's no love triangle.
823
There's no infighting.
824
There's no, they're not, they're just smart people trying to do a good job.
825
And I think that over and over again in your books, when the villains are hard problems that you have to solve, it positions humanity as what we are,
826
which is a species that loves to solve hard problems.
827
We're the good guys.
828
We're the good, yeah.
829
And I'm just curious how you think about that, how you feel about maybe your position in, I'll say it for myself,
830
a world of both sci-fi and science journalism that feels pretty pessimistic sometimes, pretty dystopian sometimes.
831
How do you think of the work that you're making in that context?
832
Well, I'm not trying to change society and I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion of anything.
833
I Firmly consider myself just an entertainer.
834
I'm just writing stories to entertain So I'm not trying to set your opinion
835
or change your mind on anything When you're done with one of my books, I want you to put it back on the shelf and say that was cool I enjoyed reading that that was nice.
836
That's it.
837
That's the only effect I wanted to have on you.
838
Maybe you tell some of your friends to read it, too, you know, that's it But in terms of pessimism, I I, yeah, I don't know.
839
I'm not here to solve a pessimism epidemic.
840
All I can do is just be me.
841
I'm not pessimistic.
842
I think humans are really awesome.
843
I think technology is really awesome because technology is then put into the hands of humans who are awesome.
844
You know, people are afraid of AI, but, you know, it's like, you know, AI can do things no human can.
845
I'm like, so can a forklift, you know?
846
If I give you a hammer, you could build a house or you could murder someone.
847
It's not there's nothing about the hammer that does it.
848
And most people use hammers to build houses.
849
So I'm not afraid of technology because I'm not afraid of my fellow humanity.
850
I'm optimistic that way.
851
One of the effects that that perspective naturally has is to seed inspiration in other people.
852
I do think that you are here to be an entertainer,
853
but the effect of your entertainment is a lot of people get really excited about science.
854
Well, if it has that side effect, then I'm happy.
855
Although people have often said, hey, you're helping get people into science.
856
I'm like, I don't think I am.
857
I think, you know, people who are already into science maybe get encouraged to like pursue it further.
858
You're not going to make someone who isn't interested in science be interested in science.
859
That's kind of like saying, like people often ask me, like, how do we get more girls into STEM?
860
Like kids, like how do we get more girls into STEM?
861
I'm like, like figure out which ones are interested in STEM and then foster it.
862
You're not going to make anyone get into, you're not going to make anyone take an interest, but they're there.
863
They're interested.
864
You just got to make it so that the other kids don't beat it out of her before she.
865
Yeah, the fostering, I think, is like maybe, no, you're not creating something brand new, but the fostering is so important.
866
The water in the receipt.
867
Normalizing.
868
Yeah.
869
Yeah.
870
Yeah.
871
I think there's another debate that feels very rich, which is the effects of science fiction on real science.
872
And people say science fiction is a real meaningful way to inspire actual creativity.
873
Martin Cooper at Motorola said that he was inspired to build the first ever handheld cell phone from the Star Trek communicators.
874
And then other people will say, no, come on.
875
cell phones came about because of smaller transistors and, you know, technological development.
876
And like that was going to happen.
877
Like it's very nice after the fact to say that you were inspired by Star Trek, but that was a cultural ambition and we accomplished it.
878
How do you think about the, because you are projecting into the future solutions that smart people might realistically have.
879
How do you think about the relationship between science fiction and science?
880
Well, I don't think science fiction authors come up with anything that real scientists don't already come up with.
881
It's just we're better at like making books that get into the public zeitgeist about it.
882
But I mean, obviously the idea of a phone
883
that isn't attached to the wall is something that people have like thought about having for a long time.
884
And once technology came about to have it, and like a lot of people say like, oh, Arthur C.
885
Clarke was the guy who invented the concept of artificial satellites.
886
I'm like, no, he wasn't.
887
I'm sure some other people thought of that first, but he was also a really talented science fiction author, so he was the one who got to write about it.
888
But I mean, I just don't think that science fiction drives real science very much.
889
I don't think there's anything I've thought of in any of my stories that real science-wise that real scientists haven't already, like, thought of at great length.
890
I think your science fiction does the fostering that you talked about in people,
891
And I think it also perhaps drives cultural acceptance of ideas or cultural excitement around ideas.
892
I do think that in some way, the popular excitement about Star Trek communicators,
893
the popular excitement that we continue to have about self-driving cars or flying cars, the idea that, you know,
894
we might get to Mars and actually accomplish that as a species is fostered by great stories about it.
895
So I know that you feel that you're here as an entertainer.
896
I feel that you have inspired.
897
I mean, I'm not a scientist, so.
898
But I think you've inspired a lot of people.
899
And I think that function is really important.
900
I think that the specific way in which you do it, the way in which you show
901
that you don't have to be a natural genius to love science
902
and be good at it it is about hard work and solving the problem right in front of you.
903
Yeah.
904
As they would say, you know, work the problem.
905
The exercise that we just went down.
906
Okay.
907
The spreadsheets, my pulling on my particular thread,
908
the story that you told of how you chose Arid and then went down that rabbit hole.
909
What are some of the rabbit holes you're going down right now?
910
Well, I can't talk about it that much because that's the book I'm writing right now.
911
Can you give us any hints about the book you're writing right now?
912
No, I really don't want to.
913
I'm sorry.
914
That's okay.
915
I don't want to.
916
Are there scientific concepts or ideas that are exciting to you?
917
Yeah.
918
I mean, so these are not involved in the book that I'm writing now.
919
So there's two things that I think are going to change the world, the real world, dramatically.
920
One of them is kind of boring, but it's like the self-driving cars.
921
Okay.
922
I don't think people understand how much that's going to change the world.
923
First off, the idea of owning a car, I think, will kind of go away.
924
you'll just be like you'll be subscribed to a car service it'll be like uber
925
or lyft or something like that they'll be just driverless
926
and then cities dedicate something like 10 of their total surface
927
area to parking they're not going to have to do
928
that anymore the car's going to drop you off
929
and then go off to pick up someone else
930
and then it'll go off to recharge also
931
which is great for urban transport it like it becomes economically better to use electric cars
932
and so they'll just go recharge themselves and continue
933
so that's good for the environment
934
but also cities will now be fully dedicated to being cities instead of parking lots so that's amazing
935
also we're going to have about 50 000 people a year not dying from car accidents
936
which is kind of nice drunk driving will cease to be
937
a thing yeah it'll cease to be a problem dying in
938
car crashes will be as unusual as dying in plane crashes
939
and also everybody's effectively going and get a bigger house because everybody's going to remodel their garages away.
940
I mean, in a hundred years, people will look back and say,
941
isn't it weird that people dedicated like a quarter of their entire home to a place to put a car?
942
It's like your car has more personal space than your kid does.
943
Like your kid has a bedroom, your car has a big bedroom, right?
944
And for an object that you're not using 98% of the time, it's just ridiculous, right?
945
So I think that's going to have a tremendous effect on society.
946
And then we get into the weird stuff where it's like, okay, there are entire professions that revolve around human drivers, trucking, cabbies, that sort of thing.
947
Those are going to go away.
948
That's going to have an effect, not necessarily a good one.
949
They won't just vanish from the earth.
950
They'll have to go find a new profession.
951
And then there's other things like cities,
952
like the city of Los Angeles gets something like $100 million a year in parking and traffic violations.
953
Electric cars aren't going to break the law.
954
So a lot of cities are probably going to oppose the adoption of electric cars
955
because their revenue relies on a lot of this stuff.
956
So it's a really interesting dynamic.
957
I was talking to a tech leader, I won't say by name.
958
We were talking about this specific topic.
959
And they said that a politician had asked them, okay, you're talking about self-driving cars.
960
I believe in this future.
961
But what about all of the organs?
962
Yeah, that's a good point.
963
Yeah.
964
No more organ donation.
965
And the answer is like, oh my god, I would hope that the organs stay in their original body.
966
Yeah, yeah. But that...
967
That's a weird way of looking at it.
968
You're like...
969
An incredibly weird way of looking at it.
970
So yeah, I'm sad to hear about the guy in the hospital who doesn't get the heart transplant, but the donor didn't die in this scenario.
971
Yeah!
972
Just the whole way that people think about this whole shift.
973
It's a weird way of looking at that.
974
Yeah.
975
So that's one technology I think is significant.
976
The other one is protein folding via AI.
977
So it's really exciting to see that we are just using AI, just blasting up exactly how the proteins fold and stuff like that.
978
But what I'm more excited about is doing it backwards, saying, I want a protein that makes this shape.
979
Yeah.
980
Tell me the RNA sequence that'll do that.
981
Yeah, for drug discovery.
982
Yeah, exactly.
983
Or, no, it gets way better than that.
984
Oh, it gets so much better than that.
985
It gets so much better than that.
986
No, if you can make a custom shape with a protein, then you start by saying, oh, bad news, you have cancer.
987
So we've got a sample, right?
988
And we're going to take a look at your cancer cells, And we're going to figure out what shape of molecule will kill those cancer cells, but not your healthy ones.
989
And we'll have computers do that, too.
990
We'll have them try out things and figure out, OK, that's the shape we need.
991
OK, now we'll go to the AI and say, what protein do we need to make that shape?
992
And it'll be like, here, this sequence.
993
OK, now we're going to CRISPR splice that into a bunch of E coli in a lab.
994
And we're going to make this.
995
This cures your cancer.
996
Yeah.
997
Just yours.
998
Yeah.
999
But here you go.
1000
I mean, like, or also, like, viral treatment.
1001
It's like, okay, bad news.
1002
You've got a virus.
1003
Good news, this is the shape that neutralizes that virus.
1004
So we're going to mass produce a bunch of it and put it in you.
1005
And you can literally cure a virus, which we have never done.
1006
Other than we've rendered viruses extinct via vaccination, but we've never cured.
1007
Nothing other than the human immune system has ever cured a virus.
1008
Yeah, it is really amazing to hear you do the go
1009
down the rabbit hole on the physicality of an alien species
1010
and then go down the rabbit hole on self-driving cars and protein folding.
1011
Just call me Alice.
1012
I like rabbit holes.
1013
It feels, yeah, it feels like it's a reminder of where we started,
1014
which is, you know, the exploration of fictional worlds feels like it tells you so much about the real world.
1015
It feels like you're doing the same process now that you were doing about Rocky.
1016
And the other thing is, like, all these things I've been saying, like, real scientists, I'm sure, have already thought of all of this and are working on it.
1017
So that's pretty cool.
1018
Yeah.
1019
If you thought it, someone else probably thought it and they're probably working on it.
1020
There are probably people out there who have dedicated their lives to these random ass thoughts that I've just had.
1021
One of the questions that I like to end with is, if someone were to watch the videos that I make after I'm gone,
1022
I would hope that they would get the feeling
1023
that what I'm about is trying to get people to feel a little bit more optimistic, have a little bit more faith in people trying to solve hard problems,
1024
and in turn see the possible futures ahead so that they can help build them.
1025
That's what I'm trying to do here.
1026
And I'm curious, if someone is reading your stories, the many, many more stories that we're going to be lucky to have,
1027
what do you want people to take away?
1028
I just want them to have a good time.
1029
And when they put the book away, I want them to think, that was cool.
1030
That's the same effect that my father's science fiction collection had on me when I was like 12 years old, reading his like books by Asimov, Heinlein and Clark with a,
1031
with a glossy ad for cigarettes in the middle.
1032
Cause he'd gotten them in the fifties and sixties.
1033
Right.
1034
And, and I just, that was cool.
1035
Next, you know, that's all I'm shooting for.
1036
That's all I want.
1037
Thank you so much for your time.
1038
Thanks for having me.
1039
It's great.
1040
Thanks for coming.
1041
Since that conversation with Andy, I have been writing this sci-fi story and it is coming soon to our channel.
1042
So if you want to see it, And if you want to just support optimistic science and tech stories, subscribe.
1043
See you soon.
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Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição
Esta aula de conversação de nível C1 usa o vídeo “I Wrote a NEW Sci-Fi with Project Hail Mary Author Andy Weir”. Este vídeo tem 1043 frases e 11324 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 58:53. O falante fala rápido, cerca de 192 palavras por minuto, então espere sons ligados e reduzidos. 85% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês; vale a pena estudar o restante antes de começar.
Vocabulário principal deste vídeo
As 15 palavras mais avançadas do vídeo, com pronúncia e significado:
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| spreadsheet substantivo | /ˈspɹɛd.ʃit/ | planilha, folha de cálculo |
| telescope substantivo | /ˈtɛl.əˌskoʊp/ | telescópio |
| arid adjetivo | /ˈæɹɪd/ | árido |
| evolve verbo | /ɪˈvɑlv/ | desenvolver, elaborar |
| calculate verbo | /ˈkælkjʊleɪt/ | calcular |
| nuke verbo | /n(j)uk/ | aniquilar, destruir |
| absorb verbo | /æbˈsɔɹb/ | absorver |
| invent verbo | /ɪnˈvɛnt/ | inventar |
| hydrogen substantivo | /ˈhaɪdɹəd͡ʒ(ə)n/ | hidrogênio, hidrogénio |
| rabbit substantivo | /ˈɹæbɪt/ | coelho |
| ammonia substantivo | /əˈmoʊn.jə/ | amoníaco, amônia |
| infect verbo | /ɪnˈfɛkt/ | infectar, contagiar |
| microbe substantivo | /ˈmaɪkɹoʊb/ | micróbio |
| neutrino substantivo | /nuˈtɹinoʊ/ | neutrino |
| rotate verbo | /ˈɹoʊ.teɪt/ | rotar, girar |
Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| come up with verbo | pensar (em), alcançar | |
| figure out verbo | descobrir, deduzir | |
| go down verbo | descer | |
| find out verbo | descobrir | |
| set up verbo | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | preparar |
| come out verbo | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | sair, partir |
| give off verbo | /ɡɪv ɒf/ | soltar, exalar |
| go away verbo | sair, partir |
Frases que vale a pena repetir
Frases curtas e completas do vídeo que você pode usar na conversa do dia a dia:
- Could you walk me through that flow?
- It's like, how do you explain that?
- You've seen it, did you think?
- What are the questions that you're asking yourself at this point?
- How do you do it?
Gramática neste vídeo
As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:
| Estrutura | No vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — uma ação que começou antes e continua | I've been preparing · we've been watching · I've been saying |
| Frases condicionais if + oração, will/would + verbo — uma condição e seu resultado | if we catch the squirrel, what would we · if they can look at us, they'll see |
| Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora | haven't seen · have written · have gotten |
| Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz | is infected · are infected · has been shown |
Pronúncia para ficar de olho
O falante usa 291 contrações e formas reduzidas, como I'm, don't, we're. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.
- Os sons de “th”: thumb /ˈθʌm/, methane /ˈmiːθeɪn/
- Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: spreadsheet /ˈspɹɛd.ʃit/, echolocation /ˌɛkoʊloʊˈkeɪʃən/, fusion /ˈfjuː.ʒən/, fictional /ˈfɪkʃənəl/, equation /ɪˈkweɪ.ʒən/
- Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: echolocation /ˌɛkoʊloʊˈkeɪʃən/, entertainer /ˌɛntɚˈteɪnɚ/, exoplanet /ˈɛksoʊˌplænət/, meteorite /ˈmi.ti.əˌɹaɪt/, electromagnetic /ɪˌlɛk.tɹoʊ.mæɡˈnɛ.tɪk/
Sons difíceis para falantes de português:
- Consoante final — sem acrescentar um “i” depois: spreadsheet /ˈspɹɛd.ʃit/, telescope /ˈtɛl.əˌskoʊp/, arid /ˈæɹɪd/, calculate /ˈkælkjʊleɪt/, nuke /n(j)uk/
- /l/ final — a língua toca o céu da boca, não vira “u”: molecule /ˈmɑ.lɪ.kjul/, fictional /ˈfɪkʃənəl/, technological /ˌtɛk.nəˈlɑ.dʒɪ.kəl/
- s + consoante no início — sem um “i” antes: spreadsheet /ˈspɹɛd.ʃit/, stargaze /ˈstɑɹɡeɪz/, spoiler /ˈspɔɪ.lɚ/
Como praticar com este vídeo
- Ouça o vídeo inteiro uma vez sem falar e anote as palavras que você não conhece.
- Comece na velocidade 0,75×, faça shadowing frase por frase e volte à velocidade normal quando ficar fácil.
- Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como spreadsheet, telescope, arid.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.