This piece contains major spoilers for both the book and film versions of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. I also include a brief plot summary in a textbox below.

There is a pessimistic worldview in which we live on a planet with limited resources and are—and always will be—engaged in a struggle for control over those resources. The most important divides here are sociopolitical—between haves and have-nots, oppressors and oppressed, workers and bosses, indigenous people and settler colonialists, whitefellas and blackfellas, Israelis and Palestinians, your tribe and my tribe—all the familiar binaries that have most recently been framed in the fashionable language of critical theory but that ultimately go all the way back to humanity’s origins. The most important questions facing us, in this light, are about how to husband and divide up our world’s scant allocations of space and energy, questions that will be decided largely through power struggles.

At its most extreme, in this worldview human beings are parasites on our planet, exploiters and destroyers of nature. The recently deceased Paul Ehrlich was one of the most outspoken proponents of this idea. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicts the death by starvation of hundreds of millions of people over the coming decades. Despite the fact that none of his predictions were fulfilled and he was proven definitively wrong about almost everything, he held a prestigious chair at Stanford University, continued to publish in peer-reviewed journals, was awarded a number of important prizes, and even received some glowing obituaries. There is an appetite, clearly, for doom-mongering of this kind.

But recent events have also demonstrated people’s deep longing for the opposite: for an optimistic vision in which problems are challenges to be solved by human ingenuity and in which, through cooperation, we can escape the zero-sum battle over resources and instead increase the riches and opportunities open to us. This vision is deeply uplifting because it celebrates humanity and especially human creativity and resilience. Every time people are given a glimpse of that vision, all but the most depressed and cynical are captivated by it—even if only temporarily. This is because it appeals to a profound and I believe hardwired psychological need, which evolved in us as a replacement for the blind instinct that drives other animals. Other animals have evolved to be adapted to their environments. We alone have evolved to adapt our environment to us.

We caught a glimpse of this longing in the delight with which people all around the world watched as four astronauts flew by the Moon in the Artemis II mission and sent stunning images of its far side back to Earth, which were greeted with a euphoria that NASA dubbed “moon joy.” We also caught a glimpse of this longing in the critical acclaim and box office success of the film of Andy Weir’s book Project Hail Mary. Weir himself has repeatedly stated that he writes to entertain, not to persuade readers of any particular worldview:

I’m not trying to change society and I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion of anything. … I’m just writing stories to entertain. I’m not trying to set your opinion or change your mind on anything. … I’m not here to solve a pessimism epidemic. All I can do is just be me. I’m not pessimistic. I think humans are really awesome. I think technology is really awesome because technology is then put into the hands of humans who are awesome.

But, of course, this rejection of an overt political stance is part of the charm of Weir’s vision. It’s a worldview that is not ideological—i.e., it is not primarily about trying to mould society in accordance with a set of political preferences. It’s about a joyful curiosity about the world as it is. Weir is a nerd: someone more interested in how things are than in his ideological fantasies of how he would like them to be. This is why his protagonists—like the astronauts on the Artemis Moon-run—are not primarily strongmen, intrepid explorers, visionaries, or warriors of any kind; they are engineers. The most thorough philosophical statement of the vision implicit in Weir’s fiction can be found in David Deutsch’s radical optimism.

In his 2011 book, The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch presents a thought experiment: could you create an entire civilisation using only the matter found in a solar-system-sized area of deep space?

While the Earth is inundated with matter, energy and evidence, out there in intergalactic space all three are at their lowest possible supply. There is no rich supply of minerals, no vast nuclear reactor overhead delivering free energy, no lights in the sky or diverse local events to provide evidence of the laws of nature. It is empty, cold and dark.

Or is it? Actually, that is yet another parochial misconception. Intergalactic space is indeed very empty by human standards. But each of those solar-system-sized cubes still contains over a billion tonnes of matter—mostly in the form of ionized hydrogen. A billion tonnes is more than enough mass to build, say, a space station and a colony of scientists creating an open-ended stream of knowledge—if anyone were present who knew how to do that.

With sufficient knowledge, humans or other higher sentients could make even an area of the universe that seems completely barren, sterile, and inhospitable into their home and flourish there. We know that we are capable of moulding our environment to suit our needs, Deutsch argues, because we have already done so, here on Earth. Our lives would be short and brutal without the human inventions that make this a welcoming place for us: “clothes, houses, farms, hospitals, an electrical grid, a sewage system … a safe water supply, and medical equipment, and comfortable living quarters.”

If Earth is a spaceship, Deutsch writes: “we have never been merely its passengers, nor … its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its designers and builders. … The ‘passengers’ metaphor … implies that there was a time when humans … were provided for … without themselves having to solve a stream of problems in order to survive and to thrive.” He considers such a view narrowly “anthropocentric.” Weir’s vision is more expansive and, on their actual starships, Rocky and Grace are designers and builders solving one problem after another in order to survive.

Mysteries within Mysteries

A man is alone in deep space. His ship is pursued by a vessel that dwarfs it. The mysterious inhabitant of that vessel sends a tentacle out across the void, creating a tunnel to his spacecraft. In that pitch-black tunnel, he encounters a giant, faceless arachnid. It is easy to see how, with this premise, Weir could have written a classic sci-fi thriller featuring a terrifying alien life form. His characters themselves joke about this: “Good,” Rocky tells Grace in the book, on learning about human arachnophobia. “I am scary space monster.”

As Jason Parkin notes in his own remarks on the film,