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That's an interesting angle.

I haven't seen that.

I wrote a brand new sci-fi story with Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir.

Andy is one of the most popular science fiction writers alive.

He also wrote The Martian.

And what's special about his work is how real his fake stories are.

He showed me the secret spreadsheets that he uses to calculate all of the science in his stories.

And the reason that that matters is that great fiction can help you see the real world more clearly.

Sci-fi is huge if true.

This show is about real science and technology, but we've used a little bit of sci-fi to start to explain complicated things.

So I wanted to learn from Andy.

In this conversation, we go deep inside his fictional worlds to see exactly how he makes them feel so real.

And we play out our brand new sci-fi story together in real time.

Welcome to Huge Conversations.

Just my bump.

Success.

Just my bump.

Exactly.

Hello!

Thanks for doing this!

Sure, happy!

Nice to meet you.

Please!

I am a fan.

Likewise!

Oh, this is going to be so much fun.

I never thought you'd start out that way.

Well, I saw that video of like, just a short of you with like a light- lightsaber.

It's like, and just the look on your face is like...

Oh, that's cool.

Just this delight, it's like you were 10 again.

It felt like that.

And you see it come out, and you can't help but make the noise.

Of course, immediately you're like, I can't.

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.

Oh, this is going to be so much fun.

Thank you so much for being here.

Great to meet you.

And congratulations on escaping Alcatraz.

Thank you.

That was way harder than I thought it was going to be.

Well, I mean, the prevailing theory is that those guys died, right?

Yes, yes, and now I know why.

We were like hour four in the freezing water, and I was like, so these guys definitely died.

These guys died.

They died.

Definitely, definitely they died.

Maybe, who knows?

I have so many questions for you.

I have so many answers.

I feel like I've been preparing for this interview my whole life.

Great, whatever you want.

Let's talk about whatever.

So just whatever your first question is, my answer is seven.

Awesome, I'll make sure.

Well, it's six plus.

OK, so it sounds like maybe you know a little bit about our show.

Yes.

Taking a step back, Huge Conversations is a show about possible futures.

And often we're interviewing tech CEOs and scientists and folks like that.

You spend all day every day imagining possible futures and sharing them with other people.

And you have written some of my favorite books of all time.

So first, I just want to say thank you.

I know I speak for millions of people

when I say how much joy I have gotten out of the stories that you've written.

Exactly.

But on behalf of the millions of nerds around the world, thank you for your service.

So this is not a list of PR questions about the Project Hail Mary movie.

We'll get into it in some ways.

But I'm hoping to have a larger conversation about science and science fiction.

And we could not be in a better place to do it.

Yeah, exactly.

We're in the American Museum of Natural History.

That is a real meteorite.

It is the largest meteorite in any museum anywhere.

Excellent.

Why are we here?

Because it's cool.

It's cool.

I just thought, what a perfect spot.

I love meteorites.

I have a sugar tight at home.

Do you really?

I have it.

It's about the size of a walnut.

Can you buy them?

Yeah.

It's perfectly legal.

Buy.

Buy a sugar tight.

Yeah.

It's a Mars meteorite.

Oh, awesome.

And it's about the size of a walnut.

It costs an absurd amount of money, but I had just gotten paid a bunch for the Martian, so I'm like, wants it.

And so I have it on display in my house.

100

It's like, yeah, this unremarkable looking rock is from Mars.

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This was on Mars.

102

That's so awesome.

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That's really cool.

104

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.

106

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.

108

So the second category of question I want to ask you is about a sci-fi story that I am working on.

109

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.

113

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.

123

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.

133

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.

135

Thank you.

136

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,

141

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

143

that star to maybe save Earth.

144

Okay, I want to start by talking about these.

145

Yes, yes.

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This is like one of my many spreadsheets that I use in writing Project Hail Mary.

147

And this has mostly do with the physics of astrophage.

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At the bottom here, there's a bunch of tabs.

149

This tab, Hail Mary, has all the information about the ship and this one.

150

Beetle, nav, tau seti.

151

Yep, yep, Fortier Adani.

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And then there's even one that's called like wrong math

153

because I had to calculate how much fuel the iridians brought along with them because they didn't know about relativity.

154

So they assumed they would have pure Newtonian physics all the way from Fortier Adani to Tau Ceti, so their math was completely wrong.

155

So I had to calculate all of that to know...

156

You did their wrong math for that.

157

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.

159

This is the temperature that astrophage needs to be, which is 96.415 degrees Celsius, is what it works out to be.

160

This is the temperature astrophage needs to be to be able to generate neutrinos, which is what it uses to store energy.

161

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,

162

just, you know, mean square, calculate their their velocity that they will have at any given temperature.

163

And that is the velocity they need to have to have the kinetic energy equal to the mass energy of two neutrinos.

164

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?

165

If you know the average particle speed, you can calculate the temperature in kelvins and then work it out backwards.

166

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.

167

And you have to make two because they have to be going opposite directions to balance momentum.

168

And this informs how they build the engines And all kinds of other things.

169

Yeah, all sorts of stuff.

170

And is it that you came up with an idea like astrophage and then do all of the math to,

171

if something that could actually, you know, act like this around the sun exists,

172

then these are all of the second order effects that you would see and that's how you build the story.

173

How do you use, actually use these spreadsheets in the process of telling the story as you write it?

174

Well, I mean, so first I need to go, I love the research and making this stuff up,

175

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.

178

Okay, great.

179

And I know it's how much mass it can hold before it does that.

180

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.

181

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.

182

So you know how far the stars could be between each other that couldn't get infected.

183

Right.

184

Got it.

185

And I had to account for the fact that it's moving in its own inertial reference frame.

186

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.

189

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

191

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.

200

But what I'm really interested in is how you worked into what the alien of Rocky would be like.

201

was a real star, a real planet, and then you had a flow of logical decisions that worked into a whole rich creation.

202

Could you walk me through that flow?

203

Sure.

204

Well, first off, I have to give a disclaimer.

205

Since writing Project Hail Mary, it has been shown that that planet doesn't actually exist.

206

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

207

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.

212

And also, giving a little bit more information from the book here, we later learn that all of the life in the entire book,

213

Earth, Erid, and Tau Ceti, all of it, astrophage, everything, has common ancestry.

214

Life, within my fiction, life only evolved once and it only evolved on Adrien, planet Adrien.

215

Primordial astrophage, it really just evolved to go back and forth between Tau Ceti and Adrien.

216

That's it.

217

It wasn't supposed to be an interstellar species.

218

But then what happened was occasionally it would miss.

219

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,

220

but sometimes it was able to survive long enough to reproduce a little bit, and that's what seeded life on Earth and Earth.

221

So that's why when they take apart the cells, they find out that astrophage has, like, ribosomes and RNA transcription and everything.

222

Stuff that it is impossible to believe would parallel evolve.

223

It has to be there.

224

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.

226

It was kind of perfect for it because, first off, Tau Ceti is a solar analog,

227

And so I figured it is more likely that life would be able to seed in environments similar to where it started.

228

So I wanted solar analogs across the world, Tau Ceti.

229

Also, Tau Ceti, I forget exactly how old it is, but it's got a few billion years on us.

230

Like, it's much older than the sun.

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So it had more time to evolve life.

232

That's why, like, we got seeded with life, like, when the sun was only, like, half a billion years old.

233

It's like, how do you explain that?

234

Well, because Tau Ceti was already, like, three or four billion years old.

235

And so that's how we got seated with life.

236

So all that having been said, this Arid, the planet Arid, had to have water.

237

Had to have liquid water because we're all related.

238

It's all you have to have water for this to work.

239

And I'm like, okay, so this is a planet that is really close to its star.

240

Closer to its star than Mercury is to ours.

241

It's a 46-day year.

242

I mean, it's very close.

243

So I thought, how do you have liquid water on a planet that's that close to a star?

244

It's going to be really hot.

245

Yeah, pressure.

246

If you have really high pressure, the boiling point goes up.

247

So their oceans are like 200 degrees Celsius.

248

Their air is also 200 degrees Celsius.

249

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.

250

It's always about the same temperature because its atmosphere is so thick.

251

So now from that I'm saying I want liquid water, so that means I have to have a thick atmosphere.

252

Now what's my next problem?

253

My next problem is how do you have a thick atmosphere when you're that close to a star?

254

If you're right next to a star, the solar wind is just gonna just blast your atmosphere off.

255

That's why Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere at all.

256

Really strong magnetism.

257

Part of it, yeah.

258

Two things can help you with this.

259

One, you may remember that Venus has a really thick atmosphere and it's close, fairly close.

260

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.

263

Earth's atmosphere is mostly just N2, nitrogen.

264

It's not very heavy, right?

265

Venus's atmosphere is carbon dioxide.

266

It's much heavier.

267

So the sun can't really knock those out of Venus's gravity well as easily.

268

So that's why Venus gets to keep its atmosphere and Mercury doesn't.

269

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.

272

So it's plausible to assume, okay, that there's a bunch of ammonia.

273

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.

275

The next thing is a strong-ass magnetic field, just like you said.

276

So I decided that ARID has a liquid, you know, ferromagnetic core and also rotates really, really fast.

277

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.

281

So it's whipping around.

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Fun stuff that never made it into the book Yes, please.

283

Is this creates such an oblong shape for the planet.

284

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

335

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?

355

Yeah.

356

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.

360

But for an iridian, it's mostly inorganic material that was assembled by its worker cells.

361

So an iridian is kind of like if a beehive could walk, right?

362

Yeah.

363

It's like the little things inside build it.

364

But they also look a little bit like crabs.

365

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.

369

Everything eventually becomes a crab.

370

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.

397

Iridians don't have that because they don't need it.

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So they are constantly getting that input.

399

And so if for some reason they lose that input, they won't remember the layout of the room.

400

they've never had any need to memorize their 3D environment like we do.

401

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.

403

You know there's a camera there, there, there, a lighting thingy there, and so on.

404

But an Iridian would be like, uh, I got nothing.

405

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.

412

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.

415

Okay, here we go.

416

Ultimately, our goal is to educate people about science.

417

And we want to share with people the real science and technology that we're using to search for aliens right now.

418

The Europa Clipper is on its way all of the cool telescopes

419

that are looking for signs of life in different atmospheres, right?

420

And so one of the ways that we've started to do this is with small fiction stories.

421

They're sort of intercut into our videos.

422

We did it with a video about finding near-Earth asteroids by playing out what if an asteroid were coming for Earth.

423

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.

424

It was very fun.

425

And Mark Rober voiced the fiction sections of that video.

426

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?

429

Sort of like if we catch the squirrel, what would we do next?

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And so I have some parameters here.

431

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.

434

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.

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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.

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Maybe we should really invest a huge amount of money in finding aliens, intelligent aliens, far away.

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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.

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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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Лексика и советы по произношению к этому уроку

Этот урок разговорной практики уровня C1 построен на видео «I Wrote a NEW Sci-Fi with Project Hail Mary Author Andy Weir». В этом видео 1043 предложений и 11324 слов для шедоуинга. Речь длится 58:53. Говорящий говорит быстро, около 192 слов в минуту, поэтому звуки часто сливаются и сокращаются. 85% слов входят в 3000 самых частых слов английского языка; остальные стоит разобрать перед занятием.

Ключевая лексика этого видео

Самые сложные слова из видео (15), с произношением и значением:

Слово	Произношение	Значение
spreadsheet существительное	/ˈspɹɛd.ʃit/	электро́нная табли́ца
telescope существительное	/ˈtɛl.əˌskoʊp/	телеско́п
arid прилагательное	/ˈæɹɪd/	сухо́й, засу́шливый
evolve глагол	/ɪˈvɑlv/	развива́ться, разви́ться
calculate глагол	/ˈkælkjʊleɪt/	вычисля́ть, вы́числить
absorb глагол	/æbˈsɔɹb/	поглоща́ть, поглоти́ть
invent глагол	/ɪnˈvɛnt/	изобрета́ть, изобрести́
hydrogen существительное	/ˈhaɪdɹəd͡ʒ(ə)n/	водоро́д
rabbit существительное	/ˈɹæbɪt/	кро́лик, крольчи́ха
ammonia существительное	/əˈmoʊn.jə/	аммиа́к
infect глагол	/ɪnˈfɛkt/	заража́ть, зарази́ть
microbe существительное	/ˈmaɪkɹoʊb/	микро́б
neutrino существительное	/nuˈtɹinoʊ/	нейтри́но
rotate глагол	/ˈɹoʊ.teɪt/	враща́ться, верте́ться
crab существительное	/kɹæb/	краб

Фразовые глаголы, которые вы услышите

Слово	Произношение	Значение
come up with глагол		придумывать, приходить в голову
figure out глагол		разбира́ться, разобра́ться
go down глагол		спуска́ться, спусти́ться
find out глагол		узнава́ть, узна́ть
set up глагол	/ˌsɛt ˈʌp/	устана́вливать, установи́ть
come out глагол	/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/	выходи́ть, вы́йти
give off глагол	/ɡɪv ɒf/	источать, испускать
go away глагол		уходи́ть, уйти́

Фразы, которые стоит повторять

Короткие законченные фразы из видео, которые пригодятся в повседневном разговоре:

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?

Грамматика в этом видео

Конструкции, которые говорящий использует чаще всего, с точными словами из видео:

Конструкция	В видео
Present Perfect Continuous have/has been + -ing — действие началось раньше и продолжается	I've been preparing · we've been watching · I've been saying
Условные предложения if + предложение, will/would + глагол — условие и его результат	if we catch the squirrel, what would we · if they can look at us, they'll see
Present Perfect have/has + причастие прошедшего времени — прошлое действие, важное сейчас	haven't seen · have written · have gotten
Пассивный залог be + причастие прошедшего времени — важно, что происходит, а не кто это делает	is infected · are infected · has been shown

Произношение, на которое стоит обратить внимание

Говорящий использует 291 сокращённых и редуцированных форм, например I'm, don't, we're. Произносите их коротко, так, как слышите.

Звуки «th»: thumb /ˈθʌm/, methane /ˈmiːθeɪn/
Звуки «sh» и «zh»: spreadsheet /ˈspɹɛd.ʃit/, echolocation /ˌɛkoʊloʊˈkeɪʃən/, fusion /ˈfjuː.ʒən/, fictional /ˈfɪkʃənəl/, equation /ɪˈkweɪ.ʒən/
Длинные слова — следите за ударением: echolocation /ˌɛkoʊloʊˈkeɪʃən/, entertainer /ˌɛntɚˈteɪnɚ/, exoplanet /ˈɛksoʊˌplænət/, meteorite /ˈmi.ti.əˌɹaɪt/, electromagnetic /ɪˌlɛk.tɹoʊ.mæɡˈnɛ.tɪk/

Звуки, трудные для русскоязычных:

/w/ — губы округлены, это не /v/: walnut /ˈwɔlnət/, backward /ˈbækwɚd/, equation /ɪˈkweɪ.ʒən/
Звонкие согласные в конце слова — не оглушайте их: arid /ˈæɹɪd/, evolve /ɪˈvɑlv/, absorb /æbˈsɔɹb/, microbe /ˈmaɪkɹoʊb/, crab /kɹæb/

Как заниматься с этим видео

Прослушайте всё видео один раз молча и выпишите незнакомые слова.
Начните со скорости 0,75×, повторяйте предложение за предложением и вернитесь к обычной скорости, когда станет легко.
Запишите себя и сравните с оригиналом, обращая внимание на такие слова, как spreadsheet, telescope, arid.

Что такое техника Shadowing?

Shadowing — это научно обоснованная техника изучения языка, изначально разработанная для подготовки профессиональных переводчиков и популяризированная полиглотом доктором Александром Аргуэльесом. Метод прост, но эффективен: вы слушаете аудио на английском от носителей языка и немедленно повторяете вслух — как тень, следующая за говорящим с задержкой в 1–2 секунды. В отличие от пассивного прослушивания или грамматических упражнений, Shadowing заставляет мозг и мышцы рта одновременно обрабатывать и воспроизводить реальные речевые паттерны. Исследования показывают, что это значительно улучшает точность произношения, интонацию, ритм, связную речь, понимание на слух и беглость речи — что делает его одним из самых эффективных методов для подготовки к IELTS Speaking и реального общения на английском.

Техника шедоуинга: читать полное пошаговое руководство →

Практика Shadowing: I Wrote a NEW Sci-Fi with Project Hail Mary Author Andy Weir - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

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Лексика и советы по произношению к этому уроку

Ключевая лексика этого видео

Фразовые глаголы, которые вы услышите

Фразы, которые стоит повторять

Грамматика в этом видео

Произношение, на которое стоит обратить внимание

Как заниматься с этим видео

Что такое техника Shadowing?