BIG JOE 🧃@l7mbss
Neil deGrasse Tyson called out the biggest plot hole in Project Hail Mary, and Andy Weir had to defend it live.
Andy Weir: You and I are enemies now.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: It was a stretch for me, as an academic, to completely embrace the idea that the entire world of biochemists is insufficient to handle this mission. And they need the one guy who has the expertise no one else has. And he’s a middle school chemistry teacher.
Andy Weir: Right, so to be fair, he was a speculative xenobiologist, he’s a PhD astrobiologist, and he had done that, and then he’d left that field. He’d written papers.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: But he wrote papers, so the papers are out there and other people are still active, and he’s no longer active. So why does he still become the guy?
Andy Weir: Because he’s been part of the mission and the mission planning the whole time, so he understands all the other aspects of the mission as well. He knows all about the Hail Mary itself.
Chuck Nice: And they don’t have time to train someone else up on all the other stuff.
Andy Weir: And he’s as well trained as any of the other biologists need him to be in the field they need.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Okay, all right. He got out of that one.
Andy Weir: I wriggled out of that one.
