HUGE* Conversations: w/ Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir (Transcript)

But the reason that you’re seeing all this bad stuff on the news is because bad stuff is newsworthy.

You don’t report people doing good stuff because it’s so incredibly common that that’s the norm. Somebody slips on a street corner and breaks their leg, and 7 total strangers crowd around, bring them to safety, maybe give them a bottled water, call an ambulance, ask if they can call any family, try to stabilize his leg. That happens all the time. It doesn’t make the news because it’s expected, ordinary, normal human behavior.

But I think it’s beautiful that the kind of compassion and empathy and selflessness that humans have is so ordinary that it’s not newsworthy.

CLEO ABRAM: That’s the feeling that I want people to have when they watch my show as well. And that’s the feeling that I get from reading your books.

ANDY WEIR: Thank you.

Project Hail Mary: The Story

CLEO ABRAM: I want to start with Project Hail Mary.

ANDY WEIR: Okay.

CLEO ABRAM: I want to summarize it really quick. Please interrupt me in any question, but especially when I’m summarizing one of your books to you.

ANDY WEIR: Okay.

CLEO ABRAM: In Project Hail Mary, our sun begins to dim. Scientists figure out that there is a space bacteria called astrophage that is dimming our sun, and that not only our sun is infected, but all of the stars in our near vicinity are infected too, except one. And so your main character, Dr. Ryland Grace, needs to go on the world’s longest space adventure to discover what’s happening with that star to maybe save Earth. Okay, I want to start by talking about these.

The Spreadsheets: Building the Science of Astrophage

ANDY WEIR: Yes, this is one of my many spreadsheets that I used in writing Project Hail Mary. And this has mostly to do with the physics of astrophage. At the bottom here, there’s a bunch of tabs. This tab, Hail, has all the information about the ship.

CLEO ABRAM: And this one, Beetle, now Tau Ceti.

ANDY WEIR: Yep, 40 Eridani. And then there’s even one that’s called Wrong Math because I had to calculate how much fuel the Eridians brought along with them because they didn’t know about relativity, so they assumed they would have pure Newtonian physics all the way from 40 Eridani to Tau Ceti. So their math was completely wrong, so I had to calculate all of that to know—

CLEO ABRAM: You did their wrong math for them.

ANDY WEIR: 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 leftover for Grace.

So this is all about astrophage. This is the temperature that astrophage needs to be, which is 96.415 degrees Celsius, is what it works out to be. This is the temperature astrophage needs to be to be able to generate neutrinos, which is what it uses to store energy.

So the way it makes neutrinos is it has a temperature, that heat energy causes some hydrogen ions electrons inside the astrophage to be bouncing around, just root mean square calculate their velocity that they will have at any given temperature. And that is the velocity they need to have to have the kinetic energy equal to the mass energy of 2 neutrinos.

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? If you know the average particle speed, you can calculate the temperature in Kelvins and then work it out backwards. 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. And you have to make two because they have to be going opposite directions to balance momentum.

CLEO ABRAM: And this informs how they build the engines and all kinds of other things.

ANDY WEIR: Yeah, all sorts of stuff.

CLEO ABRAM: And is it that you came up with an idea like astrophage and then do all of the math to— if something that could actually act like this around the Sun exists, then these are all of the second-order effects that you would see, and that’s how you build the— how do you actually use these spreadsheets in the process of telling the story as you write it?

ANDY WEIR: Well, I mean, so first I need to go— yeah, I love the research and making this stuff up, but I go on a deep dive into the math to find out what is the effect of all of this. Like, what is the effect? It’s like, okay, doing all this math tells me, oh, astrophage is 96.415 degrees. Okay, great. And I know it’s how much mass it can hold before it does that. And as a result of that, plus its own blackbody radiation when it’s going through space, I can calculate how long it takes before it starves. 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—

CLEO ABRAM: So you know how far the stars could be between each other that couldn’t get infected.

ANDY WEIR: Right.

CLEO ABRAM: Got it.

ANDY WEIR: Because— and I had to account for the fact that it’s moving in its own inertial reference frame. So it’s only living for like a few months away from its star, but it can go up to like 8 light years away because of special relativity. So that’s why the infection distance is 8 light years. And so I didn’t decide that, I derived it.

Creating Rocky: The Alien Character

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, that’s what I think feels so satisfying. So speaking of the ways that the stars all get infected or don’t, one of my favorite moments in an interview that you’ve done before is where you played out how you invented the character— the species rather— of Rocky. This will be a spoiler for the book, but not a spoiler for the movie because it’s in the trailer.

ANDY WEIR: Everybody knows at this point that Rocky exists. I’m going to call you Rocky. It’s now or never.

CLEO ABRAM: So Dr. Ryland Grace gets to the star that’s uninfected, and he sees another spaceship there, and that spaceship has in it an alien that becomes the cutest best friendship of all space-time.

ANDY WEIR: It’s a bromance.

CLEO ABRAM: It’s just the most wonderful thing, and they have to save both their civilizations. But what I’m really interested in is how you worked into what the alien of Rocky would be like. You chose a real star, a real planet, and then you had a flow of logical decisions that worked into a whole rich creation. Could you walk me through that flow?

ANDY WEIR: Sure. Well, first off, I have to give a disclaimer. Since writing Project Hail Mary, it has been shown that that planet doesn’t actually exist. But at the time I wrote Project Hail Mary, it was believed that 40 Eridani AB de was a real exoplanet that had about 8 Earth masses and was orbiting Forte Aridani around once every 46 days. And that’s all we knew. So I figured I’m going to start with that, and then I get to do whatever I want beyond that. Anything that we don’t know, I get to define, right?

So I said, all right, I want life to be on this planet. And also, giving a little bit more information from the book here, we later learn that all of the life in the entire book — Earth, Arid, and Tau Ceti, all of it, astrophage, everything — has common ancestry.

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah.

The World of Erid: Building an Alien Planet

ANDY WEIR: Life, within my fiction, life only evolved once, and it only evolved on Adrian, planet Adrian. Primordial astrophage really just evolved to go back and forth between Tau Ceti and Adrian. That’s it. It wasn’t supposed to be an interstellar species.

But then what happened was occasionally it would miss. 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, but sometimes it was able to survive long enough to reproduce a little bit, and that’s what seeded life on Earth and Erid.

So that’s why when they take apart the cells, they find out that Astrophage has ribosomes and RNA transcription and everything, stuff that it is impossible to believe would parallel evolve. It has to be there. So we are descendants of life that evolved at Tau Ceti.

That’s one of the reasons I chose Tau Ceti. It was kind of perfect for it because first off, Tau Ceti is a solar analog, and I figured it is more likely that life would be able to seed in environments similar to where it started. So I wanted solar analogs across the board.

Tau Ceti, I forget exactly how old it is, but it’s got a few billion years on us. It’s much older than the Sun, so it had more time to evolve life. That’s why we got seeded with life when the Sun was only about half a billion years old. It’s like, how do you explain that? Well, because Tau Ceti was already 3 or 4 billion years old, and so that’s how we got seeded with life.

So all that having been said, the planet Erid had to have water, had to have liquid water, because we’re all related. You have to have water for this to work. I’m like, okay, so this is a planet that is really close to its star, closer to its star than Mercury is to ours. It’s a 46-day year. It’s very close.

So I thought, how do you have liquid water on a planet that’s that close to a star? It’s going to be really hot. Pressure. If you have a really high pressure, the boiling point goes up. So their oceans are like 200 degrees Celsius. Their air is also 200 degrees Celsius. 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. It’s always about the same temperature because its atmosphere is so thick.

So now from that I’m saying I want liquid water, so that means I have to have a thick atmosphere. Now what’s my next problem? My next problem is how do you have a thick atmosphere when you’re that close to a star? If you’re right next to a star, the solar wind is just going to blast your atmosphere off. That’s why Mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere at all.

CLEO ABRAM: Really strong magnetism?

ANDY WEIR: Part of it, yeah. Two things can help you with this. You may remember that Venus has a really thick atmosphere and it’s fairly close, right? So the answer is two things.

One, your atmosphere can be made out of really heavy molecules. Earth’s atmosphere is mostly just N2, nitrogen. It’s not very heavy. Venus’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide. It’s much heavier. So the Sun can’t really knock those out of Venus’s gravity well as easily. That’s why Venus gets to keep its atmosphere and Mercury doesn’t.

So I said Erid has an atmosphere of ammonia. We see ammonia all over the place in our solar system. Gas giants are made of it. So it’s plausible to assume that there’s a bunch of ammonia. That’s a heavy molecule that’s hard to knock out of the gravity well. And it’s also a bigger gravity well, which helps.

The next thing is a strong-ass magnetic field, just like you said. So I decided that Erid has a liquid, ferromagnetic core and also rotates really, really fast. The faster you rotate, the stronger your magnetic field will be. So it has a magnetic field that’s about 25 times as powerful. And it rotates — I did all the math — it takes about 6 hours to do one revolution. So it’s whipping around.

Fun stuff that never made it into the book —

CLEO ABRAM: Yes, please.

ANDY WEIR: — is this creates such an oblong shape for the planet. Because of the — it’s below the Roche limit. It’s not going to rotate itself apart, but it creates such a deviance. So the distance from the center of Erid to its equator is significantly different than the distance from the center of Erid to its pole. And so much so that it would be like measurably different gravity.

CLEO ABRAM: Oh, wow. So they could have a whole sort of culture around like where they end up in there.

Erid’s Atmosphere and the Origins of Eridian Life

ANDY WEIR: It’s not by much, but it’s on the order of centimeters per second per second. It’s different. To their ancient world, notably different. And so that’s interesting.

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. Now what evolves there?

I decided, well, maybe the ammonia would be clear all the way to the surface, but I decided it wasn’t. So I decided that their atmosphere acts kind of like an ocean. There’s life that absorbs sunlight and reproduces that way up in the upper parts of the atmosphere, then life below that that eats that, and life below that that eats that, kind of like our oceans. Sunlight only gets about 10, 20 meters into the ocean, and that’s as far down as it goes. But there’s life in the ocean all the way down to the floor. So that biosphere can filter down. And so that’s the same thing that happens in Erid’s atmosphere, and then the larger fauna live on the surface, and that’s what Eridians are, one of them.

So I thought, well, what do you need to be like to live on the surface of Erid? Okay, well, it’s nice to know that there’s liquid water, but there’s no oxygen in the atmosphere, so your body has to basically not be like Earth’s system where animals exhale carbon dioxide, then plants consume the carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, and it goes back and forth. That entire system has to be internalized to each animal.

So Eridians are like a biosphere. They need energy, so they need to eat other animals. They’re omnivores just like we are, and so they need to hunt and kill and eat other animals. Caveman Eridians did that. That’s how energy enters the system. But as long as you have energy entering the system, they can maintain their biological biosphere.

I said no light gets to the surface, so there’s no need for them to evolve vision. Instead, they evolved echolocation so accurate that they can fully understand their room. And what’s funny is people are like, wow, that’d be really — it’s hard to imagine having that level of detail in echolocation. I’m like, try to explain —

CLEO ABRAM: There are lots of animals that —

ANDY WEIR: Yeah, try explaining how vision works to Eridians. And Eridians are like, “Let me get this straight. Okay, so electromagnetic radiation is just kind of bouncing around, and you have an organ that gathers it and then kind of bends it and moves it around a bit. And then from that, you know your 3D environment.” There’s a bunch of intervening steps here I do not understand. So this is so much fun.

CLEO ABRAM: I know. Did you know that you were trying to get to some kind of animal that had a different sort of more musical way? Like, no, it just really was like the chips fell.

Designing a Truly Alien Species

ANDY WEIR: That’s where it came from. Yeah. I said, well, one thing is I genuinely wanted an alien species that was alien. I wanted it not to be like Star Trek forehead bumps. No diss on Star Trek. Love Star Trek. Love Star Wars. My number one true love is Doctor Who. So those are where my loyalties are. Obviously soft sci-fi doesn’t bother me at all. But I wanted my alien, my hard sci-fi book, to be really alien.

I wanted our environment to be completely incompatible with theirs. Because even on Earth, if you exchange the positions of a shark and a camel, they’re both going to die, right? So it’s like, why would an alien be comfortable?

So anyway, it wasn’t so much that I was going out of my way to make something specific. It’s that I was saying there are no rules. I don’t have to follow any rules for narrative purpose. I am creating a life form and then that’s what he’s going to meet.

And so now I have Eridians that I went way deep dive on. There are spreadsheets I have on Eridians. I posted a whole document online of Eridian biology and how their bodies work. Did you see it? Yeah.

Broadly speaking, an Eridian isn’t like — we are mostly made of biological material. We’re mostly cells. The only thing that’s not like living biological tissue on you is your hair, your fingernails, the irises of your eyes, parts of your teeth, that sort of stuff. But for an Eridian, it’s mostly inorganic material that was assembled by its worker cells. And so an Eridian is kind of like if a beehive could walk, right? The little things inside build it.

CLEO ABRAM: But they also look a little bit like crabs. Crabs.

ANDY WEIR: Yeah, carcinization.

CLEO ABRAM: I was curious if you were drawing from Earth’s history of everything kind of evolving into a crab.

ANDY WEIR: Everything eventually becomes a crab. Yeah. That’s your favorite thing. Yeah, and that’s what I did. I decided arbitrarily that in evolution, something happened like a billion years ago and then all of the species since then are formed by that.

CLEO ABRAM: It’s like the ideal body type.

ANDY WEIR: But also in evolution, it’s like, okay, why does DNA spiral this way instead of that way? Because that’s how it started and now it can’t change, right? So I decided that for whatever reason, Eridian life tends to be very pentagonally symmetrical. So everything’s in fives. It’s just fives. Why? I don’t know. Because that happened at some point in their evolutionary tree. And then everything is very pentagonal.

Okay. So now I’ve defined how their bodies work. And I’m like, well, if they’re not exchanging with the outside air, how do they make noise? Because since they have such incredibly good hearing — they don’t have ears. Hearing is almost like touch. Every part of their carapace can hear.

Wouldn’t it be neat if you clapped and it made light? Because that’s what it is for them. Like, “Oh, it’s completely quiet in here. Give me a second. Oh, okay, I see. All right. Yeah, now I get it.”

CLEO ABRAM: It would be as though we could glow.

ANDY WEIR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then also this led to all sorts of other fun things about how their brains work. Because they use echolocation, they have a 360-degree constant input of their 360-degree environment. We have to have parts of our brains dedicated to remembering what’s behind me. Eridians don’t have that because they don’t need it. So they are constantly getting that input.

And so if for some reason they lose that input, they won’t remember the layout of the room. They’ve never had any need to memorize their 3D environment like we do. If you close your eyes, you can probably still tell me a bunch of stuff about this room. Maybe not every last little detail, but you know there are stairs there, you know there’s a camera there, a lighting thingy there, and so on. But an Eridian would be like, I got nothing.

Building a Sci-Fi Story: Cleo’s Alien Discovery Premise

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, this is one of my favorite things about science fiction generally, I think, which is that what— as you were describing the different way in which Eridians work, and you’re describing how we work, I’m appreciating being human in a different way. 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, like that the animals that live in the deep sea are fundamentally alien too in some way that you can appreciate. And I really— I love that.

And I want to play that out if you’re okay with it, with a new story. I think one of the best ways to see potentially how your process works is to offer you new examples. Okay. Oh, wow. I don’t get nervous very often. I’m nervous to tell you about my sci-fi story. Okay, here we go.

Ultimately, our goal is to educate people about science, and we want to share with people the real science and technology that we’re using to search for aliens right now. The Europa Clipper is on its way. All of the cool telescopes that are looking for signs of life in different atmospheres. So one of the ways that we’ve started to do this is with small fiction stories. They’re sort of intercut into our videos. We did it with a video about finding near-Earth asteroids by playing out what if an asteroid were coming for Earth. 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. It was very fun. And Mark Rober voiced the fiction sections of that video.

So we’re doing another version of that where we’re playing out what if we really find aliens. What if it works, all of this science that we’re doing right now? Sort of like if we catch the squirrel, what would we do next? And so I have some parameters here. I really don’t want it to be that they’re sending us a message. I want it to be that our ways of searching work. That feels different to me.

I think one of the struggles is that a lot of the things that we’re doing will just take an enormous amount of time, and I want to sort of speed it up. So one of the things that I’m thinking is that we will set this character, this scientist, in a future world where we have already discovered microbes on maybe Venus or Europa or somewhere nearby. 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. Maybe we should really invest a huge amount of money in finding aliens, intelligent aliens, far away. So that gives me the excuse to kind of speed up the technological process here. 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.

ANDY WEIR: I didn’t even bother to explain why people, why they sent people to Mars in the 2030s. I just said they did.

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah. Like, yeah.

ANDY WEIR: I didn’t work on the funding aspect. That’s way less fun.

CLEO ABRAM: 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. What are the questions that you’re asking yourself at this point?

World-Building the Discovery: Separate Genesis and the Drake Equation

ANDY WEIR: Well, my first questions would be about the world that you’ve already set up and what your characters already know. So the microbes they found on, say, Venus and Europa. Were they a separate genesis?

CLEO ABRAM: I’m saying Venus. And yes, we have reason to believe for reasons—

ANDY WEIR: Just the cellular mechanisms are so completely different to ours.

CLEO ABRAM: Yes. The Drake equation has changed dramatically. And we now believe that life arises— the Drake equation. The precision approaches 1.

ANDY WEIR: Yes. It’s everywhere. Everywhere.

CLEO ABRAM: And so we’re super motivated to go find it.

ANDY WEIR: So we have established that there’s microbial life on Venus and it is its own genesis. We’re positive of that. Furthermore, there’s no multicellular life, or at least none that we found on Venus.

CLEO ABRAM: Not that we found, no. Our scientist character is not working in that particular field. So he’s like the guy who is— in my wildest dreams, this is voiced by [MASKED]. He’s like an expert in transmission spectroscopy or something. His thing is like, he’s like, “Yes, I fully agree that there are microbes on Venus. Microbes aren’t my thing. I want the intelligent aliens. And now I believe that they really are out there. So I am just—”

ANDY WEIR: So how do we find intelligent aliens? And he’s thinking of looking at other stars or just in our solar system?

CLEO ABRAM: I think he’s looking at— So I think that we pick a star system. I’m imagining that the planet is an invented one that we discover because of all this investment in new telescopes.

The Science of Detection: Radiation Imbalance as a Biosignature

ANDY WEIR: Well, then the first thing that comes to my mind is if we had all this awesome technology, look for a planet that is not emitting as much radiation as it’s absorbing. Why? Because the radiation it’s absorbing is going into the form of life.

Because if you think about Earth, a lot of sunlight is coming in and not bouncing away because plants are absorbing it and turning it into complex carbohydrates, and that energy is being stored in the form of chemical bonds. But it’s happening at a global scale on algae, forests, everything like that. So if you saw a planet absorbing— because a dead planet like Mercury will be emitting exactly as much radiation as it is absorbing from the Sun because it has to. Otherwise it would be heating up or cooling down or something. It has had a few billion years to reach that stasis point and that’s where it is.

So if you see a planet absorbing more radiation than it’s emitting, then that is probably a planet that has not just life, but fairly complex life. Life like plant life, like multicellular life. Either that or a whole lot of algae. But that’s my first hint, I think, would be that that’s a planet worth checking out.

CLEO ABRAM: How much detail is too much detail?

ANDY WEIR: Well, that’s where you’re getting into the made-up.

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, like how much should I pull a thread versus like—

ANDY WEIR: The way I do it is I try to do one thing and then everything derives from that one thing. So if you say, “Oh, they’ve got really good exoplanet investigation technology,” then the way I would do it is I would spend a lot of time defining exactly what that exoplanet detection technology you have is, what it can and can’t do, and then work from there. And then if you find out that it’s not doing enough for your plot to happen, then give it a little more gas. But don’t come up with 12 different things. Come up with one thing that you can amp up.

Starshade, Technosignatures, and the Cold Scale

CLEO ABRAM: So what I’m taking from what you’re saying is let’s imagine that the telescopes are really that much better. And there are real plans. I was talking to a bunch of NASA folks and scientists that are working on plans to block out the light of stars that are more sun-like in order to learn about more Earth-like planets that are near them. So there’s one called Starshade, for example. And by doing that, you would be able to see more Earth-like planets, but also more planets on other orbits that don’t perfectly transit.

So let’s imagine, just pulling on this thread like you said of saying, “Okay, they have better telescopes.” What does that mean? That means they can identify more new Earth-like planets around more Sun-like stars. That means that our character is exploring a lot of them and identifies one with not just a biosignature, but let’s give it a technosignature too. It’s got lots of CFCs in its atmosphere.

ANDY WEIR: It’s like you look for— okay, there’s no natural process by which there’s a bunch of carbon monoxide and CFCs and other stuff like that in an atmosphere. So that must be like a civilization generating that as waste.

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah. 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?” And so you increase— you go up the levels on this scale if you are checking with a secondary piece of evidence. So let’s imagine our character sends this information to all the radio telescopes and now they’re looking for radio signals from this planet. And they actually find something. They could be blasting like a signal meant to be detected by other—

ANDY WEIR: Well, that’s SETI. That’s getting really close to your initial prohibition.

CLEO ABRAM: That’s true.

A Burst of Electromagnetic Radiation: The Nuclear War Twist

ANDY WEIR: So let’s assume they’re not doing SETI. How about something like this? We have this system-wide array, the SWA. Come up with a cool acronym for it, whatever. The system-wide array. And we’ve been watching lots of planets. And we’ve been watching for radio signals. We’ve been watching for anything like that. It’s just we have a much more advanced one. Then one planet, one time, there’s a burst and then nothing. And we’re like, “What the hell was that?” There’s just a burst of electromagnetic whatever from that. And it happens over the course of like minutes. And that’s it. And then they’re like, “What was that?”

And then you turn your guns on it and you’re really super ready. And then you discover that planet has an atmosphere and it has life signs and pollution and all that stuff. And then what happens is they just had themselves a nuclear war.

CLEO ABRAM: Oh yeah, you can back into like why. Now there’s— oh, there’s radiation.

ANDY WEIR: Yeah. Oh, they just failed the cosmic filter, I’m afraid.

CLEO ABRAM: Oh yeah, so then we get to explain the Great Filter. One of the things that a lot of science fiction misses, if they’re contacting you, is the moment when humanity has to decide whether or not they say hi back. That feels very rich to me. These people just blew themselves up, we think.

ANDY WEIR: Yeah. Or maybe they invented some new form of energy and made a mistake, or maybe they did something on purpose and they’re fine. But there was a sudden massive burst of electromagnetic radiation that came from not the star but the planet. Should we say hi? Did they just have a global nuclear war, or is that their new technology for launching spacecraft to their moon, or is that a test of their new energy system that’s fusion-based that we don’t even understand?

CLEO ABRAM: At what point do you add a character with specific personality traits that has to make decisions in this world that you’ve built?

Brainstorming the First Contact Story

ANDY WEIR: Well, okay, so in a scenario like this, I would have the discoverer character. He’d be the guy who’d be like, “There was a burst at this planet,” or something like that.

One thing that annoys me in fiction is the main character is like the only person who believes something and then goes on to be vindicated over and over again. That, that annoys me. It could just be the guy who happened to notice it. Like you’ve got some Tycho Brahe equivalent dude who’s just an amateur who just happened to be like looking that way that day, you know, whatever.

It could be something as simple as that. Like he could be just out stargazing. He’s an amateur astronomer. Maybe you make him more interesting. He’s a rich guy. He’s actually built a little astronomy dome in his home. I know some people who have done that, who have their own like straight up massive telescope, like that they go from their living room into their telescope room and stuff like that.

And he’s just stargazing, and that’s what he loves to do. He likes to take measurements and stuff like that, and he happens to be looking at that moment. He sees this little visible light, he’s like, “That was odd.” And of course he records everything he sees, and he’s like, “Let’s play that back.” It’s like, “Yeah, that was over there. Okay, were there any satellites in the area at the time? Nope, it was from there.”

He talks to other amateur astronomers. “Anybody see that? Anybody see that over at this star over here? This little bloop?” And the people are like, “No, I wasn’t looking that way.” He’s like, “I don’t know. There was something that happened there.” And maybe there’s some guy in Australia who says, “I saw that too.” And then they say, “Okay, well, we’ve got two independent corroborating sources.”

So then the people who run the great system-wide array say, “Okay, we’ve got two corroborating sources that say they saw an event in this solar system,” and they have this new telescope technology. It’s accurate enough to kind of tell it didn’t happen at the star, it happened away from the star, not on the star, but next to the star. And maybe this planet is a little further away than 1 AU, maybe it’s like 5 AU away, maybe it’s bigger, maybe whatever, it’s a brighter star. So it’s 5 AUs away and they can tell with their telescopes, “Yeah, it didn’t happen at the star, it happened near the star.”

So that gets the powers that be to go like, “Well, let’s look at it with the Great Array.” And okay, yeah— what’s your name again? Steve. Okay, Steve’s World, we look at Steve’s World and yeah, now we’re seeing evidence in the atmosphere of, you know, there’s free oxygen and methane and pollution, which implies intelligent life. We don’t know what that flash was. And then you can get to your question of like, should we say hi?

CLEO ABRAM: I think I’m okay with the idea that they would be signaling somehow. So one of the problems—

ANDY WEIR: Well, so what I was saying is, I think you’re on to something. Identifying it for sure. I think you’re on to something with they aren’t trying to contact us. They don’t even know about us. We spotted them first. Yes. That’s an interesting angle. And that’s where I haven’t seen that, outside of like space opera. But I haven’t seen that outside of like Star Trek and stuff, where we are the ones who detect them first.

But then it’s like, okay, so there’s this planet, Steve’s World. They put the big array to work and they say, “Yeah, it has oxygen, it has methane, and we don’t know what that big flash of light is. And there’s pollution in the atmosphere, so maybe they’re inventing fusion. Maybe they invented fusion wrong. Maybe they just didn’t like a mountain range because it was unsightly and wanted to get rid of it. Maybe it’s something completely— maybe this is their reproductive molting cycle and it happens every 500 years and we just happen to see it for the first time now.” We have no idea.

And so then comes the— should we say hi? We have the technology to say hi. 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.

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah. And no, no thanks. No, no thanks. Actually, just— we’re good.

ANDY WEIR: It’s fine. We’re cool. Just frickin’ ghost them. That’s all I’m saying. That’s all. The end. They decided, “No, no, we’re good. And we’re banning all radio broadcasts from Earth. We’re shutting down SETI. We are done with this bullshit.” No. So they decided to contact him. And so then the next fun question is, how do you contact him? You said like 20 light years away. Okay. How do you send a signal 20 light years?

CLEO ABRAM: I want it to be something that could plausibly be within a human lifetime that you could, in theory, expect.

ANDY WEIR: Maybe bump it a little closer. There’s a lot of stars out there. We can get closer than that. So yeah, that’s an interesting question of like, how would you send that? How would you send information? So now I’m deep in my spreadsheet.

CLEO ABRAM: Now you’re deep in your spreadsheet. Lots of options for what would be realistically powerful enough. And also, I guess, what would we say? Are we sending prime numbers or are we actually trying to communicate?

ANDY WEIR: We want them to know we’re here. That’s step one. It’s hi, right? That’s what we’re saying. We don’t speak their language. We don’t know anything. Prime numbers is the Carl Sagan way. Digits of pi. Sure. Well, then you have to wonder— what base would you like to do that in? If you 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.”

How Would We Say Hi?

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, I think this is what I appreciate so much in your stories. You could write a whole set of chapters on how do you say hi. There’s a rich, earnest debate in just the idea that, okay, we’re going to say hi, but there’s a bunch of decisions that have to be made about how you would best do that. There’s debate, real debate, and then there’s actually doing it, that is difficult.

ANDY WEIR: How do you do it? Well, the first thing that came to my mind, talking about the ultimate swords to plowshares, is set off nukes in space. They’re very bright. Fair enough. And then some other people might be worried— we’re worried about them knowing where we are. Why don’t we send nukes to Mars and set them off there?

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, that way, that way, if anybody thinks—

ANDY WEIR: —thinks it’s us, they’ll turn around.

CLEO ABRAM: 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, then nice little—

ANDY WEIR: Yeah, nice try, you kid. But you could send nukes far away from Earth, not to disguise our identity, but just because if you’re going to set off nukes, you want to do it far away. Set them away in a line, have them so that they go off in sequences and stuff like that. That’s really bright. If you’re giving off like a nuclear explosion in space, the light just goes and goes and goes.

That’s where my spreadsheet would come in. I’d be like, what would a 1-megaton bomb being detonated out in space— you’d probably want to get further away from our star, away from the Sun, so that it’s more visible against the background. So maybe— at this point, we’re very excited and willing to spend whatever it takes, right? So we’re sending something out, like way out, orbit of Saturn, Neptune, like way the hell out there 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.

So we’d be sending nukes like way out there and set to blow up in a sequence. And so that’d be a whole thing. And then that’s where my spreadsheet would come out. I’d be like, okay, how much light from a 1-megaton nuclear explosion would be visible to somebody who’s however many light-years away, and how would that compare to the arc distance from our star? Would we be able to detect that with today’s technology if somebody did that?

CLEO ABRAM: And if it needs to be bigger or farther, that drives your plot because then we need a bigger ship or something.

ANDY WEIR: We need a bigger boom, or maybe nukes are not a good way to do it. But it seems like that’s a good way for us to release an awful lot of light all at once.

Publishing The Martian Online: Public Feedback and Fact-Checking

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah. So when I’m telling stories, I’m publishing them on YouTube and I’m getting lots of comments, some incredibly helpful, some very pedantic. When you were publishing The Martian, you published first as chapters online, and I have some of them. These are the original chapters as you published them. And this is my published copy of The Martian. And I’m curious— it seems to me both like an enormous privilege to have the public fact-checking of making things in public, but also difficult to figure out, okay, how do you as an individual creative person make changes or not make changes based on what you want to get super close to reality versus what you’re saying like, no, this is driving the plot, this is deliberately my choice. Tell me about the difference between this and the book that you finally published.

ANDY WEIR: I think there’s not much, but it looks like you have like some sort of secret details.

CLEO ABRAM: I do have a spreadsheet. One of my favorites is— this is a whole published paper on the differences, by the way. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this.

ANDY WEIR: I did not see this.

CLEO ABRAM: One of my favorites is the table that they have at the back about the difference between the cursing. Oh, cool. They have a whole chart for you. They helped me dial it back a little.

ANDY WEIR: Yeah.

CLEO ABRAM: These are all the differences between the versions for how many times you curse. That’s awesome.

ANDY WEIR: When we made the classroom edition of The Martian— so we have a classroom-friendly edition for schools and stuff like that. All of the swear words are replaced with PG alternatives. Yeah. And because they’re not allowed to change text without me allowing it, right? And so in most cases, you can almost do a search and replace, but not in all cases.

It was funny because they had a copy editor and they said, “We want you to flag every swear word in the manuscript that is not suitable for classrooms. So basically anything that you couldn’t put in a PG movie.” And so she just went through the whole thing and she said, “That’s the most fun I’ve ever had.” She said, “That is the most fun I’ve ever had,” because every single one of her notes is like, amazing.

CLEO ABRAM: Did you enjoy— like, sometimes I wish I could publish my videos and then have an opportunity to get— sometimes they make good points, sometimes they say things that I wish I included. Like, you didn’t do that with your other books, and I’m curious how that—

ANDY WEIR: Well, I did with The Martian. As I did a chapter at a time, people would email and say, “Okay, you got this wrong, you got this right,” and so on.

The biggest one was I had just spaced and forgotten that air will completely mix together. And so the hydrogen— yeah, the hydrogen. In an earlier chapter, my original chapter where he had the Hab, it had a bunch of free hydrogen in it and he was worried about how to get rid of it and it was all up at the top of the Hab because it’s hydrogen. And so he went up and just had small amounts of oxygen that he had to burn. He was wearing his suit and stuff like that. But of course, that’s not what happens. That happens at the planetary scale. But inside of something like the Hab, the hydrogen would be evenly distributed throughout the air. And someone emailed me that. I’m like, “Oh yeah,” so I got to come up with a different thing.

The Optimism Behind the Stories

CLEO ABRAM: I remember thinking about how you published The Martian, and what I appreciated was obviously there’s so many people that help and support you now. Obviously it seems like you’re really close with your team and have that wonderful collaboration. It also was inspiring to see that you didn’t need anyone to say yes to you writing the book. You wrote the book and then you put it online. And to some degree, I always felt like that was the key to what we’re doing too. Like we just began making videos that we thought were great on YouTube and it’s sort of gotten its own audience and it’s worked from there. Fists bump bump, success.

ANDY WEIR: Fists bump bump. Exactly. Yeah. Thumbs down, baby.

CLEO ABRAM: We promise this is a relevant— This matters.

ANDY WEIR: This is a thing. This is relevant. Thumbs up. No, that’s thumbs down. We do the thumbs up.

CLEO ABRAM: It’s close enough.

ANDY WEIR: That freaked me out. 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. And I’m like, oh no, I get it. Okay. Yeah.

Optimism as a Creative Choice

CLEO ABRAM: One of the things that also feels similar is the optimism that you bring to your stories. Can you tell me about the way that you bring that into your process? Like, for example, I really love the way that the astronauts in The Martian all believe in their commander. There’s no love triangle. There’s no infighting. There’s no— I hate that. They’re just smart people trying to do a good job.

It 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, which is a species that loves to solve hard problems. We’re the good guys. And I’m just curious how you think about that, how you feel about maybe your position in— I’ll say it for myself— a world of both sci-fi and science journalism that feels pretty pessimistic sometimes, pretty dystopian sometimes. How do you think of the work that you’re making in that context?

ANDY WEIR: Well, I’m not trying to change society, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion of anything. I firmly consider myself just an entertainer. I’m just writing stories to entertain, so I’m not trying to set your opinion 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.” That’s it. That’s the only effect I wanted to have on you. Maybe you tell some of your friends to read it too. That’s it.

But in terms of pessimism, I don’t know. I’m not here to solve a pessimism epidemic. All I can do is just be me. I’m not pessimistic. I think humans are really awesome. I think technology is really awesome because technology is then put into the hands of humans who are awesome.

People are afraid of AI, but AI can do things no human can. I’m like, so can a forklift. If I give you a hammer, you could build a house or you could murder someone. It’s not— there’s nothing about the hammer that does it. And most people use hammers to build houses. So I’m not afraid of technology because I’m not afraid of my fellow humanity. I’m optimistic that way.

Science Fiction and Its Real-World Effects

CLEO ABRAM: One of the effects that that perspective naturally has is to seed inspiration in other people, right? I do think that you are here to be an entertainer, but the effect of your entertainment is a lot of people get really excited about science.

ANDY WEIR: If it has that side effect, then I’m happy. Although people have often said, “Hey, you’re helping get people into science.” I’m like, I don’t think I am. I think people who are already into science maybe get encouraged to pursue it further. You’re not going to make someone who isn’t interested in science be interested in science.

That’s kind of like— people often ask me, how do we get more girls into STEM? I’m like, figure out which ones are interested in STEM and then foster it. You’re not going to make anyone take an interest, but they’re there, they’re interested. You just have to make it so that the other kids don’t beat it out of her before she—

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, the fostering, I think, is— yeah, maybe— no, you’re creating something brand new, but the fostering is so important. Normalizing. Yeah.

I think there’s another debate that feels very rich, which is the effects of science fiction on real science. And people say science fiction is a real meaningful way to inspire actual creativity. Martin Cooper at Motorola said that he was inspired to build the first ever handheld cell phone from the Star Trek communicators. And then other people will say, no, come on, cell phones came about because of smaller transistors and technological development and that was going to happen. 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.

How do you think about the relationship between science fiction and science? Because you are projecting into the future solutions that smart people might realistically have.

ANDY WEIR: Well, I don’t think science fiction authors come up with anything that real scientists don’t already come up with. It’s just we’re better at making books that get into the public zeitgeist about it. But I mean, obviously the idea of a phone that isn’t attached to the wall is something that people have thought about having for a long time, once technology came about to have it.

And a lot of people say, “Oh, Arthur C. Clarke was the guy who invented the concept of artificial satellites.” I’m like, no, he wasn’t. 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. But I just don’t think that science fiction drives real science very much. I don’t think there’s anything I’ve thought of in any of my stories that, real science-wise, real scientists haven’t already thought of at great length.

CLEO ABRAM: I think your science fiction does the fostering that you talked about in people, and I think it also perhaps drives cultural acceptance of ideas or cultural excitement around ideas. I do think that in some way the popular excitement about Star Trek communicators, the popular excitement that we continue to have about self-driving cars or flying to Mars— the idea that we might get to Mars and actually accomplish that as a species is fostered by great stories about it.

So I know that you feel that you’re here as an entertainer. I feel that you have inspired— I mean, I’m not a scientist, so— but I think you’ve inspired a lot of people. And I think that function is really important. The specific way in which you do it, the way in which you show that you don’t have to be a natural genius to love science and be good at it. It is about hard work and solving the problem right in front of you. And as they would say, work the problem.

The exercise that we just went down, the spreadsheets, my pulling on my particular thread, the story that you told of how you chose arose, arid, and then went down that rabbit hole— what are some of the rabbit holes you’re going down right now?

ANDY WEIR: Well, I can’t talk about it that much because that’s the book I’m writing right now.

CLEO ABRAM: Can you give us any hints about the book you’re writing right now?

ANDY WEIR: No, I really don’t want to. I’m sorry. I don’t want to.

CLEO ABRAM: Are there scientific concepts or ideas that are exciting to you? What are some?

Technologies That Will Change the World

ANDY WEIR: So these are not involved in the book that I’m writing now. There are two things that I think are going to change the world in the real world dramatically.

One of them is kind of boring, but it’s the self-driving cars. I don’t think people understand how much that’s going to change the world. First off, the idea of owning a car I think will kind of go away. You’ll just be subscribed to a car service. It’ll be like Uber or Lyft or something like that. They’ll just be driverless. And then cities dedicate something like 10% of their total surface area to parking. They’re not going to have to do that anymore. The car is going to drop you off and then go off to pick up someone else, and then it’ll go off to recharge also, which is great for urban transport.

It becomes economically better to use electric cars, and so they’ll just go recharge themselves and continue. So that’s good for the environment, but also cities will now be fully dedicated to being cities instead of parking lots. So that’s amazing.

Also, we’re going to have about 50,000 people a year not dying from car accidents, which is kind of nice. Drunk driving will cease to be a thing. Dying in car crashes will be as unusual as dying in plane crashes. And also, everybody’s effectively going to get a bigger house because everybody’s going to remodel their garages away.

In 100 years, people will look back and say, “Isn’t it weird that people dedicated like a quarter of their entire home to a place to put a car.” Your car has more personal space than your kid does. Your kid has a bedroom, your car has a big bedroom, right? And for an object that you’re not using 98% of the time, it’s just ridiculous.

So I think that’s going to have a tremendous effect on society. 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. Those are going to go away. That’s going to have an effect, not necessarily a good one. They won’t just vanish from the earth. They’ll have to go find a new profession.

And then there’s other things like— the city of Los Angeles gets something like $100 million a year in parking and traffic violations. Electric cars aren’t going to break the law. So a lot of cities are probably going to oppose the adoption of electric cars because their revenue relies on a lot of this stuff. So it’s a really interesting dynamic.

CLEO ABRAM: I was talking to a tech leader— I won’t say by name. We were talking about this specific topic and they said that a politician had asked them, “Okay, you’re talking about self-driving cars. I believe in this future. But what about all of the organs?”

ANDY WEIR: Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah. No more organ donation.

CLEO ABRAM: The answer is like, oh my God, I would hope that the organs stay in their original body. Yeah. But that—

ANDY WEIR: That’s a weird way of looking at it. An incredibly weird way of looking at it. So 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. Yeah, that’s interesting.

CLEO ABRAM: The whole way that people think about this is such a—

ANDY WEIR: Yeah. So that’s one technology I think is significant. The other one is protein folding via AI. So it’s really exciting to see that we are just using AI, just blasting up— we know how the proteins fold and stuff like that. But what I’m more excited about is doing it backwards. Saying, “I want a protein that makes this shape. Tell me the RNA sequence that’ll do that.”

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, for drug discovery.

ANDY WEIR: Yeah, exactly.

The Future of Medicine and Closing Thoughts

ANDY WEIR: Or no, it gets way better than that. Oh, it gets so much better than that. No, if you can make a custom shape for the protein, then you start by saying, oh, bad news, you have cancer. So I got a sample, right? And we’re going to have AI 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.

And we’ll have computers do that too. We’ll have them try out things and figure out, okay, that’s the shape we need. Okay, now we’ll go to the AI and say, what protein do we need to make that shape? And it’ll be like, here, this sequence. Okay, now we’re going to CRISPR splice that into a bunch of E. coli in a lab, and we’re going to make this cure. Here’s your cancer. Yeah, just yours. Yeah, but here you go.

And I mean, or also like viral treatment. It’s like, okay, bad news, you’ve got a virus. Good news, this is the shape that neutralizes that virus. So we’re going to mass produce a bunch of it and put it in you. And you can literally cure a virus, which we have never done. Other than we’ve extincted— we’ve rendered viruses as extinct via vaccination, but we’ve never cured. Nothing other than the human immune system has ever cured a virus.

CLEO ABRAM: Yeah, it is really amazing to hear you go down the rabbit hole on the physicality of an alien species and then go down the rabbit hole on self-driving cars and protein folding.

ANDY WEIR: Just call me Alice. I like rabbit holes.

CLEO ABRAM: It feels like it’s a reminder of where we started, which is the exploration of fictional worlds feels like it tells you so much about the real world. It feels like you’re doing the same process now that you were doing about Rocky.

ANDY WEIR: And the other thing is, all these things I’ve been saying — real scientists, I’m sure, have already thought of all of this and are working on it. So that’s pretty cool. If you thought it, someone else probably thought it and they’re probably working on it. There are probably people out there who have dedicated their lives to these random-ass thoughts that I’ve just had. Neat.

What We Hope to Leave Behind

CLEO ABRAM: 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, I would hope that they would get the feeling 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, and in turn see the possible futures ahead so that they can help build them. That’s what I’m trying to do here. And I’m curious, if someone is reading your stories — the many, many more stories that we’re going to be lucky to have — what do you want people to take away?

ANDY WEIR: I just want them to have a good time. And when they put the book away, I want them to think, “that was cool.” That’s the same effect that my father’s science fiction collection had on me when I was like 12 years old, reading his books by Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke — with a glossy ad for cigarettes in the middle because he’d gotten them in the ’50s and ’60s, right? And I just— “that was cool. Next.” You know, that’s all I’m shooting for.

CLEO ABRAM: That’s all I want. Thank you so much for your time.

ANDY WEIR: Thanks for having me. It’s great. Thanks very much.

CLEO ABRAM: Since that conversation with Andy, I have been writing this sci-fi story and it is coming soon to our channel. So if you want to see it and if you want to just support optimistic science and tech stories, subscribe.

ANDY WEIR: See you soon. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you.

CLEO ABRAM: Amazing, amazing, amazing. Thank you. Awesome.

ANDY WEIR: And I am a fan, by the way, so it’s pretty cool to hang out with you.

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