Science Friday - ‘Project Hail Mary’ brings a new kind of alien to the big screen

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Science fiction nerds, rejoice: the long-awaited adaptation of “Project Hail Mary” is in theaters now. Host Flora Lichtman chats with book author Andy Weir and astrobiologist Mike Wong about the film’s aliens, and how they buck the trend of what extraterrestrials usually look like on screen. Guest: Andy Weir is the author of “Project Hail Mary” and “The Martian.” Dr. Mike Wong is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flora Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Happy Big Budget Sci-Fi movie release day to all who celebrate. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct, including us. Project Hail Mary comes out this weekend. You may have seen ads of a dazed Ryan Gosling in a spacesuit, or maybe you know the book that it's based on. Here's the premise. A microbial alien species is dimming the sun,

and the Earth is going to turn into a frozen, lifeless tundra unless someone figures something out and quick. The solution? Put failed molecular biologist and middle school teacher, Rylan Grace, on the case. I put the knot an astronaut. I've never done anything. I've never done a space. I can't even moonwalk. This is your warning.

There will be spoilers. So our protagonist finds himself in space. He meets a new buddy, Rocky, an alien from the space. the planet Arid, who is very cute despite having no face and looking like a pile of rocks. It is super fun to see a scientist and his alien sidekick try to save the world. And the movie raises lots of interesting questions about alien life, which is why I'm so happy we're talking about it with the perfect guests, author of the book Project Hail Mary and the Martian, Andy Weir, and astrobiologist and planetary scientist Mike Wong.

Andy and Mike, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this is going to be fun. Okay, Andy, kick us off. This story is your baby. It must be so gratifying to see it come to life and executed in such a fun and beautiful way. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, to see just hundreds of, you know, world-class people, like,

putting all of their effort into making this thing that fell out of my head a reality is, you know, it's pretty humbling, actually. Okay, so given that, I'm going to ask you to put on your petty writer hat. What is like the tiny little thing we can all look out for in the movie that you would have done differently? Well, I can't really think of anything that I would have done differently. There are a few tiny little things like, oh, this scene would have been a good opportunity to do this thing. Or there's some omissions from the book that obviously only like 5% of a book is going to make it into a a movie, but I wish, you know, there are a couple of scenes in the book that aren't in the

movie that I'm like, I would have only been a couple of minutes that could have added it. But I don't have any specific gripe. I think it's a great adaptation that came together really well. I know that sounds like a cop out, but that's just genuinely how I feel. It does sound like a cop out, but I understand. What was your level of involvement? I was very involved. I was a producer on the film, so I was there for the whole shoot. and I was always like, you know, Ryan considers the screenplay to be sort of a vague suggestion. And so, you know, he'd ad lib and stuff like that. Ryan Gosling.

Yes, Ryan Gosling. Yeah. And so a lot of the takes that are in the movie are things that he just ad libbed and stuff like that because he came up with like better versions than what we wrote. Can you think of an example? Like, is there one that comes to mind? I mean, just generally like the phraseology and just like how he phrases this thing. Like one thing is when Rocky is rolling around in his lab and so again, he's like, Rocky, Rocky, Rocky, my hand is up. You know, that was all him.

And there's another line where he's going through potential voices for the voice synthesizer for Rocky. And he just ad-libbed, you know, Merrill Street, man, she could play anything. He just ad-lib that. That was a great line, actually. I do remember that. So, yeah, and then we went and asked the real Merrill Streep if she could read a line for us for the movie. and she agreed. So yeah, we got to do that. That was pretty cool. And like I said, Ryan would go off script a lot. So I'd go up and whisper the directors. I'm like, okay, he said, he said milligram. He should have said nanogram, that sort of thing. They'll get it right on the next take. Okay, Mike, what about you? You saw the movie, right? I did, yes.

What did you think? I absolutely loved it. It was just such a joy to watch. I mean, I also read the book. And I've got to say, I know the book came out. several years ago, but I only got around to reading it last May because we run the summer internship program at my institute, Carnegie Institution for Science. And the intern that we had admitted to the program last summer wrote in their application, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir inspired me to want to be an astrobiologist. And when we admitted this person into the program to work with me, I was like, I guess I got to read this book now to know what the kids are getting inspired by to go into my field. The main character of this story, Rylan Grace, is kind of an outsider scientist. He's been sort of shunned by the establishment. Mike, I'm curious, when you see a scientist

portrayed that way, you know, what do you make of it? How does it make you think or feel? I really identify with Rylind Grace. I'm an astrobiologist, and Rylin's big thing, the reason why he's shunned is because he wrote his dissertation about life that is not water-based at all. And I've actually written papers about how we should stretch our definitions of life such that we would be attuned to looking for life that doesn't follow the same characteristics as life on Earth, including life that may not be water-based or carbon-based or, you know, use ribosomes or mitochondria, et cetera, et cetera. And so I really identified with that aspect of Riland.

I also really identified with his love for teaching. That's something that I'm also very passionate about, too. So I saw myself in this character. And, you know, when I see somebody like that shunned by his community, I think about all the times that people have really raised eyebrows at me and the rest of the astrobiology community thinking, is that a real science? I mean, how can you even do astrobiology when you haven't yet found signs of life in space? To which I've developed a kind of funny answer, which is I tell them, oh, but we have found life in space. and people's, you know, eyes widen and their jaws drop and they wait with bated breath for me to, you know, divulge some state secret about where we're keeping the alien bodies. Right here on Earth.

Exactly. No. And he's with it. You know, I just remind them, your life in space. We're all life in space. You know, when we discovered that our planet was an inhabited world, that our entire biosphere was on the crust of this regular rocky world orbiting a very ordinary star in one of a trillion galaxies in the observance. universe, you know, we discovered life and space. And the great question that we get to ask now is, is there more of us out there? And I'll go ahead and own up to this, which I knew at the time that I was writing, is that I portrayed Grace's view as like, you know, life doesn't need water as being this radical idea that partially got him, like that got him ridiculed within the community. But it is actually a commonly held theory by many, many astrobiologists. I just wanted something that the reader could understand that would kind of like explain why he left academia. Andy, do you identify with Riland as the outsider?

Or not anymore? Are you too big now? I'm just, I'm too big. I mean, you guys are lucky I'm here, frankly. No. I mean, I always feel like an outsider. I think everybody always feels like maybe that's just me projecting on to everyone else. but I always feel like I'm an outsider wherever I am, and I reject that. Although I will take a step back and say, like, Riland is the first time I made a main character that wasn't just directly based on my own personality.

Really? Yeah, Mark Watney from The Martian is all of the aspects of myself that I like, magnified, and then all the aspects of myself that I don't like erased. So he's the idealized, perfected version of me. Jazz Bashara from Artemis, also known as Andy Weir's other book, is sort of an amalgamation of all of the flaws I had when I was her age. You know, theoretically very smart, yet still making bad life decisions.

And most of her problems are things that she brought about and stuff like that. Self-created. We can all relate to that. Yeah. And so that was based on me as well. People, turns out, they like the pretend idealized version of me more than the more realistic version of me. Everybody likes smart. People didn't like jazz that much. But then Rylund was the first time I decided, okay, I'm going to try to make a character that isn't based on my own personality. So I started off with a core central thing of like, okay, what makes him a little different than most people is he is so like pathologically conflict diverse, like almost a phobia of conflict, that he would rather leave his profession than defend his theories. And he retreats to the safety of a middle school teacher where the children aren't going to challenge him, you know. and he's the cool teacher and all this stuff like that.

And he's afraid. And I think feeling overwhelmed and afraid, well, that's something we all can really kind of get behind. I think we've all been there. Yeah. And don't downplay being a middle school teacher because that actually seems like one of the most frightening and difficult jobs I can think of. But the point is he went into an environment where he went out of his way to be like the cool teacher that the kids like. Right. Yes.

I mean, and he loves to educate kids, but it was really important for him to be beloved by the kids. Yes. And a lot of teachers will tell you, okay, it's nice if the kids like you, but it's more important that the kids learn. Yes, right. True enough. We have to take a break, but don't go away because we're going to get to my favorite part of the movie. The aliens. Stay with us. I'm so excited to talk about the aliens. I want to start with the microbial sun eating species that sort of kicks off. the drama here. Andy, what was your inspiration around that form of alien life? Astrophage. Yeah, this all started off with I wanted to come up with a story where humanity had access to a mass conversion-based fuel. Because if we had that right now, we'd be able to colonize the solar system.

Like now, it would be easy because we have the energy. The problem is storing the energy in a small enough volume and mass that we can use it for spacecraft. And so I was like, I want us to have that now. but it's way beyond our technology to make right now. So it's a bit too much suspension of disbelief to have some mad scientists invented. Then I went through a phase where I'm like maybe they find a crashed alien spaceship. But then it's like, okay, then the other stuff on the spaceship would probably be even more interesting than the fuel. And I don't want to focus on that. And then I thought like, well, maybe it's like maybe they find some fuel.

Maybe they find a crashed alien spaceship and everything's all completely rotted because it crashed here like a billion years ago. But the fuel is still good. and maybe the fuel makes more of itself. Maybe it's a reversible reaction. So you can shine light on the fuel and it'll absorb it and start turning that into mass and something like that. And then I said, absorbing energy and making more of yourself sounds like life, right? That's what plants do? So I thought, okay, what if it's a biological entity?

What if it's not like aliens who say take me to your reader? What if it's just an invasive species, basically? And so I said, oh, okay. So then we have single-celled organism that does. mass conversion for storing energy. And then I'm like, why? Why would it do it? Like, why would anything evolve that? And how would it get that much energy? And I said, like, well, it doesn't have to live on a planet just because we do. It lives on the surface of a star. People call it like, oh, it's eating the sun. They're not eating the sun. They're living on the sun. It's like algae

isn't eating the ocean. It just lives there. Right. And so it's absorbing energy from the sun. And I'm like, why? And I'm like, oh, so it can spore out to get the, so it can go out. to get the things it needs to reproduce because you can't even find carbon and oxygen until you go like to the middle of a star. And so it would need to go somewhere else to breed and all that stuff like that. So the end result was I came up with astrophage. And then I thought, Andy, can I just pop in here? I love that this very gripping drama was reverse engineered from like the nerdiest possible starting point. Yep. I almost. It's delightful. Thank you. I almost always start with like, I want this science thing. How do I make the science

thing happen in a story. Anyway, so I came with astrophage, and then I thought, like, oh, okay, initially I thought, oh, okay, humanity gets a hold of some astrophage. And they're like, oh, we can breed it up and we can colonize the solar system and stuff like that. In the back of my mind, I was like, well, we better make sure we don't let any of this crap get on our star, because that would be catastrophic. And then like a few seconds later, I'm like, okay, wait, erase everything else. That's the story. So there we have it. That's amazing. Mike, as our planetary, our resident planetary scientist and astrobiologist, What was your take on the astrophage?

I love how the astrophage sort of subverts a lot of expectations we have about encountering alien life. I mean, just contrast the astrophage with like the alien from the aliens series, right? Aliens are these big, monstrous macroscopic monsters that are, you know, coming and eating us, whereas the astrophage is just a microscopic organism that isn't even infecting us, right? They're just doing their business, mining their own. own business, absorbing sunlight and converting that into energy. And yet, they still present this extraordinarily scary doomsday scenario, not one that, you know, it's like immediate we're going

to all die because aliens are coming to like eat us or infect us. But simply by dimming the sun, they're essentially, to me, an allegory for climate change. You know, we can see our future decades in advance that if we allow this thing to keep going, our entire way, we're going. We're entire way of life is going to disappear. Okay, we have to talk about Rocky. So astrophage are not the only aliens in Project Hail Mary. You know, in my opinion, the star of the show, I'm sorry, Ryan is Rocky, who becomes Ryland's buddy.

Rocky is extremely charismatic, I think. And once they solve the sort of language barrier problem with a kind of computer auto translator, they're off to the races. So, Andy, I loved Rocky's look. He's not humanoid at all. He's like a rock tarantula about the size of a golden retriever. Is this how you picture aliens in your mind? Well, so the truth is I don't have a very visual imagination.

So when I'm writing, the characters are just sort of blobs. Like, I put a lot of time and effort into working out eridion morphology and biology. I went down that radical. Rocky's an eridion. Rocky is an eridion. Rocky is an iridion. Yeah. And I spent a lot of time going down that rabbit hole because speculative evolution is fun. I suspect Mike would agree. But I couldn't have told you like a visual image of Rocky. I knew that, okay, he's got a thorax and he's got like five legs and there's joints and three fingers at the end of each hand. But I couldn't have told you like whether his legs were skinny or wide or if they were bumpy or smooth. I just don't have a very visual imagination. So when I was seeing it, my mind, it was all just blob. So what's kind of neat is, when I saw when they were shooting it, I went to the creature shop and saw the model

and then saw the sets and everything like that. For me, I didn't have the cognitive dissonance that a lot of writers have when they're reconciling the screen version with what happened in their mind when they were writing it. For me, it's just like, oh, so that's what that looks like. Now I know. It becomes canon, you know.

I mean, so I also, you know, because we're an audio medium and I think about sound a lot, like I also was very interested in the sounds Rocky was making. Mm-hmm. That's not bad. Is there sort of internal logic to that? Like, did you come up with a language? Like, if I don't do what Rylan does, would it be consistent throughout?

I don't think so. I mean... I'm so disappointed. I had made suggestions to the production. I don't know if they followed it, but the reason Rocky sounds the way he sounds is because an Eridion's body is basically like a self-contained biosphere. They eat food to power it and excrete whatever they don't need. But they're not exchanging air with the outside.

atmosphere. They internally have an oxygen carbon dioxide exchange system going on within their own biology. So because of this, they're not breathing in and exhaling. So if they need to make noise, they need to do it inside their body. So they have basically like airbladderes that push across vocal cords back and forth to make sounds. And they have five of them because everything is like pentosymmetrical in iridian biology because I arbitrarily decided it would be. And so they can make chords. And I was like, what would that even sound like? Well, it would sound like whale song, because that's what whales are doing. They're pushing air from their lungs through their vocal cords into their mouths, then holding it there, and then re-inhaling it so that they can push it through

again. So it's like, you know. I love that. Mike, as an astrobiologist, what did you think of the depiction of Rocky? Well, first, I'm so glad that Andy admitted first that he's not a visual person and just pictured a blob when he thought of Rocky, because that's what I thought of, too, when I was reading the book, you know, just this blob thing. So I loved seeing Rocky come to life on the screen. And, you know, who knows what kinds of very interesting different life forms can exist on other worlds, especially when those worlds like Rockies has a very different geology and therefore environment that evolution we need to play with and navigate through to generate these, you know, highly evolved forms. And so, you know, I love whenever science fiction

gives us alien morphologies that look very different from us, because one thing that we think might be true about biological evolution is that it's very path-dependent, you know, small decisions early on that, you know, we decided to use this particular molecule like DNA. Well, maybe not all life out there does use DNA as its genetic molecule. And then things like, you know, the body plans, what kind of symmetry you have. Those could be locked in early on due to a chance mutation. and then from then on out, you've got five-fold symmetry instead of bilateral symmetry or something like that. And so that's great to play around with because I think the possibility space for the diversity of life in the universe is so much wider than the possibility space that was actually sampled through evolution here on this one terrestrial planet that we call Earth. And even then, like on Earth, the population of life is so incredibly diverse.

So that's one of the reasons I really wanted the alien in this story to be true. really alien. I wanted to be completely incompatible with all things human. Like, if you put an iridion in a human atmosphere, he'll die. If you put a human in an iridion's atmosphere, he'll die. Like, they're just completely incompatible. And because it always a little bit bothered me and kind of like, Satra sci-fi when the alien is just like a human with some forehead bumps, you know, I get it because that makes production easier. And it makes storytelling easier because you can directly interact, stuff like that. But, I mean, even on Earth, in our own biosphere, if you exchange the positions of a shark and a camel, they're both going to die, right?

So something that evolved on another planet is almost certainly not going to be compatible with us. Yeah, I mean, I thought that was a real feat of storytelling that you could learn to love by the end a, you know, tarantula rock. You know, that you feel emotionally attached to it. Yeah, well, easier done in a novel than in a movie. So for me, you know, anyone reading the novel just understands that rock, is an entity that has feelings and stuff like that. And so you can be attached to them. It's a lot harder in a visual medium.

And the directors, like, understood the assignment. They're like, okay, we've got a creature made out of basically rocks that does not have a face, doesn't have eyes, can't make facial expressions at all. And we need the audience to love him. Gestures were very important. Yeah, it was all just about body language. The puppeteers, James Ortiz was a hand. head puppeteer and the voice. And they really did a fantastic job.

Mike, I know you read the book and saw the movie. I want to hear your astrobiologist, planetary scientist, gripes. There have to be some. I read the book. It was a joy. And I loved the movie and really, you know, it followed so much of the book. But there are a couple of things. One omission that I was a little disappointed to Nazi is the element of relativity. how rocky species can't, you know, see light so they don't have an understanding of light, and therefore they don't know about Einstein's theories of relativity. And that played an important part in the book in terms of the amount of fuel that was used, but also this idea of time dilation and space dilation.

But it wasn't really explored that much in the movie. And I was wondering, is that just because we don't want to belabor the audience with that explanation? Or what was the reason for not landing on relativity too much? I think one of the main reasons is because it wasn't critical to advancing the plot, and you have to be laser-focused on that when you're writing a screenplay because you don't have a lot of space and room, where we're not going to stop the forward momentum of the plot to give an explanation of special relativity or general relativity, as a case maybe.

Now, we do mention, I think, that Riland only experienced four years during his, like, 13-year journey. So it's there and they know it's there. Also, just minor correction to your quibble. Eridians absolutely know about light because they have scientists who have discovered it. They don't have an organ to perceive light, but they know about it. I often get, just sorry, like a random aside here, I often get emails like, how did the iridians know about a petrovaline?

They can't see light. I'm like, we can't see infrared light either, but we knew about our petrovaline. How do you explain that? It's like science, technology, they worked this stuff out and found ways to, you know, learn about their environment and put it into a form that they can proceed. It's not hard to follow. Andy, is this the occupational hazard of writing mainstream sci-fi where like tons of smart people are like, well, actually. Yeah, it is. And not only that, but I'll go the next step.

I bring it on myself by saying, by writing hard sci-fi. So I tell people, hey, I wrote this to be as scientifically accurate as possible. And then the scientists are like, really? All right. Okay. Let's go. Let me just pick up this gauntlet here and dust it off and let me see what. You have had, you know, several giganto hits.

What's next? I guess my next giganto hit. I don't know. No, I'm working on my next book now. I'm not talking details publicly, but I can. can tell you it's science fiction, of course, and it's not a sequel to anything. It's a safe space. It's just us.

Yeah, it's just us. Yeah. So everybody wants a sequel to Project Hail Mary. I get it. But like I just don't have enough good ideas to make a compelling story yet. I would rather not make a sequel than make a crappy one. So right now I'm working on another idea that I've had bouncing around in my head for quite a while. And I've been wanting to work on that.

So that's my next book. Looking forward to it. Andy, we are author of Project Hail Mary and Planetary Scientist Mike Wong. Thank you both for being here today. Thank you for having me. This was fun. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you have strong feelings about aliens and how they're portrayed in the movies,

or anything else really in the science universe, please give us a call 8774 SciFRI. We love hearing from you. We'll catch you next time. I'm Flor Lichten.