Nick Chia

Thank you so much.

Glad to be here.

Well, my day-to-day job is understanding life through simulation, right?

So you think about all the things we know about life and all the things we don't know about life.

And if I have to figure out how life works in an environment we've never seen before, I don't have a basis for that.

I don't have a, you know,

I don't have a way to go out into space and sample, you know, life because we haven't found alien life yet.

So I have to simulate it.

I have to figure out what the possibilities are, imagine them and put them into a computer.

I think it goes both ways.

It's a really creative endeavor.

I think a lot of us are inspired by sci-fi growing up, reading.

For me, it was like Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

And at the same time, I can tell you that many of the scenarios that are inside of the Project Hail Mary are real scenarios in astrobiology that haven't been thought about.

One caveat we have to just get out of the way here is these microorganisms...

have a magic mechanism for turning mass into energy and directing it.

So we haven't figured that out yet.

We haven't figured out how to turn mass into energy just at the snap of our fingers.

But these microorganisms can.

That aside, that one magic caveat aside, everything else is very realistic.