{"id":275107,"date":"2026-04-19T04:13:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T04:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/275107\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T04:13:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T04:13:14","slug":"in-project-hail-mary-ryan-gosling-encounters-aliens-how-likely-is-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/275107\/","title":{"rendered":"In \u2018Project Hail Mary,\u2019 Ryan Gosling encounters aliens. How likely is that?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a Q&A, UC Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri reality-checks the recent sci-fi movie and talks about the chances of encountering life elsewhere in the galaxy.<\/p>\n

In the sci-fi book and now movie\u00a0Project Hail Mary, astronaut Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, encounters three different alien lifeforms in the vicinity of Earth. He joins forces with one of them, from the star 40 Eridani, to try to stop another, an alien microbe from Tau Ceti, that is eating stars \u2014 including our sun. The third lifeform saves the day.<\/p>\n

Aliens have long been a common trope in science fiction, but for audiences not steeped in\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0and\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0or who may be skeptical that UFOs are alien spacecraft, this premise may seem far-fetched.<\/p>\n

So we asked UC Berkeley astronomer\u00a0Gibor Basri<\/a>, who has conducted research on distant planets, how likely it is that life exists around two stars a relatively short distance from Earth, with one being an advanced technocivilization.<\/p>\n

A long-time science fiction buff who liked the book and movie, Basri said one-celled life in the galaxy is not unlikely at all. If you make optimistic assumptions about the conditions required for simple life to arise, there may be hundreds of billions of habitable planets and moons in our galaxy where it could happen. In a recent\u00a0perspective piece<\/a>\u00a0in the journal\u00a0Nature Astronomy, Basri reviewed what\u2019s known about the stars and planets with stable environments conducive to the origin of life \u2014 those in so-called Goldilocks zones \u2014 and speculated about the chances we will encounter other life within the Milky Way galaxy.<\/p>\n

Basri, who taught in the astronomy department for 35 years, is best known as the discoverer of the first confirmed brown dwarf \u2014 dim but massive objects that are bigger than a planet but just shy of the mass needed to ignite nuclear fusion and become a star. Today, astronomers think that these failed stars may be as common as planets in the galaxy.<\/p>\n

His specialty is star formation and the magnetic fields of stars \u2014 he authored the 2021 textbook\u00a0An Introduction to Stellar Magnetic Activity\u00a0\u2014 so he has opinions about the premises behind the\u00a0Project Hail Mary\u00a0book, by Andy Weir, and the movie, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. According to the plot, a microbe dubbed Astrophage is sucking up the energy from our sun and dimming it, which is destined to turn Earth into a frozen, dead planet. Basri also was a principal investigator for the Kepler mission to discover exoplanets a decade ago.<\/p>\n

Suffice it to say, he has had a lot of time to think about habitable planets and the necessary requirements for life to arise \u2014 at least, life as we currently know it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a Q&A, UC Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri reality-checks the recent sci-fi movie and talks about the chances…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275108,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-275107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}