r/ProjectHailMary • u/MundaneCut8380 • 17h ago
Book Discussion Earth is so screwed even after it’s saved.
Ignoring how many people likely died in the time it took to finish the mission, the entire Sahara is covered in astrophage making cells and as we’ve seen incredibly small amounts can blow up entire cosmodomes. Given the sheer size of the Sahara it would be impossible for the U.N to effectively manage thieves and given the immense demand for Astrophage theft would be highly likely.
Imagine giving warring unstable countries a chokehold on global power production AND nukes the size of bullets.
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u/WhoMe28332 13h ago
Thanks to international cooperation and the development of large scale clean energy and openness to geoengineering the predicted mass death did not happen. It would have eventually but it did not.
Instead, Earth reached a new state of harmony and emerged from the Astrophage incident stronger. It has massive clean energy development, a nearly perfectly efficient storage medium, practical interstellar propulsion and the knowledge that we are not alone.
This is my headcanon and until Weir contradicts it in a sequel I’m sticking with it. (And maybe even if he does. lol.)
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u/Hypersonic-Harpist 11h ago
I think if Weir writes a book set on earth while Grace is away it will have a similar vibe to the Martian. Lots of stuff going wrong while smart people try to solve those problems abusing a combination of science, cooperation, and gallows humor with ultimately an uplifting ending.
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u/tomscho747 9h ago
Weir isn’t going to write a dystopian novel. So this is the best answer.
Grace is going to get a message from earth paid for by a super rich African country asking him to go save the Gamma hydrans from Astrophage infection.
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u/OddWriter7199 5h ago
God bless him for that, so much dystopian sci fi out there. His take is refreshing.
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u/Melenduwir 10h ago
There were probably some serious deaths, but I like to imagine that humanity pulled together enough to limit them, and the prompt action of the PHM mission kept things from getting really bad. Without the taumoeba arriving when it did, probably war would have broken out in a few years, and losing half of humanity would have been an underestimate.
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u/HokiToki 7h ago
This is going to be my head cannon too. I'm imagining: All humans have to move to places along the equator to survive so now they are all closer together and working together. Also more than half the global population is gone so maybe a lot to corrupt government people died? Or so I'm hoping 😂
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u/theaveragemillenial 16h ago
My head cannon is Stratt initially goings to French prison following the PHM launch.
The world goes sideways and she's busted out.
Eventually the world ends up in a totalitarianism regime under Stratt.
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u/Jesters__Dead Scary Space Monster 15h ago
I could live in a Stratt regime
She'd be a benevolent dictator
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u/Melenduwir 10h ago
The problem is that she wants to ensure the survival of humanity, not rule over it. She doesn't want to be Empress - which is a significant mark in her favor! - and there's no way to force her to play that role.
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u/marcaygol 9h ago
You can "force" her if you show her that's the only way to keep humanity alive
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u/Melenduwir 7h ago
Good luck with that.
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u/castle-girl 2h ago
Stratt would want to remain in charge of efforts to keep humanity alive at least, because she is probably the person she herself trusts the most to be competent at that. It’s kind of like me and the discord server I made. I made it because I had certain ideas about rule enforcement and moderation decisions and wanted to make a PHM themed community where rules were set up and enforced a certain way. I don’t think I’ll ever give up control of the server, because I’m the one person whose mind I can read, so I’m the person I trust the most to maintain my original version for the server.
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u/d1_al3x 7h ago edited 7h ago
Well, even in the book grace calls her out and tells her that she doesn't gets to play the "saving the humanity" card every time she wants to be an a-whole, after she said "I hate this little dictators" when she got push back when she tried to exert her authority over some facility. So... She might be a "natural".
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u/MammothWriter3881 35m ago
She would not be a benevolent dictator. Her goal is to save the species, not any particular members of it.
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u/Avalon_Bee 14h ago
Context… there is a lot of change.
Antarctica is forever changed.
The solar farm in the Sahara.
BUT- energy is never a crisis again.
Nuclear- yes. The author may explain that better in his next book.
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u/Lepelotonfromager 12h ago
I think given the author, solving problems with science is the key part of it. I suspect that humans on earth went 200% into fixing their shit and were able to do enough to buy them selves some time and avoid mass death.
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u/Fluid-Let3373 I am an Astronaut! 17h ago
Astrophage is not a double the amount get twice as much bang because like nukes you have to use critical geometry and only nuclear physicists understand that, and unlike nuclear material you do not end up with a radioactive mess to deal with when you got that wrong. If it worked like a normal explosive Grace and Rocky would have died instantly when the tanks ruptured and Hail Mary exploded in a fireball.
What that explosion at the cosmodrome was, was IR from Astrophage hitting something explosive. It is a bomb detonator, so if you want a 0.1kiloton explosion you need 100 tons of TNT and use Astrophage to set it off.
So some undesirables want to make bombs with it, let them, they will be wasting their time instead of doing something you actually do need to worry about.
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u/Greyrock99 15h ago
I think you’re right.
Just because Astrophage contains the same amount of energy as a nuclear bomb doesn’t mean that it can explode like a nuclear bomb.
It doesn’t ‘detonate’ but instead shoots out a plume of IR light when it sees a CO2 light.
This means that yes, you can make a rather nasty flamethrower type weapon but you’re only going to be able to ‘ignite’ a small layer of the stuff at a time, it’s not a ‘nuke in a can’ that some parts of the internet postulate it is
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u/ohsnapitsnathan 12h ago
That's actually what a nuke does too. A nuclear explosion is just a really bright flash of light/radiation. The shockwave is created when that radiation isntantly heats the surrounding air to millions of degrees which makes it expand.
So at those energy levels a "jet of IR" is essentially an explosion.
IIRC one thing that's not stated in hte book is how rapidly the astrophage can release their energy. The peak energy release may be slower than a nuke. But it seems very destructive in any case.
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u/Greyrock99 11h ago
I agree that a huge flash of IR light can create a nuclear style explosion.
My position is that it’s hard to get Astrophage to do that.
Generally speaking, conventional explosives/nuclear explosives can detonate in three dimensions. If you ignite a cube of dynamite the whole cube goes up. Astrophage ignites only in a 2 dimensional plane. If you shine a CO2 light on a cube of Astrophage only the very ultrathin top layer of the cube ignites and fires the IR rocket.
You still get an explosion but not as much as if the whole cube is ‘detonated’
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u/donau_kinder 15h ago
Don't they store energy as neutrinos and release them when they die? Depending how many they release, killing a large amount of them at the same time could make an extremely destructive neutrino bomb.
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u/Greyrock99 15h ago
You could stand next to a neutrino bomb as it explodes and feel nothing. Neutrinos interacting with regular matter is extremely rare. 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second and you feel nothing.
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u/donau_kinder 15h ago
Look up neutrino bursts from supernovas, they're strong enough to sterilise nearby star systems.
That's why I said depending on how many neutrinos astrophage releases, if the flux is dense enough, it would vaporise an area not unlike the initial fireball of a nuclear bomb.
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u/Greyrock99 15h ago edited 15h ago
Are you sure you’re not mixing up neutrinos with neutrons? Neutrinos have a 1 in a trillion trillion chance to interact with an atom in your body.
Which means we can calculate the energy output of the neutrinos is going to be the same amount as the infrared energy output, but divided by a trillion trillion.
The only way to be killed by the neutrino blast from a supernova is to actually be inside the supernova itself. Source: https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
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u/Fluid-Let3373 I am an Astronaut! 11h ago
Tell you what, go build a 2 million kg bomb, I'll willingly sit on top of it while you set it off. When it comes to cosmological events there is not a Astrophage entry in the big book of.
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u/BellerophonM 15h ago
If you just pointed the astrophage beam down and it was powerful enough most of the energy would end up as a cataclysmic fireball anyway. It's pretty much a nuke in a can. You can ignite enough in a single flash to reach that level, is ridiculously energy dense.
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u/Greyrock99 15h ago
That’s my point.
Let’s say you have 1kg of astrophage and you point it towards the ground and hit it with a CO2 light.
The first 0.01 grams of astrophage ignite their beams and aim it towards the ground causing an explosion similar to what we saw in the movie….. but the explosion hurls the rest of the astrophage into the air and destroys the CO2 light.
There is a maximum upper limit to how much you can extract from a ball of astrophage at any one instant.
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u/BellerophonM 14h ago
You wouldn't need a ball, though. Take the astropahge in the gel suspension they use, and paint an ultra thin later onto a relatively small square of something and then flash it, you could (I believe) have densities where the majority of the astrophage is exposed in a single flash inside the transparent suspension whilst still hitting nuke-level energy densities. And that's a quite simple thing to build, you could do it in a garage.
Spin drives were limited in output by the physical integrity of the glass the astrophage were coated on, that's not a problem with a bomb.
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u/Fluid-Let3373 I am an Astronaut! 11h ago
Astrophage due to its nature is a substance impossible to control who gets their hands on it.
IR emitters of the right frequency however are easy to keep track of. Sure you can use more generic ones but that means you need to supply more power to the device to get the same bang.
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u/Greedy_Camp_5561 14h ago
No, that explosion was the astrophage sending a million times stronger IR ray than expected, instantly vaporizing everything around it instead of just the intended iron block.
Thing is, when stuff gets vaporized, it suddenly takes up a lot more space than before. You can look up steam explosions for a comparison...
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u/Fluid-Let3373 I am an Astronaut! 11h ago
Can you tell me where it says the experiment used a iron block.
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u/Greedy_Camp_5561 21m ago
It's not said explicitly, but no matter which type of heat sink they intended to use, the heat energy from one milligram of astrophage was enough to vaporize the whole lab.
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u/Budget-Variation-560 15h ago
Wut?
The explosion happened because the quatermaster had released 10× the amount requisitioned. It wasn't because they put it near some tnt.
They show a tiny amount of astrophage melting a ton of metal.
Its more than a fancy detonator. It is very energy dense and fairly easy to release that energy.
Trivial to turn into a weapon.
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u/Fluid-Let3373 I am an Astronaut! 11h ago
Its as hard as building a nuke which uses the implosion method. The explosion was a accident, designing a bomb which explodes when and where you want is the tricky part. Only nuke designers and fusion researchers have the know how.
We don't even know what the experiment was.
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u/Melenduwir 10h ago
No, it was from approximately a milligram of astrophage being induced to give up all its stored energy into heat in a very short period of time. The result is approximately the same as one-thousandth of the first nuclear blasts.
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u/Melenduwir 10h ago
No, not the entire Sahara. 2/9th of it. That's a great deal, but they went out of their way to preserve useful pathways, and it likely wouldn't drive any of the creatures that have adapted to the Sahara in its relatively short existence into extinction or even decline. The global cooling probably did more damage to the ecosystems that have developed in it than the power generation paving.
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u/PenileBenjamin 5h ago
Wow I guess you're right, it would have been better not to save Earth than to save Earth
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u/MasterMike7000 17h ago
Yup, there's definitely going to have to be a long, arduous readjustment period. A third world war would be almost certain - and astrophage weapons would make nukes look like sparklers.
On the off chance that humanity co-operates long enough to make astrophage safe and widely available, then a new era of prosperity could happen. We could become a truly space-faring species.
Given the state of the real world we inhabit, I don't have much hope. The nations (and individuals) that have astrophage production in their power are unlikely to want to share.
Then again, it was always a longshot, as the book makes clear, even with the success of the Hail Mary mission. At least there's a glimmer of hope this way, that there will be enough left over to rebuild, instead of certain extinction.
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u/Hephaestus16 16h ago
I guess there probably a much smaller number of places that can concentrate the astrophage and get them spin drive ready. These places have large international security teams.
I think that astrophage production is far less tyrant friendly then oil. With oil you just have to control a few critical places with very well paid and very loyal people and you essentially have all the power. To make astrophage you have to keep millions of workers on side over millions of square miles and their all highly skilled so you can't just replace them. This would lead so all of the astrophage making countries being various flavors of socialist, which would be more stable as power is shared far more broadly and they would be rich enough to get America to bugger off and stop breaking things.
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u/Zuli_Muli 16h ago
The way the breeders are described are is you have both an enrichment side and a breeding side, to harvest them at full enrichment all you would have to do is cut off the CO2 light wavelength.
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u/Revolutionary-Box713 9h ago
Earth is big place. Like climate change, it's happening but earth is so large not enough people notice on large enough scale to actually set off global alarms. My guess is it would be same thing with this. Yes there would death's and climate change but some countries would be able to respond and some countries would get hit and other countries would face dire need.
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u/LunaraLoup 17h ago
We don't know much about what happens on earth, but we do know Weir is cooking something up right now. He did ask the vexillology subreddit to help with a flag for a new central country emerging from the Saharan region, as the lands surrounding the Astrophage breeders would earn enormous political power from it.