Tau Ceti

Again, it was directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and it centers around former teacher and biologist Ryland Grace.

When he wakes up from an induced coma, alone, in space, and suffering from amnesia, he doesn't know where he is, he doesn't know how he got there, and he learns that he is the sole surviving member of a crew that was on a mission to the Tau Ceti solar system, because Earth's sun is dying.

Through flashbacks, we begin to learn, um, which is Dr.

Grace regaining his memory, are these flashbacks.

Um, and that they're breeding on Venus.

So he joins the Hail Mary mission, so Project Hail Mary.

He joins Project Hail Mary to try to find why Tau Ceti is the only, uh, sun that isn't being... eaten by the astrophage.

So the mission would travel with enough fuel for a one-way trip, leaving the astronauts on the mission to die in space after they find the answer to save Earth.

The thing I loved about the magic system in this game...

in this property isn't being represented here or to put it another way Project Hail Mary is now my favorite movie I love it to pieces I love it so so much if I was presented with the Project Hail Mary board game What I think a lot of people would do is they would say, okay, the plot of the movie is you're going to Tau Ceti and you're trying to deal with the astrophage and all this sort of stuff.

And it would be very mechanically, this is what the plot does.

And so this is what the game should do.

[laughs] Yeah.

Well, we're gonna be trying to go to another star this time, which is Tau Ceti.

I've heard of that place.

Yeah.

It is a very exciting part.

So the main conceit behind Project Hail Mary is that Andy Weir has come up with the perfect fuel.

It is called astrophage, and it basically converts almost all of its mass into energy directly, and this is the fuel that's used for a spaceship that has to get to another star in order to save our sun, basically, and hence Earth, right? And so they need 2 million kilograms of this fuel to get to Tau Ceti, which is 12 light years away.

Because of the tyranny of the rocket equation, the more fuel that you have, the more fuel that you need because ma- fuel has mass.

One year before Drake wrote his equation, he had already conducted the first modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

In the spring of 1960, Drake pointed the 85-foot radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, toward two nearby sun-like stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.

He called the project Ozma, after the princess of the fictional land of Oz, a distant and unreachable place filled with exotic beings.

For roughly 200 hours over several months, Drake listened for narrowband radio signals, the kind that natural astrophysical sources do not produce, that would indicate deliberate transmission by an intelligent civilization.

In the spring of 1960, a young astronomer named Frank Drake pointed an 85-foot radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, at two nearby sun-like stars.

Their names were Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, and they were chosen because they were close, because they were similar to our own Sun, and because they seemed like reasonable places to begin.

Drake listened for narrow band radio signals at the hydrogen line frequency, 1420 MHz.

He chose the hydrogen frequency for a reason that was both practical and poetic.