Perhaps the least convincing aspect of Project Hail Mary is not alien lifeforms, interstellar travel, or extraterrestrial threat. It is the concept that world leaders and experts could actually cooperate in face of extinction. It’s bewildering how an interstellar friendship between species separated by sixteen light years seems more plausible than earth banding together.
In a story involving an alien microorganism, “Astrophage”,draining stars’ energy, the concept of nations surrendering political self-interest for survival feels more terrifying than alien threat itself. Somehow, Ryland’s friendship with a rock-looking, ammonia-breathing alien engineer with radically different biology and speech, named “Rocky” by Ryland, feels more achievable than the prospect of diplomacy.
For decades, the big screen has attempted to fill the growing sense of humanity’s uncertainty and search for purpose in stories set beyond Earth. With a dynamic shift from space fantasy to science fiction, the genre has become less concerned with “good vs evil” narratives, with a larger focus on the terrifying limits of human condition and capability. Novels and cinematic universes project our fears, hopes and ambitions onto distant solar systems and galaxies since resolve cannot occur in our own back garden.Â
Space is a beautifully terrifying void that resists human comprehension and our fascination with it has sprung from humanity’s collective interest in possibility and transcendence.Arguably, the cosmos offers an escape from political stagnation, environmental decline, and social fragmentation, allowing audiences to imagine alternate realities where civilisations transcend conflict. But this raises question of if humanity is incapable of advancing due to internal division; are we self-sabotaging our own progress?
Seemingly, every question relates back to “The FermiParadox” (1950), the question of “where is everybody?”. “The Great Filter” acts as a solution to this. This theory proposes that there are set out steps that intelligent life takes in order to progress from simple organisms to technologically advanced interstellar species, yet there exists a near-impossible barrier preventing civilisations from reaching type II (stellar) or type III (galactic) on the Kardashev Scale. The question lies in whether humanity sits behind or beyond this step. Is intelligent life exceptionally rare and humanity has advanced beyond the most difficult evolutionary barriers? Or, does the filter lie ahead with the inevitable collapse of our civilisation due to self-destruction?
Science fiction repeatedly returns to this concern where, perhaps, interstellar travel is not a question of physics, but our ability to cooperate to achieve such milestones. Project Hail Mary effortlessly captures this tension; beneath scientific prowess lies a bleak geopolitical reality. Cooperation only exists due to starvation being inevitable, as Stratt puts it, “We will lose a quarter of the world’s population in the next 30 years. And that assumes that the nations of the world work together to ration food. Which they won’t… The alternative[in regards to Grace going on the Hail Mary] is to just do nothing. And to starve. And to kill each other. And to watch everything on this planet go extinct. Including us”. What would be optimistic scientific discovery is rendered controlledand militarised due to governmental competition for survival.Thus, cooperation becomes forced upon humanity by extinction rather than a natural state of our civilisation. This is something that feels painfully contemporary.
Today’s real world space race reflects these same contradictions. Whilst collaboration may exist on the surface through space stations and missions such as Voyager 2, modern exploration is shaped by national competition with a new emerging “space race”. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and CNSA (China National Space Administration) are engaged within their own competing lunar infrastructure projects, focusing on landing on the moon as preparation for eventual colonisation of Mars. Concurrently, Russia’s Roscosmos (Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities) has renewed its focus onreviving its dominance over Venusian research through the proposed Venera-D mission with rudimentary landings on the planet. Even beyond Earth, exploration remains inherently tied to competition, prestige, and technological superiority.
These achievements are often framed as evidence of human progress, yet it is evident that division motivates these scientific discoveries and innovations. Simultaneous with these advancements exists environmental decay, war, and the unequal distribution of wealth. So how are we dreaming of terraforming and colonising other planets, whilst struggling to preserve our own home, the one capable of sustaining life? It is deeply ironic how audiences and pop culture romanticise fictional worlds, such as desire to live with the Omatikaya clan in Avatar, surrounded by a vibrant biome, immense biodiversity, and live harmoniously with nature. But we possess our own Pandora: Earth itself. Due to diplomatic fragmentation and environmental exploitation, it has become easier to imagine escaping to another world than repair what already exists. It’s this arrogance and lack of accountability that continues to accelerate ecological collapse.
The enduring appeal to this romanticisation has only been sustained through the enduring appeal of heroic protagonists, from the likes of Luke Skywalker and Ryland Grace, reassuring audiences that one morally exceptional individual can overcome systemic deterioration, unite divided societies, and advance their respective civilisations beyond previously perceived political and scientific limitations.
It’s deeply unsettling how this accountability and individual action doesn’t exist beyond the cinema screen: progress is collectively constrained by the competition for power. Star Wars, in particular Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, sits as an exemplary example of this, with the Galactic Republic falling apart due to political manipulation, separatist conflict and institutional paralysis through enacting extreme power to Chancellor Palpatine, which Padme notes, “this is how liberty dies in thunderous applause”. Meanwhile, Project Hail Mary, replaces this prophetic mystification with scientific pragmatism, where reluctant cooperation acts as humanity’s barrier against.. Despite the difference in genre, both thesestories arrive at the same conclusion, that humanity’s greatest threat is internal division. There is no extraterrestrial enemy greater than ourselves, we are the architects to our own extinction, whether that be politically or environmentally.
So what are we exactly taking to space if we cannot cooperate on earth? This makes me think back to Voyager Two, launched in 1972. Now a light-day away, there exists a mechanical ambassador acting as a symbol for a unified Earthfloating away from the solar system, yet this innovation exists not only within a once-in-a-lifetime planetary alignment, but also within a larger scientific competition within the Cold War. This probe exposes how Earth has constructed aretrospective illusion of human triumph within geopolitical rivalry. Colonisation, exploitation, territorial conflict, and resource competition do not disappear simply because they are projected into another solar system: evidently, the same instincts that shaped empires on Earth has shaped our motivation for humanity’s expansion into the cosmos. Terraforming Mars and interstellar travel does not mean we had evolved beyond the current systems that divide our planet.
As demonstrated through Project Hail Mary, we do possess the capability for immense astrophysical discovery and technological advancement. But, the real challenge or next step exists in our ability to learn to cooperate: Ryland Grace’s and Rocky’s relationship sits at the heart of this, both sacrificing themselves in turn for the other’s survival, with Rocky leaving his protective xenonite barrier to save Grace from mortal danger, and Grace sacrificing his possibility of returning home to help his alien friend and his species survive. If two species separated by biology, language, and interstellar distance can achieve mutual trust, why can’t we?