It’s not everyday that we get a science fiction movie with the science part right, well we may assume most scifi movies are well liked by nerds and geeks for their scientific accuracy but the reality is more bizarre than the plot of most Michel Bay movies.

Well for starters take Star Wars in space where there is no air. How can you hear planets exploded by death rays or wat or comprehend laser blasts that are as fast as light and this is not even the worst plots out there.

The Transformers being part of King Arthur’s round table was not his most bizarre vision, in the movie Armageddon a Mt Everest sized asteroid is heading for earth and we are sending a group of miners in space to blow it up. And the plot was too ludicrous.

So that’s it throughout the years we had many movies where man has been exploring outer space from exploring plots to jump start the Sun with a nuclear bomb to Jeff Goldblum using a 90’s laptop to hack into An Alien ship from Independence Day.

And this is where Project Hail Mary wins, the creators have consulted with real life scientist Prof Brian Cox to make sure the science stays science throughout the flick.

He began this by teaching Ryan Gosling the basics of quantum physics so he can walk the talk so once Ryan was convinced of the science behind things like how gravity can be used to measure or verify whether he was in space.

There is a scene in the opening where Grace wants to know if he is in space, he doesn’t just look out a window. He drops a ball and measures how fast it falls. He uses a stopwatch and a calculator to prove he’s on a ship accelerating at 1.5g.

And all the calculation we see scribbled in the board are also the right steps taken to understand and break down these problems even in fan favourite movies like Ex-Machina the program shown to be algorithm for and AI program was infact a simple c++ program on generating Fibonacci Numbers.

And the makers were so cocky they even rounded up Neil Degrasse Tyson post the movie’s premiere and he told them they “got the science right.”

These are the main villains of the plot. The plot of the movie begins when the scientists on earth observe a strange phenomenon: the sun is losing 0.01% of its brightness every year. According to the movie’s plot and the science concocted for it theoretically the astrophages are microbes that live on the surface of stars like the sun, they feed off the light and shoot themselves to the nearest place with CO2 in this case that was Venus.

Water is essential for life and even the astrophages are not an exception to that rule but the astrophages have a thick shell that keeps the water tight inside and when they reach a braking point they expel the excess heat as neutrino and thereby regulate their internal heat. From there they will breed and will create more tiny sun eating microbes and the cycle will continue and even a tiny fractional change in sunlight can cause havoc in the world. Imagine an exponential chain reaction like this.

So by that estimate in 30 years the sun would have lost like 10% of its energy but that would have resulted in starvation for one third of the earth’s population and post that the earth will be pushed to an ice age.

One day a researcher came across a thin arc of infrared light in the solar system, the arc resembled a thread that connected the sun with Venus. And the line was in reality a by product of the energy expulsion by the astrophages as they travelled from the sun to the Venus where they multiplied because of CO2 and the newly formed astrophages make their trip to the sun and the cycle continued.

The petrova line was a gauge that measured how fast the sun was dying. Initially they were scoffed as space dust but Grace noticed that rocks wont change path but living things would, this lead to him testing and proving that the lines were flying bugs.

Time is relative and not the same for everyone and one is at a standstill and the other is moving as per the theory of relativity the one that is moving will experience time differently than the one that is at standstill. So in our movie on the Hail Mary Ryan is travelling at 93% of speed of light and so he experiences time slower than the ones that are still left on earth so for him only 4 years have passed but for the ones on earth around 13 years have passed. He was forced to go on a suicide mission and even if ever returned the world will have already moved on for him.

So the astrophages are causing the same destruction to suns across the nearby systems and there comes tau ceti, a nearby system where the astrophages are not affecting the sun. This prompts Dr Eva Strutt to send Grace across the galaxy to find what made Tauceti the exception and somehow save the earth. After a nearly cliffhanger near death stunt from his shuttle Grace collected an astrophage and he was able to understand the presence of another bug, the Taumoeba the good bug in this context.

The Taumoeba ate the astrophage before they could steal any sunlight but the catch was that they can’t survive in an environment with Nitrogen and Earth is 70% nitrogen so Grace does what all good micro biologists do he makes better bugs. Through selective breeding he was able to breed a strain of Taumoeba that can survive under nitrogen and voila we had our ant astrophage.

Well this was the most Hollywood and far from reality instance from the movie in real life. If the world ends, the USA will try to Nuke the sun rather than build a coalition of governments to tackle the apocalypse. Imagine all the factories in the world stopped producing phones, Smart TVs, teslas and all hands were on deck and that they made miniature automated space ships called beetles that collected astrophages from Venus and post that they built a Venusian Ring(Solar Farm).

Humans launched a giant ring of black panels and mirrors into orbit around Venus. These panels absorbed sunlight and got very hot. The Astrophage on Venus “saw” the heat and thought it was the Sun, so they swam up from the planet’s clouds directly into the human traps. For the Hail Mary to make the travel to tau ceti they needed 2,000,000 kilograms (2,000 tons) of the astrophage that is equivalent to the size of 400 African elephants.

Rocky looks like a pile of rock because he comes from the plant of Eridia, in his homeplanet the temperature is super hot and the air is super heavy so his species has developed tough external shell to withstand it. It is pitch black on his planet because the clouds are too thick for sunlight. So, Rockie’s species never evolved eyes instead they used echo location like bats or Daredevil to see via echolocation. They make tiny sounds that bounces of surfaces so he will be able to measure and perceive the depth of surfaces. Instead of water,they have liquid mercury inside of them since their planet is so hot (210°C), water would turn into steam. Mercury stays liquid at high heat and helps move energy through their rocky bodies.

This is something that hooked me a lot from the trailer like how will an alien who makes clicking noice communicate with a human who use vocal chords. Rocky and his species dont have vocal chords instead they were made like giant instrument with many holes that can create a distinct sound for communication for context instead of saying Hello he will make a sound similar to C sharp. Unlike in most movies they alien didnt have any universal translator or mind reading abilities instead both Rocky and Grace connected over maths, like Einstein said maths was the universal language so slowly from drawing circles to fist bumping for Pi they.

Grace started to record Rockys songs and He used a computer program to look at the “waves” of the sound. He saw that every time Rocky pointed to himself, he played the same specific melody and those waves meant Rocky. Eventually, they built a huge dictionary. Grace would talk into a microphone, and the computer would play the “music” for Rocky to hear. Rocky would “sing” back, and the computer would show the English words for Grace to read. And post that assigning a voice to him was easy after going over a few hilarious tries with Merryl Streep being a bit much we finally got the perfect alien voice.

Project Hail Mary is not just one of your Scifi movies its at the core a perfect friendship that makes us realise at the end of the day we all need someone like Rocky.