Trevor is Wrong About Project Hail Mary

ok, i just watched this for the first time like an hour ago and i strongly disagree. i guess i could say i enjoyed the comedy, i enjoy kids movies, i enjoy buddy cop movies, i enjoy space, and supposedly the book was much harder scifi and they glossed over all that. all of these things are true, but that's not what im here to say

It sets itself up as a Jesus allegory, like a super obvious one. A man named Grace, carried by a ship named Mary, on a one way trip to sacrifice himself to save the world. I'm not super good at recognizing obvious allegories (i literally did not know the Aliens movies were about pregnancy and that's apparently blatantly obvious to everyone), but like come on. Rocky's happy phrase is literally "amaze amaze amaz(-ing grace)", the 12-segmented fuel tank where one segment "betrays" Grace by springing a leak. Ok, whatever, it's basic, and probably everything is a Jesus allegory if you think about it too much

But then it completely subverts that. You start wondering if actually Rocky is Jesus, and then maybe it actually was Grace, and at that point you're not sure if Jesus is supposed to be both of them or neither of them or maybe the predator bacteria is Jesus and you're just confused

That's because it's not actually a Jesus allegory, it's an allegory for modern technological society. Yes, we have to make tradeoffs sometimes, but it's actually possible to just make things better and no one has to die. Just put a redundant emergency brake on the trolley. Let the Omelas kid go, how exactly was he supposed to be holding together the utopia again? Every social problem ever solved by humanity has been a technological solution that makes the hard tradeoff irrelevant. While the feudal lords were arguing about whose peasants should starve, some guy just went out there and invented fertilizer. When the sun starts dimming, just breed the astrophage bro. it's pretty obvious

Sure, smart thinking can't solve every problem, but we've eliminated whole classes of problems just by making resources so plentiful that they're mostly irrelevant. We might still have cancel culture, but we're not burning any witches on the stake. Not because we're all enlightened and perfect now, but because we've advanced enough in information tech and literacy to the point where no one has to die over it. We're solving global poverty not by all coming together and deciding to sacrifice our standards of living, but by just creating so much growth that it's becoming irrelevant. We're solving climate change not by riding bikes everywhere and going without AC, but just through the sheer numbers of Chinese solar panels we're churning out. If we just do the obvious thing, we can have so much cake that we don't have to worry about who's having it and who's eating it

Further reading:

• An excellent Noah Smith post about technological solutions to social problems: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tech-can-fix-most-of-our-problems
• A (very compelling and very short) LW post about an alternate interpretation of Omelas: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n83HssLfFicx3JnKT/omelas-is-perfectly-misread

After describing the child’s suffering in detail, Le Guin asks a second question:

"Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?"

Are they more credible? She's not asking about the ethics of it all. She’s asking about the story’s plausibility.

And the implied answer is: Yes. You do find them more credible. You believe in Omelas now that it has a dark side.

I'd summarise this reading as: We can't accept stories about pure utopia. Le Guin demonstrates this by having you reject her perfect city until she adds suffering to make it believable.