Project Hail Mary

Yes, the book explains that Erid's atmosphere and magnetic field are thick / strong enough that no radiation, including light, gets to the surface, hence why his species is blind. Rocky's ship is basically the first extra-planetary vessel the Eridians made period.

Presumably (though the book doesn't go into it) the Eridians employed heavy telepresence robots for the construction of their ship (as they'd be blind in vacuum), but it doesn't particularly hold up that no one noticed all the ship construction crew dying once it was pressurized and Eridians were on it, nor that Rocky _exclusively_ stayed in engineering for decades once the rest of his crew died.

It's just a setup for how biology could severely alter which branches of physics a species concentrates on - don't worry about the details.

Oh yeah, since you mentioned magnetic fields, in case you didn't know, the Earth's magnetic field (which direction is magnetic north) has flipped hundreds of times - Geomagnetic reversal - Wikipedia - though the effect is probably caused by the outer liquid core, not the solid center. We're possibly 'overdue' for a flip - the Earth hasn't kept its magnetic polarity this long in 10 million years - though on the long term scale, there doesn't appear to be any regularity in how often that field flips.

It's very likely the Earth's magnetic field is highly variable during those flips (some areas get much stronger fields, some much weaker), though the correlation to mass species extinctions is very murky. It is safe to say a lot of current human tech will be fucked during the transition - a coronal mass ejection started (much fewer compared to current human wiring) telegraph lines on fire back in the 19th century with a stable magnetic field - Carrington Event - Wikipedia

Wombat said:

Yes, the book explains that Erid's atmosphere and magnetic field are thick / strong enough that no radiation, including light, gets to the surface, hence why his species is blind. Rocky's ship is basically the first extra-planetary vessel the Eridians made period.

Presumably (though the book doesn't go into it) the Eridians employed heavy telepresence robots for the construction of their ship (as they'd be blind in vacuum), but it doesn't particularly hold up that no one noticed all the ship construction crew dying once it was pressurized and Eridians were on it, nor that Rocky _exclusively_ stayed in engineering for decades once the rest of his crew died.

It's just a setup for how biology could severely alter which branches of physics a species concentrates on - don't worry about the details.

Click to expand...

A ship in low orbit =! interstellar travel in terms of radiation. Erid has an even stronger magnetic field than Earth, so we can presume that protective bubble extends out pretty far and would have mitigated most of the harmful radiation to Eridians working on the space elevator/ship.