Project Hail Mary — Alex Priest

Highlights

Cool thing about pendulums: The time it takes for one to swing forward and backward—the period—won’t change, no matter how wide it swings. If it’s got a lot of energy, it’ll swing farther and faster, but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time. That period ends up being driven by two things, and two things only: the length of the pendulum and gravity.

Human suffering is often an abstract concept to kids. But animal suffering is something else entirely.

Man, being an American scientist sucks sometimes. You think in random, unpredictable units based on what situation you’re in.

I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.

We do not have time to develop a complicated neural network. This is a strictly procedural algorithm. Very complex, but not AI at all. We have to be able to test it in thousands of ways and know exactly how it responds and why. We can’t do that with a neural network.

I leaned to Dimitri. “Are all Russians crazy?” “Yes,” he said with a smile. “It is the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.”

And I think He [God] was pretty awesome to make relativity a thing, don’t you? The fast you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe, you know?”

Gravity doesn’t just “go away” when you’re in orbit. In fact, the gravity you experience in orbit is pretty much the same as you’d experience on the ground. The weightlessness that astronauts experience while in orbit comes from constantly falling. But the curvature of the Earth makes the ground go away at the same rate you fall. So you just fall forever.

Nitrogen is utterly harmless and nearly inert in its gaseous state. It’s usually content to be N2, which barely wants to react with anything. Human bodies ignore the stuff despite every breath being 78 percent nitrogen.