Open spaces and wide expanses

This is it, the final installment of the IT-related observations and ideas inspired by “Project Hail Mary”. You can find part 1, part 2, and part 3 linked here. For a final time, those wary of spoilers might want bookmark this blog until after enjoying either the book or the movie.

What you don’t know CAN hurt you.

One of the biggest moments of drama and danger in the story comes when a tank on the Hail Mary rupturse, causing the ship to spin at dangerous speeds. If Grace hadn’t jettisoned the tank and negated the spin, he would have passed out and died. In fact, he was dangerously close to that exact outcome.

But WHY did the tank rupture in the first place? The seeds of that moment of peril were planted earlier that day, when Grace and Rocky performed a tricky maneuver to collect organisms from the upper atmosphere of a planet in the Tau Ceti system. Because Grace isn’t a trained pilot, he didn’t realize that the angle he set the ship to fly would create a backdraft, which super-heated the hull, which caused it to fracture.

Let’s be clear: Grace and Rocky are extremely intelligent and competent. They don’t rush thoughtlessly into any task. But that doesn’t mean they know – or can know – everything. In this case what they didn’t know – about flying, about vectors and forces, about liquid dynamics – almost got them killed.

The lesson to us working in IT should be clear: No matter how well-trained we are, how many years of experience we have, how much research we do; despite all of that, we still can’t (and won’t) know everything. And the things we don’t know can (and might) hurt us, our infrastructure, and even our business.

Luckily for us, the stakes are somewhat lower. We’re not single-handedly (or seven-handedly, since Grace has two and Rocky has five) trying to save all live on two different planets.

And my point here isn’t to avoid risk, or stop trying; or conversely, to dump even more time into preparation. No, my point is to recognize that mistakes can happen despite all that. It’s to be aware of the possibility and keep an eye out for “gotchas.””

BUT… you can’t know everything. You will make mistakes.

In IT circles, we sometimes get caught up with who the “smartest person in the room” is. I think that attitude is not helpful in any way. At the very least, we need to be clear about who the subject matter expert on a specific topic might be, but even there we lead ourselves astray.

Grace was not – not at the beginning nor at the end, the “smartest” person when it came to biology, or astro-biology, or even astrophage. Every person in the story – from the teams of scientists on earth to Grace and Rocky in space, and even to the Eridian’s at the end of the story – all acknowledge the gaps in their understanding.

As I’ve pointed out a few times – both in this series and others that I’ve written in the past – we have to embrace the reality that we need others to help us out. Often.

Even so, even though “None of us are as smart as all of us”, there will still be times that nobody knows what’s just around the bend. We will still, depsite all our training, experience, and preparation, get hit by something we didn’t see coming.

In those moments, many of us get stuck in the cognitive dissonance of “how could this have happened?!?” My advice, and the advice of “Project Hail Mary,” is to first accept that mistakes will happen, and second to acknowledge that the only way past them is to understand what happened and adjust.

Healthy Environments Aren’t Universal

In the story, the hull fractures, the ship begins to spin out of control, and Grace struggles to hit the controls to jettison the fuel tank and save himself (and Rocky). Except he doesn’t. He can’t quite reach the controls. And so Rocky comes rushing through the airlock to save him.

The problem is that Rocky is used to atmospheric pressure that’s 26 times heavier than ours, with ambient temperatures of about 200 degrees celcius, and is composed almost entirely of pure ammonia. Coming into Grace’s space on the ship causes him unimaginable pain, not to mention spontaneously combusting the oxygen around him.

Having saved Grace, Rocky collapses. Luckily, Grace recovers quickly, and moves to return Rocky through the airlock. Unfortunately, opening the airlock exposes him to Rocky’s native environment, which inflicts burns on his skin and in his lungs.

Both Rocky and Grace survive, but come away with both scars to show for it and a healthier respect for the other’s living conditions.

The lesson I’d like to emphasize here is that we all have environments in which we thrive, but it would be dangous to presume that other folks will succeed in the same conditions we do. One person’s oxygen is another’s ammonia.

The key piece here is that there’s no single “right” environment. We can’t (or shouldn’t) judge other people on our team based on the conditions that allow them to flourish. Nor can we (or should we) insist that everyone conform to exactly the same environment.

In this, as in so many other things, there’s no “one size fits all.” There’s barely even a “one size fits most.”

FINAL SUMMARY

It’s been quite a journey for us – if not 11.9 light years, then at least 5,000 words. But more than that, I hope that this has been a journey of reflection – and that it’s shown how a fantastical story full of improbable events can still be held up and used as a mirror of our very common and very real experiences.

Folks working in tech are first asked to imagine a world as it ought to be, and then chart a course to getting there. Sure, this better world is usually both limited and specific (“can you make it easier for customers to send us this information? Can you make it so easy (and fun) they can’t wait to do it?”), but we’re still asked, over and over, to not only envision a better world, but to provide specifics of how it would be better and how to get there

But Grace and Rocky would be the first to tell you that simplifying a problem is the first step to solving it. Experienced IT professionals know complex problems can’t be solved until the component parts are separated out.

The stories we find in science fiction, fantasy, and comic books prepare us for this. They provide a map for what the process might look like. They show us the value – both to ourselves and to our community – of making this kind of literary leap.

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” It’s not always Mr. Miyagi, the kindly and unassuming janitor; or Ben Kenobi, the crazy old hermit, Ben Kenobi. Sometimes the teacher isn’t a person or a character, but an entire movie filled with lessons for ready students.

Meanwhile we, as IT practitioners, are better when we can bring our whole selves to the office every day. We’re better technologists when we allow our past experiences – whether from school, past (non-tech) jobs, hobbies, or science fiction books – to inform our choices.

I hope the blogs in this series have helped inform some part of your work, too.

Until the next time (or book, or movie).