Projekt Hail Mary

He doesn't like it, but he accepts that the universe uses rules that are much more complicated than we can see.

The faster you go, the less time you experience.

Ah, the c-word. "Culture." We have an unspoken agreement that cultural things just have to be accepted. It ends any minor dispute. "Do it my way because it's how I was raised," basically. We haven't run into anything where our cultures clash... yet.

I want to spend the rest of my life studying Eridian biology! But I have to save humanity first. Stupid humanity. Getting in the way of my hobbies.

I am happy. You no die. Let's save planets!

Deadline-induced quality issues: a problem all over the galaxy.

When the alternative is death to your entire species, things are very easy. No moral dilemmas, no weighing what's best for whom. Just a single-minded focus on getting this project working.

Remember, it took us a century of burning coal and oil on a global scale to even notice it was affecting the climate at all.

And just like that another climate denier is born. See how easy it is? All I have to do is tell you something you don't want to hear.

Who would have thought saving the world could be so boring?

Language is kind of an exponential system. The more words you know, the easier it is to describe new ones.

"No?" I ask

"No," he says in Eridian.

"So, 'yes'?"

"No, yes."

"Yes?"

"No. No."

"Yes, yes?"

"No!"

The oldest words in a language are usually the shortest.

If you looked at a rock for several hours, and someone replaced it with a very similar, but slightly different rock, you would know.

I wouldn't want him to think humans are untrustworthy.

I mean... we're pretty untrustworthy, but I don't want him to know that.

There's nothing special about the number 10. We have ten unique digits because we have ten fingers. Simple as that.

Thinking rationally, you can't make spaceships without a civilization and you can't have civilization without being able to communicate. So of course they have language. 

"♩♫♪♪♫," says Rocky.

All I saw was "nothing," and I drew a bunch of conclusions! Conclusions that are wildly speculative and with nothing to prove them, but conclusions!

No one ever talks about the really hard parts of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I'm going to go with "he" for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being "it."