Completely isolated in deep space, stars glow bleakly off the metal hull of an international spaceship. This space ship is humanity’s last-ditch effort for a solution to save the planet from a global ice age. Humanity’s problem? The sun is dying.
This is the premise of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. The book came out May 4th, 2021, and quickly became a top-selling, modern classic in the science-fiction genre. The following year, it was a finalist for the Hugo Best Novel award.
Most notably, Project Hail Mary is praised for its place in “hard” science fiction, a subgenre which focuses on scientific accuracy and consistent logic. Hard sci-fi novels may have imaginary technology (say, spaceships with centrifugal force), or even introduce alien lifeforms (like Rocky and astrophage), but include plausible explanations for these sci-fi elements, rooted in chemistry, biology, and physics.
With its recent movie adaptation, Project Hail Mary has seen a second surge in publicity. Besides poking fun at the absurdity of Ryan Gosling’s role as a nerdy scientist, critics have wondered whether the story’s science is currently plausible. Contrary to its literary counterpart, the movie leans more towards “speculative sci-fi,” enabling the story to be better told through the medium of cinematography. But because of the book’s hard sci-fi roots, scientists and journalists alike have speculated how to make interstellar space travel a reality.
An article by Paul Sutter ranked the ways to achieve interstellar travel from least to most likely. In short, the most likely reality is that we won’t. However, he did explain several (extremely unlikely) possibilities. To travel the vast distances between star systems, human spaceships would need to travel faster than the speed of light. With our current technology this journey would take thousands of years. We could bypass faster-than-light travel by using wormholes (shortcuts in space that connect two points in the universe), but there’s no telling how long it would take to make the breakthroughs in physics necessary to create them.
In Project Hail Mary, one of the key factors that allows the crew to travel 12 light years across the solar system is astrophage. This made up organism is described as a single-celled interstellar algae that feeds on the sun. Because of its ability to convert light energy into mass, it makes highly efficient fuel for the Hail Mary space ship.
Unfortunately, with our current technology (and lack of high-energy alien-bacteria), the likelihood of visiting stars and planets outside our own solar system is slim. The astronautical feat of interstellar space travel is just not yet within our grasp. However, NASA is making small steps towards this astronomical goal with the Artemis program, allowing NASA to study the impact of long-duration spaceflights. Additionally, NASA is developing several technologies that will aid in deep space exploration, including special batteries (SABERS) that can store high amounts of energy, autonomous spacecrafts, and special infrastructure known as FLOAT railway technology that allows the transport of cargo on the Moon’s surface.
While we likely won’t meet aliens from other planets or even venture to other solar system’s stars in the near future, NASA is taking big steps to advance space exploration, paving the way for future discoveries.
