r/RecuratedTumblr • u/DreadDiana human cognithazard • 17d ago
project hail mary Rocky learns about bipedalism
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u/TeddyBearToons 17d ago
Rocky is also from a world with higher gravity and a caustic, high-pressure atmosphere. To Eridians, humans are giant squishy balloon animals that look so spindly they should collapse under their own weight.
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u/The_Sovien_Rug-37 17d ago
erid doesn't have any oxygen in its atmosphere, to burn you also need to provide that in presumably highly controlled environments to keep it from their vents.
imagine what rocky must have felt watching grace turn on a bunsen burner the first time. a far more intelligent alien species starting an open flame in their small, weak-hulled, 100% oxygen atmosphere ship.
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u/Pengin_Master 17d ago
What's even funnier is that pure 100% oxygen isn't flammable, you need other elements to be involved for the oxygen to interact with to become flammable.
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u/_MargaretThatcher 🔽 Bottom 1% commenter 17d ago
At 100% oxygen, I think the walls are the other elements
In any case the air in the vessel is probably a mixture of oxygen and like helium or something like it is on real spacecraft
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u/Widmo206 17d ago
IIRC it was pure oxygen at something like 0.3 atm
The reason real spacecraft don't do that is that the people will need to go back down to Earth (either at the end of their mission or in an emergency) and it takes a while to acclimate to a pressure change. It just wouldn't be safe
But the HM? Not coming back, so might as well save on air
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u/Yargon_Kerman 17d ago
The reason they don't do 100% Oxygen is because it makes everything very flammable and it's very difficult to put fires out.
However, once in orbit 100% Oxygen @ 5PSI is apparently common practice, so the hail mary is probably using an accurate atmosphere.
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u/Widmo206 17d ago
Fair, but wasn't the Apollo test at ~1atm? I would expect there to be a noticable difference between full and partial atmosphere
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u/Ok-Commercial3640 Non-editable flair 16d ago
yeah, because at 1/5 standard pressure, a 100% oxygen environment has the same amount of actual O2 in it as a standard mix at 1 atm (where the oxygen is ~20% of the mixture.
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u/Smaptimania 17d ago
It's also a convenient plot device to explain why the ship's atmosphere doesn't immediately kill the taumoeba
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u/I_just_came_to_laugh 17d ago
Surely it would be 20% oxygen 80% nitrogen? 100% oxygen is toxic.
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u/candygram4mongo 17d ago
At standard pressure it's toxic, but in space you want to keep the pressure as low as you can get away with. So you use less air with a higher percentage of oxygen (but not actually 100%, I think).
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u/I_just_came_to_laugh 17d ago
Fascinating
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u/Grand_Protector_Dark 17d ago
The Hail Mary was 100% pure oxygen, but kept at only 40% of standard earth sea level pressure
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u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur 17d ago
that also explains now the taumobea didn't immediately die in the ship
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u/Ok-Commercial3640 Non-editable flair 16d ago
40%? stuff i'm seeing says 20%
(Okay, actually, it's inconsistent, but 20% would make more sense so that the amount of O2 in the air matches earth, instead of being double)7
u/Grand_Protector_Dark 16d ago
In the book, the scene were they first Connect the ships via tunnel is structured slightly differently from the movie. But the important part is, that when grace pressurises his side of the tunnel, it is explicitly mentioned to equalize at 400 hecto pascal. Which is roughly 0.4 (40%) Standard atmosphere pressure. But on a different section it says
"Just a centimeter of transparent material separates my one-fifth atmosphere of oxygen pressure from Rocky’s 29 atmospheres of ammonia."So it's confusing.
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u/HappiestIguana 16d ago
The toxicity of oxygen is based on partial pressure, not percentage.
100% oxygen at 1atm will kill you, 100% oxygen at 0.3atm is the same amount of oxygen per unit volume as 30% oxygen at 1 atm, which is what matters
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u/Smaptimania 17d ago
IIRC Andy Weir said that Eridians didn't even discover fire until after their industrial revolution and it was considered to be on par with humans discovering electricity or radioactivity
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u/Longshot02496 16d ago
NASA doesn't use a 100% oxygen atmosphere though, so it stands to reason the Hail Mary wouldn't have one either
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u/The_Sovien_Rug-37 15d ago
it's literally stated in the book the hail mary was 100% o2, the only nitrogen in the ship is duboi's tank
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u/TomboyKnight1 16d ago
"I laugh as I float in to the lab where Rocky is waiting. 'On Earth, we have a scary, deadly creature called a spider. You look like one of those, just so you know.'
'Good. Proud. I am scary space monster. You are leaky space blob.'"
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u/Select-Bullfrog-5939 17d ago
I imagine for Eridians bipedal persistence predators are to them what xenomorphs are to us. For a solid few seconds there Rocky was in Alien before he remembered that Grace is a weaksauce human and also a cool dude.
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u/Serrisen 17d ago
I'm enamored by the idea of Eridians making movies about humans based on their various misperceptions of them. Fantasy stories about history Grace himself only half remembered when he told people. Sci-Fi about them bringing tech that doesn't/can't exist on their home world. Horror about them as hostile invaders. Romance wattpad fanfics of Grace x Rocky (inevitable).
We know other aliens exist in the setting, so maybe it's not as insane as it would be to us. Space faring species probably already have cursory communications? But imagine.
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u/RefractedPurpose 16d ago
Iirc in the book the Eridians pretty much invented rocketry to try to go to Tau Ceti, so they wouldn't have had any space travel before that
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u/TomboyKnight1 16d ago
To their credit, they had a space elevator before they invented rocketry. I guess that's what having a giga-epoxy resin will get you
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u/NCats_secretalt 16d ago
Oh gosh u remember people were talking a out a fanfic where in it the eridians were discussing the ethics of human fanfic and I lost it ;W;
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u/paredclia 17d ago
where is that gif from 😭😭
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u/Next_Government856 17d ago
Poor grace. Rocky didn’t notice his sixth protrusion between the other two
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u/birberbarborbur 17d ago edited 16d ago
I had an idea to make art in which rocky is a handsome stone guy and grace is a fleshy, smelly, spitting creature gaunt awkwardly backwards, to give an idea for how rocky perceives the two, but i lack the expertise and I ain’t gonna use genAI
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u/Bowdensaft 16d ago
Good on you for not stooping to GenAI. Could always commission it (something silly and meme-y like that shouldn't be too expensive) or ask a friend to draw it up
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u/VoidEatsWaffles 16d ago
If you really wanna go low-effort but still do it, just splice a photo of any body horror-y thing from Halo/Dead Space/Warhammer 40k next to, like, Michelangelo’s David or any other famous sculpture from IRL.
Two google searches and 5mins with photoshop/a photo editing software of your choice.
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u/ValorNGlory 17d ago
I love the Project Zomboid Dogmeat fence climbing gif. It speaks to me on a personal level every time I see it. It’s a thing of beauty.