Editor’s Notes: In this episode of StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson welcomes back acclaimed sci-fi author Andy Weir to discuss the intricate scientific foundations of his latest bestseller-turned-film, Project Hail Mary. The duo explores the fascinating world-building behind the story, from the physics of star-eating microbes to the biology of “Rocky,” a non-humanoid alien whose design was shaped by real exoplanet data. Weir also shares insights into the creative process, offering advice for aspiring writers and reflecting on the unique challenges of adapting hard science into compelling cinematic storytelling. (April 15, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction: Welcome to StarTalk
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And right next to me, I got Lord Chuck Nice.
CHUCK NICE: What’s up, Neil, man?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: How you feeling?
CHUCK NICE: Man, I’m feeling great.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah, you look good.
CHUCK NICE: Well, thank you, sir.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, looking healthy.
CHUCK NICE: Well, that may not be the case, but it’s good to look that way.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Look, whether or not you actually are—
CHUCK NICE: —who cares if I’m actually healthy or not as long as I look good?
Welcoming Andy Weir Back to StarTalk
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We got a good show today, certainly. Oh my God, we have a repeat guest.
CHUCK NICE: That’s correct. Many times.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Many times. I’ve looked at the numbers of appearances. Hasn’t Boyd been on this show that many times? Yeah. And I said no. Yeah, we have the one, the only, Andy Weir.
CHUCK NICE: Andy.
ANDY WEIR: Hello.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Welcome back to StarTalk.
ANDY WEIR: Thanks for having me.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Like your 6th time.
ANDY WEIR: You think you guys would learn by now?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You keep writing books and we keep bringing you back.
ANDY WEIR: I like it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You are birthed into this world as a— was it a software engineer?
ANDY WEIR: Well, it took me a while between birth and becoming a software engineer, but yes.
CHUCK NICE: I was going to say that is one seriously developmental womb.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, there wasn’t a lot of software engineering in 1972. I mean, there was some though. I mean, Apollo program.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Turned sci-fi novelist.
ANDY WEIR: Yes, sir.
From The Martian to Project Hail Mary
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Extraordinaire, man. From The Martian, a best-selling book. Yeah. Which became a—
CHUCK NICE: —a very popular movie. Hit movie.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Movie with all kinds of marquee actors in it, right? Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon.
CHUCK NICE: It was Mark Watney. Oh, is it Watney?
ANDY WEIR: It is Watney.
CHUCK NICE: Okay, says the guy who wrote it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, whatever.
ANDY WEIR: At the time I lived in Boston when I first started writing it, and I lived alone because I was a loser. I was really into Red Sox games, and they had a sideline reporter named Heidi Watney.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, really?
ANDY WEIR: And so that—
CHUCK NICE: I’m like, I like that name.
ANDY WEIR: I like the name. I’m taking it. Okay, so Heidi Watney, if you’re out there, Mark’s named after you.
CHUCK NICE: Actually, Heidi, no, no, no, no, he’s not, because we don’t want to owe you any money.
ANDY WEIR: Okay, Andy doesn’t know what he’s saying.
CHUCK NICE: He’s been drinking since noon.
ANDY WEIR: Okay, StarTalk personally takes responsibility for any monetary compensation.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There you go. So what year did The Martian come out?
ANDY WEIR: Well, it took me years to write the book. I started writing it in 2009, finished around 2012. The book came out, I think, 2013 or something.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The early teens.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And so the movie comes out in—
ANDY WEIR: 2015.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 2015, the movie.
CHUCK NICE: Wow.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So that’s a quick turnaround between the two.
ANDY WEIR: Yes, it was very fast.
CHUCK NICE: Congratulations on that. Was the book that popular that it was like a meteoric rise through the rankings and then they were like, boom, let’s make a movie? I see what you did there, meteoric rise.
ANDY WEIR: Meteors usually go down, not up.
CHUCK NICE: That’s not true, they also just go around.
ANDY WEIR: No, no, that’s asteroids. Oh, you’re right.
CHUCK NICE: Correct. The moment they break the atmosphere, right.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: A meteor is doomed.
ANDY WEIR: It is doomed. Right. Inaccurate fun is not fun, you understand. So anyway.
CHUCK NICE: You have been hanging out with the wrong people, okay?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So The Martian, you also bagged a marquee director for that.
ANDY WEIR: Yes, Ridley Scott.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Ridley Scott, yeah.
ANDY WEIR: And he did Blade Runner, and he’s the guy— Alien, yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Alien 1, not Alien 2, ’cause that was— That was James Cameron.
ANDY WEIR: James Cameron. Congratulations on that.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, yeah, and so then that was followed by Artemis.
ANDY WEIR: Artemis, which is the only one of my books not to be made into a movie. Yes, but it will be. Mark my words, I will make that happen.
CHUCK NICE: It is now a space program though.
ANDY WEIR: Yes, that’s true, that’s true.
CHUCK NICE: What more do you want? Jeez.
ANDY WEIR: I want a movie.
CHUCK NICE: Good answer. Thank you.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Wait, wait, so how many total books do you have?
ANDY WEIR: Just 3. But yeah, so that sentence, “it’s the only one of my books not to be made into a movie” — you only wrote 3 damn books, dude.
ANDY WEIR: Plural is correct in this case. I have had books made into movies.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: True. So we brought you here because of your latest project.
ANDY WEIR: I see what you did there.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: See what I did there? Project Hail Mary. Yeah. Another bestselling book. It’s still on the shelves. I see it wherever I go. And that’s now a film. Starring Ken.
ANDY WEIR: That’s right.
CHUCK NICE: I didn’t even realize that.
ANDY WEIR: Yes. Also known as Ryan Gosling.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, is that his name?
He was such a good Ken. He was a great Ken. Hard for me to shake that. Yes. We’re not worried about spoilers in this because the book predates the movie. Right. So the storyline is out there. Yeah. It’s not some secret. Right. But spare the viewer, listener, the ending.
ANDY WEIR: The finale. Right.
The Science Behind Project Hail Mary: Astrophage
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But catch us up on just the most important plot development of that story. For the people who don’t read.
ANDY WEIR: Well, the idea is that an alien microbe that they later named Astrophage. Astro is star.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. Phage is eat. Yeah. So it eats stars.
ANDY WEIR: Well, that’s what they named it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s what they named it, okay.
ANDY WEIR: They called it Astrophage. What it does is it lives on the surface of the sun and it absorbs energy and turns it into mass. It uses that mass to create light as propulsion so that it can migrate to a nearby planet with carbon dioxide so that it can get the heavier elements it needs to reproduce. And then that and its sister cell— or sorry, the two daughter cells return back to the star and the cycle continues.
And so it spores out away from stars to go infect other stars. It’s just basically like mold or algae. The problem is that it grows exponentially, and there’s now so much Astrophage on our Sun that it’s going to dim it. And it is dimming it already, and it’ll dim it to the point where Earth is no longer viable, no longer habitable by anything.
But they notice all of the stars in our local cluster have the same problem. They’ve all dimmed, except Tau Ceti. So they’re like, why didn’t Tau Ceti have any dimming? So they’re like, we’re going to make an interstellar spacecraft to find out how. And it’s like, how do we make an interstellar spacecraft with modern-day technology? You use Astrophage as the fuel, of course, because it does mass conversion propulsion, right? And that is the principal conflict of the story. Now, do you want me to talk more about it?
CHUCK NICE: Yeah, let me just say, were you high when you thought of this?
ANDY WEIR: No.
CHUCK NICE: Because it just rolled off his tongue. I mean, and by the way, it’s actually completely feasible. It’s circular and feasible all at once. Like, I mean, that’s pretty wild.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You said like, yeah, of course this is how that would’ve gone down. Very cool. So Andy, what we love and deeply respect about you is how much attention you give to the scientific detail infused within your storytelling. ‘Cause most stories don’t get that level of attention.
ANDY WEIR: I always imagine you looking over my shoulder, Neil.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, I have that quote. I have the exact quote. I would quote it now. Here it is. Go ahead.
ANDY WEIR: Okay. 10 years ago or so.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 10 years ago. Here it was: “Whenever I was tempted to use hand-wavy physics or take a shortcut and not be accurate, I honestly thought to myself, what if Neil deGrasse Tyson reads this?” Wow. That’s true, man.
CHUCK NICE: Because, you know, I’d be tweeting about it.
ANDY WEIR: Exactly. I imagine you looking over my shoulder while I’m typing.
CHUCK NICE: That would creep me out.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, that’s not what he means by that.
ANDY WEIR: Don’t worry, man, he doesn’t have to be over your shoulder. He’s got cameras in your house.
CHUCK NICE: True that.
The Alien Life Form: Rocky and the Eridian Species
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So the Astrophage, we spent a little bit of time on your last visit talking about that fascinating organism, right? And in this one, it’s one of the few sci-fi films where there’s more than one kind of alien in it. And so let’s spend some time on the other alien who the lead character befriends. And this other alien, it kind of looks like a pile of rocks. But it moves like a crab. A little bit.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, so what’s your thinking behind that life form? Well, I started off with the exoplanet that he’s from, which was at the time believed to be a real exoplanet and has since been proven to be nothing more than like solar flare activity from 40 Eridani, which is a bummer. But within the context of when I wrote it, I started with what was known about that exoplanet.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: For those who were never amateur astronomers, okay, because they’re the ones who know everything, they know everything about the night sky. The way we label stars and constellations that are sort of visible easily, we sequence them by Greek letter. And it’s followed by the genitive form of the constellation name. So the brightest star in the constellation Cetus, which means the whale, the brightest will be Alpha Ceti. The second brightest would be Beta Ceti. Third?
CHUCK NICE: Whatever comes after that. Gamma Ceti.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Gamma Ceti. Right. Okay. So you move on your way down. So Tau Ceti is not one of the brighter stars in the constellation Cetus. And the genitive name for Cetus would be Ceti. Then there are certain people who catalog stars going much deeper than naked eye and binoculars, and then they just number the stars, and it’s not as romantic, but it’s very precise in cataloging. So what star system is this?
ANDY WEIR: Well, this would be in 40 Eridani.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Eridani, so that would be Eridanus? Eridanus. Which is the river. The river. Okay. So there’s a non-living thing in the sky. Yes. Well, there’s several actually, but this is a river, and I’m always disappointed with the river. ‘Cause I think it’s just leftover stars that didn’t fit into other constellations. Oh wow. ‘Cause it’s just kind of there, you know, let me grab a couple of these stars, a couple of those, and now call me something, Eridanus. So this other life form. Rocky. Rocky life, yeah.
ANDY WEIR: Well, Iridian is what he ends up getting called. Iridian species, yeah. So 40 Eridani had— it was believed at the time— an exoplanet around 40 Eridani A. If you’d like to describe the details of the trinary star system, you can now, or we can just skip over it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Skip over it.
The Science Behind the Astrophysics of Arid
ANDY WEIR: Skip over it. Okay, so 40 Eridani A is the primary star, and 40 Eridani AB is the planet closest to that star. Okay. And that was an exoplanet that was 8 Earth masses, took about 46 Earth days to orbit the star, very, very close to the star. Turns out doesn’t exist at all. It was a mistake made, and now more accurate methods of exoplanet detection have disproven it. But what—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So he’s not describing the plot of the film, right? He’s got the actual science behind which misled him initially to believing that it was there.
ANDY WEIR: Anyway, so starting from that planet, I said, well, it’s going to be really hot because it’s very close to its star. It’s closer to its star than Mercury is. Wow. And then I said, but because all life in the story was caused by a panspermia event that radiated out from Tau Ceti, including all life on Earth, including all life on Arid, which is the nickname of the planet. Everything has to be water-based. So how do we have liquid water on a planet that’s really, really hot? And the answer is have a really, really high atmospheric pressure, right? Because water won’t boil. And so their oceans are over 200 degrees Celsius.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level. Atmospheric pressure.
ANDY WEIR: That’s right. At our atmospheric pressure, yeah. Increase, so they have 29 atmospheres at their surface, and so water, even 200 degrees Celsius water won’t boil.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Wait a minute, so you backed into these alien properties from what would have to be the properties of a planet that we would later show doesn’t exist.
ANDY WEIR: Yes, that’s right. Unfortunate. Wow. Anyway, I mean, if I was going to make up a fake planet, if it was going to be an imaginary planet in the first place, I didn’t have to constrain myself to it. Anyway.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, constraints are the soul of creativity to all engineers.
ANDY WEIR: Yes.
Building a World: Atmosphere, Magnetic Fields, and Alien Biology
ANDY WEIR: So anyway, I decided it would have to have a thick atmosphere. How do you have a thick atmosphere when you’re that close to the sun? A star is like sandblasting your atmosphere off. So you got two things you can do. You can do what Venus does, or you can do what Earth does. You can do what Venus does, which is have really heavy molecules that are hard to knock out of the planet’s gravity well. Venus has carbon dioxide. I decided Forte Aridani has ammonia. There’s ammonia everywhere in our system, so why not?
And then the other thing you can do is have a really powerful magnetic field like Earth does. So I decided Arid, rather, has a tremendous magnetic field. The way you get a magnetic field is, Neil, spin, baby, spin! It’s a Mambo King!
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, you need a conducting core.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, you need like a molten iron core with convection, but then also spin to make a dynamo. So their magnetic field is about 25 times as powerful as ours, and they rotate once every 6 hours. Wow. So that planet spins like crazy. But with those two things combined, I figured that’s enough to protect the atmosphere. So now finally I have liquid water on this exoplanet.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That was a long way to go to give a puppy some liquid water.
ANDY WEIR: And then with those constraints, I’m like, well, I’m not sure light would make it to the surface through that thick an atmosphere. Ammonia has a color at large scales. So I decided that no light gets to the surface. And so the biosphere works kind of like an ocean. There’s photophilic life up top that absorbs the sunlight and reproduces that way. And then beneath that, there’s life that eats it. Beneath that, there’s life that eats it. Just like our ocean.
CHUCK NICE: Like our ocean. Yeah. Yeah.
ANDY WEIR: And then so the apex predators are things that are the Iridians, which are the intelligent species. They live on the surface. There’s no light down there. There’s no reason for them to evolve eyes, of course. And they do everything through echolocation, etc., etc. So bit by bit, I put it together.
There’s also no free oxygen in the air, so they have to have an enclosed body that deals with the carbon dioxide, oxygen, back and forth reactions. So different kinds of cells within their body. Everything’s fine as long as they keep adding energy to the system. So they need to eat food that’s found on the ground. That’s why they’re obligate predators. So all this—
CHUCK NICE: It’s kind of like some of the animals that live near volcanic vents here on Earth.
ANDY WEIR: Well, they’re— for their biosphere, they’re not really extremophiles. This is the normal thing for them. But they are obligate carnivores. And so if you imagine things that live on the seafloor, like crabs or things like that, so far down that the light isn’t even reaching them, but there’s still plenty to eat.
Meet Rocky: The Alien Life Form
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It looks like a pile of rocks, an animated pile of rocks, but the appendages move in the crab-like way.
ANDY WEIR: Well, he has 5 legs or arms— they can use them interchangeably— that each end in 3 claws. And so it’s pentagonally symmetrical, you might say. And he doesn’t actually move specifically like a crab. He walks on those legs, but he can walk on 3 of them while holding stuff with 2 of them, or he can walk on 2 of them even if he needs to.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I learned in the wiki fan page of your book—
ANDY WEIR: Oh, excellent. An undeniable source of absolute truth. Yes.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And I hadn’t thought about it, and I read this before I saw a preview of your film. The creature does not have a front or a back.
ANDY WEIR: Right. Because it has— so the way it does its echolocation is— I call them oracles, but they’re basically all over his body— just like we have nerve endings for touch, right? He has nerve endings for sound. And so his brain untangles all that information. He knows his body shape and his position. Like, an Iridian might reach out his arm to get a better view of something. He’s like, “Wait, let me hear this a little better.”
CHUCK NICE: That’s his way of doing that.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah. And also, wouldn’t it be neat if you could just go like this and the room gets brighter for a second? Because that’s how that works. Because of that, they have a constant input of their 3D environment constantly going on in all directions.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It has to be some sound somewhere for that to be the case.
ANDY WEIR: That’s true, but there’s always ambient sound. Yes, okay, this is wind or whatever. And if they don’t have any, they can make some, right? But so they have this constant input of their 3D environment, so they don’t have the part of their brain that we have that maintains cognition of what’s around us. So you’re looking at me, but you know what’s behind you, right? In your brain, you don’t have to think about it. Your brain’s just keeping track of that. You know there’s a bookshelf there. In a way, you can see it in your mind. You know where it is, right?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If I turn around, it’s not there, I’ll notice it’s not there.
ANDY WEIR: You’ll notice it’s not there. They don’t have that part of a brain. They don’t have to track that. Because they constantly have 360-degree input, right? It’s like if you had eyes all the way around your head. That’s pretty brilliant. Now, if they suddenly can’t hear anything, they will lose all of that information, right? If you close your eyes, you still know pretty much everything that’s going on. Well, no, but in addition to that, you just close your eyes, you know where everything is in the room. Not precisely, and you probably bump into stuff, but you know there’s a table there, a microphone here, a chair here, bookshelves, Neil’s desk.
CHUCK NICE: But why wouldn’t they be able to do the same thing we do? Because when we close our eyes, we have lost the input, but what we’re doing is recreating it in our mind.
ANDY WEIR: But your mind has a whole system of maintaining a 3D model of your environment because you can’t look at it all the time.
CHUCK NICE: I understand what you’re saying. So that’s because our minds are acclimated to always tracking what’s around us and persisting. Right. If we didn’t have that, when that would be taken away, we’d be lost immediately because they don’t need to do that.
ANDY WEIR: Basically, they don’t have object permanence.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. Test with infants. Yeah, it’s a famous test. The object’s still there when it goes behind the wall, and until a certain age it goes behind the wall and then they just look somewhere else, it’s gone. And then after a certain age they’ll look and they’ll anticipate it coming out the other side.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, that’s why peekaboo is so effective with infants. You vanished from reality.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I was going to say, I still like it.
ANDY WEIR: I’m still working on object permanence. Well, they do have object permanence. Iridians, if something leaves— they use their sensory input, but they don’t have that spatial map in their heads.
Echolocation, Color, and Perception
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Richard Dawkins thinks that bats that use echolocation, being mammals, that means they’re structurally similar to us in important ways. He thinks they might use echolocation and map colors onto it. He thinks they might be able to, because they have the capacity to think of color, why not add color to echolocated objects? Why not, yeah.
CHUCK NICE: I mean, the only way we’ll know is to ask a bat.
ANDY WEIR: Ask a bat, right? What color is this wood? Well, one thing I saw interesting lately is they took— you know how the cones in your eye react to different wavelengths. So there’s red and green and blue cones, and there’s overlap and stuff like that. Well, there are some activations that never happen. Because any wavelength in this range will activate your greens a little bit and your blues a little bit and stuff like that.
And so what they did, for the hell of it I think, was they took test human subjects and shined lasers into their eyes to just activate the blue cones. And so now their brain is getting a signal that has just blue cone activation and no green cone activation. And that makes a new color. Because they have never experienced that in their life. And they have a hard time describing it. They say it’s like this really, really brilliant, bright, bright blue, which should surprise no one. But it’s interesting. Imagine being able to go in and have somebody shoot a laser in your eye and see a color you have never seen, nor will you ever see again, because it can only be done by specifically activating those.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, I love me some color. So through your pen, through your mind, the main character names this life form Rocky.
ANDY WEIR: Rocky, because he looks like a rock.
CHUCK NICE: He looks like a bunch of rocks.
Rocky, Adrian, and the Art of Alien Communication
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: He looks like a bunch of rocks. Very imaginative. Okay. Then it took me a half second. I want to alert people of this so that they don’t lose this half second. He asks Rocky, is there someone back at home? Yeah. Okay. And Rocky goes, well, and you can’t understand him. So, okay. I’ll call you Rocky and I’ll call your mate Adrian. Adrian. Okay, but you’ve got to— that’s, that’s very— that’s, that’s, that’s very pop culture, very pop culture, retro decade. Decades. I’m from Philly, it’s totally fine, we love it.
ANDY WEIR: It’s 50 years ago. Decades. Yes, yes, so am I. I am also from 50 years ago. As for Philly, here’s the thing, I wanted to do this as part of the publicity, but I came up with the idea too late. Everyone agrees it would have been a great idea.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We didn’t say what’s going on, in case you don’t know. Rocky the movie with Sylvester Stallone. Yes. And he’s from Philadelphia.
ANDY WEIR: Correct. And his wife’s name is Adrian.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: His wife’s name is Adrian. We all know that because there’s a big scene. “Adrian! Adrian!”
ANDY WEIR: But I wanted, from the marketing, I wanted them to either CG render or have the puppeteers do it to show Rocky from Project Hail Mary running up the steps of the art museum in Philadelphia. Yeah, the art museum in Philadelphia. He put his little—
CHUCK NICE: Yeah, put his appendages up, you know, everything like that.
ANDY WEIR: Why not? Because I came up with it, it would have been— it would have taken too long and cost too much at the point that I came up with it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, it would have been stupid. Okay, what are you talking about?
CHUCK NICE: That’s the first thing people do when they go to Philly is run up those damn stairs. So I’d like— how are you getting Rocky to Philly?
ANDY WEIR: How you get what? Through astrophase propulsion, stupid.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Come on, man.
ANDY WEIR: They did little things where they CGI put like Rocky on the red carpet for the London premiere and he’s like signing autographs.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool. You got it. So one thing that I didn’t quite follow precisely, how, by what means and mechanism was the lead character, of course, played by Ken.
CHUCK NICE: You know what, I can’t think of his name now. Ryan Gosling.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thank you. So he sets up his computer to— there’s initially a shared vocabulary. They start with science and symbols and things, and then that rapidly becomes full-on exchange of translated knowledge. So I didn’t quite follow how that got so effective so quickly.
ANDY WEIR: Well, it’s just he had his computer be able to analyze the waveforms, and so Rocky would say a word— acoustic waveforms— yeah, the acoustic waveforms that Rocky’s making, and it would say a word, and then he’d put that in his program and say this, and this is the word like “hello.” And then when the computer heard something close enough to that, it would then have a synthesizer voice say “hello” to be Rocky’s voice.
Rocky is not speaking full, poetic, very high-end. He’s talking like real simple words for dumb human, you know, right? He’s speaking sort of a pigeon Iridian-English hybrid thing to try to keep the words simple and keep the sentence structure simple so that they can each talk to each other. Oh, cool.
The Hail Mary Is Full of Grace
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But there had to be some starter exchange of vocabulary.
ANDY WEIR: And they started with, I think, the number 1. Yeah, this, this, this, this is my number. 1. 1. So what do you say for 1? Okay, cool. 2. 2. Okay, you know, okay, that’s cool, that works.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So I, I—
ANDY WEIR: Oh, by the way, since you’re talking about Rocky and Adrian, I’m surprised— did you notice that the name of the ship is the Hail Mary and it’s full of—
CHUCK NICE: It better be Grace.
ANDY WEIR: But Grace, yeah, wow, main character’s name is Dr. Ryland Grace. The Hail Mary is full of grace. I could not resist it. I am weak. I’m weak, Neil.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But is the Lord with thee?
ANDY WEIR: Well, the writer would be the Lord, right?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In this case. Okay. I guess so.
CHUCK NICE: Hilarious. I guess so. There you go.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But are you blessed art thou?
CHUCK NICE: I don’t want to know anything about the fruit of your womb. That’s all I’m saying. I’m talking about Among Women. Let me ask you this, though, because you seem to have this theme of alone in space. Oh, what is it that fascinates you about alone in the cosmos?
Alone in Space — A Storytelling Device
ANDY WEIR: Well, to be fair, Ryland is not alone, right? He’s got his— he’s got his brother from a rocky mother with him, right? Okay. But failing that, it’s just a very convenient method of storytelling. You have your hero completely isolated when they’re out in space. It’s like even if all of humanity wanted to help him, which was the case of The Martian, very little they can do.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So the lead character in this story is, he’s kind of a reluctant hero, to say the least. He’s kind of a selfish coward. He doesn’t want to save the world. He doesn’t want, and yet he’s cast into this spot kind of against his will, reminding me of the great Shakespearean line. Yes. “Some people are born great. Some people achieve greatness. Other people have greatness thrust upon them.”
ANDY WEIR: He had it thrust into him. It was not a good term. He had greatness just absolutely injected into him.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. Reluctant participant in this mission, right? But everyone knew they needed him, so they just dragged him and put him on.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, that’s a pretty big spoiler, by the way, for the movie, so you might want to make an extra warning. Okay. And the book also. But yes, he was there against his will, and I wanted to make a likable protagonist. And it’s— I think we can all feel like we’ve all felt at times that we are unqualified, unwilling, and scared. I don’t know, maybe not you. You just radiate confidence. No, no, no, the rest of us more.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But that’s not interesting to a viewer. You want the person to overcome his weaknesses, which he does, and then triumph.
CHUCK NICE: Yeah, yeah, which he does. Yeah. Okay. All right. I mean, that always redeems a character too. He could start off scared, cowardly, but then overcomes that to do heroic feats, right? You know, especially if they’re selfless heroic feats, right?
ANDY WEIR: I mean, the first time he was willing to really risk his neck was because of the friendship he had made with Rocky. Oh, okay.
CHUCK NICE: So that’s cool, man. That’s cool. So he didn’t want to save humanity, but he put his ass on the line for some Rocky-ass alien. Yeah, yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Now I’m pissed off.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, now I’m angry. Within the context, saving humanity was a guaranteed death sentence. It was a suicide mission. Gotcha. Saving Rocky was high risk of death.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It was a little different. Okay, that’s an interesting distinction. I like the distinction. Yeah, high risk of death or certain death. Certain death. Yeah. I’m taking the high risk. Yeah.
Designing Rocky — A Truly Non-Humanoid Alien
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So I want to just compliment you on conceiving of aliens that are not just actors in a suit. Yeah. So therefore you have the freedom for them to not be humanoid, right? Which is one of the weakest points of all Hollywood aliens.
ANDY WEIR: Well, to be fair, Hollywood aliens are usually not in $200 million movies, right? And so you’ve got to be— what did your movie cost?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, $200 million.
ANDY WEIR: Actually closer to $250 million, but we got tax rebates from the UK for shooting there. Yeah, yeah, we better make a lot of money on this.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s why he’s got an expensive Panama hat. That’s why I’ve got this expensive—
ANDY WEIR: So half of that budget went to this. All right, but yeah, most of the time, for— if you’re going to write a science fiction story and you want to tell it in a reasonable budget, like an episode of Star Trek or something like that, you get the rubber costume, you get the— yeah, you get the forehead prosthetics, you have the alien being in the same environment, you’re good. But yeah, with the luxury of being able to do whatever you want, we can have our alien require xenonite barriers, and be completely non-humanoid.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Tell me about the barriers, because your alien requires a different environment.
ANDY WEIR: 29 atmospheres of ammonia.
CHUCK NICE: 29 atmospheres of pressure and ammonia, and a lot of heat.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, that’s right. Hot, high pressure. And poisonous gases. So sounds a lot like me and Melania.
CHUCK NICE: Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So how do you— after a lot of tacos— how that the boundary between the regular spaceship and the alien in the spaceship, what was that? It was transparent.
ANDY WEIR: It was made of xenonite, which is a material that somehow— one of the main components of it is xenon, a noble gas that doesn’t normally react with things. What I wanted— makes super bright headlights. Yes. So Ryland has no idea how that stuff works or how it’s made.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, so it’s a Rocky— it’s a Rocky alloy.
ANDY WEIR: It’s Iridian technology. Okay. And so what I wanted was— I didn’t want either species to be completely scientifically more advanced than the other. From the Iridians’ point of view, we’re kind of the advanced aliens because we have computers, we have better technology across the board. But Iridians have much better materials technology.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So the material scientists, basically?
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, their materials science is far better than ours. But our— like, they didn’t understand relativity. The Iridians didn’t. Or they didn’t understand— we’ve only known it for about 120 years, so don’t get so high and mighty.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So why was it important that they didn’t know?
ANDY WEIR: They figured out flight before we figured out relativity.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, so why was it important that they did not know relativity as a storyteller?
Relativity, Excess Fuel, and Storytelling Payoff
ANDY WEIR: Because it gave me an excuse to— if you calculate, if you assume Newtonian physics, which they did, they calculated how much fuel they would need to get from their home star, 40 Eridani, to Tau Ceti, and for a trip back. It was supposed to be a round-trip thing. And you calculate that fuel, you get a certain number. The real amount of fuel you need to use is considerably less due to the time dilation and the relativistic effects you have when you’re going there. So he ended up with a whole bunch of excess fuel, which enables him— there, I didn’t catch that.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, there it is. Yeah. And so that’s the evidence they didn’t know relativity, otherwise they would have done the proper calculation. Right, right.
ANDY WEIR: And Rocky— it’s in the book but not in the movie— Rocky says they were very confused. It’s like, okay, we— the planet was, you know, the other star was closer than it should be, so we slowed down, but then it got further away. And what—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, so they were experiencing relativity, not knowing what the hell’s going on.
ANDY WEIR: What is going on?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So do you regret that that wasn’t in the movie?
ANDY WEIR: No, that you had to cut things out.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, so what’s— okay, what— because you don’t have final edit control, I presume, because you’re just the author.
ANDY WEIR: Well, I’m also a producer, so I had say.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: What, were you executive producer?
A Scene That Didn’t Make the Cut
ANDY WEIR: No, I was a real producer. Oh, damn. Wow.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So is there a scene you felt should have been in the movie?
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, my only regret— and Drew and I both fought for this. Drew made— wrote the adaptation for it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: He credited him for that.
ANDY WEIR: Drew, the full Drew Goddard. Drew Goddard wrote the adaptation, did a fantastic job. And he and I both wanted this one scene, and we just didn’t have time for it because the runtime was going so long.
But there’s a scene in the book where they nuke Antarctica. They basically put— on Earth, yeah, on Earth, they drop— they set off a bunch of nuclear explosions in Antarctica to make an entire ice shelf fall into the ocean so that it will melt and release all the methane, which is greenhouse gases, so that Earth will retain more of the heat that it is getting from the sun.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Because they are— because the astrophage is eating the sun. Dimming the sun. So, wow.
ANDY WEIR: So they’re like, we need some global warming.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Wow. And that’s why—
ANDY WEIR: Are you doing Trump? Is that it? And that’s why there’s something between Trump and Fat Albert. I think there’s something wrong with your ear.
CHUCK NICE: That’s a pretty gravelly Trump, my friend. No, if you’ve listened to him now, that’s how he talks. Okay, so I’m not doing rally Trump. I’m doing the Trump that talks in front of the cameras and wants you to know, wants you to know that, quite frankly.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So that’s something that was not in the film where we don’t see Earth descending into— Right.
ANDY WEIR: And that’s also not in the book. We see in the beginnings of it in the book, there’s issues. They’re starting to have problems, and a lot of their problems are caused by the amelioration techniques they’re proactively doing. So they nuke in, they’re going to— things are going to get worse, but then we’re going to need that heat. Yeah.
CHUCK NICE: So we have a mouse problem. Well, let’s get a bunch of hawks. And now we have a hawk problem. Okay, exactly. That’s the deal.
Ryder’s Credentials — A Stretch?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: All right. And it was a stretch for me, if I may.
ANDY WEIR: You and I are enemies now.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It was a stretch. For me, as an academic, to completely embrace the idea that the entire world of biochemists is insufficient to handle this mission, and they need the one guy who has the expertise that no one else has, and he’s a middle school chemistry teacher. Right.
ANDY WEIR: So to be fair, he was a speculative xenobiologist. He has a PhD, astrobiologist. So he had done that and then he’d left that field.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: He’d written papers, but he wrote papers. So the papers are out there and other people are still active, right? And he’s no longer active, right?
ANDY WEIR: So why does he still become the guy? Because he’s been part of the mission and the mission planning the whole time. So he understands all the other aspects of the mission as well. He knows all about the Hail Mary itself. And they don’t have time to train someone else up on all the other stuff. And he’s as well trained as any of the other biologists in the way they need them to be.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, okay. All right, he got it. Does that work for you? He got out of that one.
ANDY WEIR: I wriggled out of that one. So again, congratulations.
Advice for Aspiring Writers
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thanks so much. Some of your books getting turned into movies.
ANDY WEIR: 2 out of 3.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: 2 out of 3. Some of your books getting turned into movies. Thanks. Matt, it’s a delight anytime you come visit us here. And for whatever might be your next book still, we want to stay on your tour. Okay. Your tour list. Always. All right. All right.
ANDY WEIR: Cool. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And any last bits of wisdom or advice for us all? How about aspiring writers? What might you say?
ANDY WEIR: Aspiring writers? I’ve got 3 bits of advice for aspiring writers. One, you have to actually write. Ideating and imagining and world-building is not writing. You need to type. Number 2 is resist the urge—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You have to execute the idea.
ANDY WEIR: Yeah. Yeah. To tell your friends and family your story. It satisfies your need for an audience and saps your will to write. Oh, very nice. So you can give them a chapter at a time as you write it to satisfy that need. Don’t tell them, don’t tell them.
And then the third one is there’s never been a better time in human history to self-publish. There’s no old boy network between you and the readers anymore. You can, for absolutely zero financial risk, you can put your book out there and millions of people will access it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Says the man who’s published with Penguin Random House.
ANDY WEIR: I was going to say. Initially published on Kindle Direct Publishing.
CHUCK NICE: Oh, but for all of you who aren’t this talented, don’t quit your job.
ANDY WEIR: I didn’t quit my job until I had a traditional publishing deal.
CHUCK NICE: So, all right, all right, we’re done here.
Closing Thoughts
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That was Project Hail Mary. Nice. Full of grace. Yeah, the Lord was with thee. Well, Phil Lord. Always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. And Andy, thanks for being high up on my compliment list. Oh, thank you. Thank you.
And let me give you the highest compliment I could ever give. Don’t stop moving the needle in your storytelling for Hollywood because it was looking like same s*, different day. Yeah. For so many years. And with your stories out there, it gives us something fresh. To embrace and imbibe.
ANDY WEIR: Thanks so much. That means a lot to me.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In the genre. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Do keep looking up.
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