Where Fiction Meets Physics: Inside the SETI Institute’s Project Hail Mary Screening Event

Last week, the SETI Institute hosted a special opening-night screening of the film Project Hail Mary, based on the novel by Andy Weir. When the theater doors opened to our line of buzzing patrons, we nestled into Century Cinema’s cozy reclining chairs with buttery popcorn and sparkling sodas, ready to witness the sci-fi adventure film of the year!

For example, Film Grace drinks heavily early on, while Book Grace only celebrates after finding hope. Film Grace reacts to the world's fate with detachment, Book Grace panics for his students. Despite these differences, both characters ultimately save the day with physics, which I love.

After the film, I had the honor of hosting the Ask a Heliophysicist portion of the evening. One of our patrons asked me to describe my favorite bit of science from the story, and I noted that I appreciate how each enormous problem that Grace and Rocky had to solve was solved by one elementary physics problem at a time. This is abundantly clear in the book, and I wish the film had more time to explore the story's problem-solving aspect. Each step forward was taken by solving for mass, for gravity, for time, for relativity – even though relativity can be a complicated concept to grasp, no four-dimensional spacetime continuum equations were needed to tackle the task at hand. No quantum chemistry, no magnetohydrodynamics, no super hard stuff – just conceptual, foundational, practical applied physics. 

I was delighted to field such questions from our guests; we hopped around from physics to fiction, from astrobiology to social psychology, from Book Grace vs. Film Grace to how to identify parallel character arcs, and how to encourage humanity to work together in the face of extinction. One patron asked whether it was realistic how amateur astronomers in the story made such a huge contribution to understanding the star-dimming effects of astrophage, and I enthusiastically confirmed! “Amateur” astronomers are usually anything but amateurs, and citizen scientists continue to make tremendous discoveries that science teams often miss. Like raising children, raising a species takes a village and many more perspectives than we have dimensions. 

I’d like to thank everyone who joined us for the SETI Institute’s opening-night screening of Project Hail Mary. I hope to see you all at the next one!

Keep Shining,
B