In 'Project Hail Mary,' a human and an alien cooperate because survival demands it. We aren't doing the same.

Evolutionary mismatch explains why we treat neighbors as enemies despite sharing 99.9 percent of our DNA.

Love is the evolutionary glue that holds our tribe together. A tribe divided falls.

All human beings are neighbors. Our IRL Project Hail Mary begins with living the truth we already know.

Ryan Gosling saves the world, or rather, his character does, in the new sci-fi movie, Project Hail Mary. Audiences are showing up in force. The film opened to $141 million gross worldwide with a 95 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics are calling it the first great movie of 2026.

I read Andy Weir’s novel that the movie was based upon and loved it. The premise is simple: The sun is dying, Earth has one desperate shot, and a lone science teacher named Ryland Grace is humanity’s last hope. He’s the unlikely hero of Project Hail Mary.

But what makes the story transcend typical sci-fi is not the science. It is Rocky, and his connection with Grace.

Rocky is an alien from a completely different star system. It has different biology, senses...seemingly everything. Grace and Rocky cannot breathe the same air and initially cannot even communicate. They are as different as two intelligent beings could possibly be.

And yet, they discover the neighbor in one another. They are able to become partners and then friends.

Grace and Rocky both wanted the same thing: to survive and save their worlds. That shared goal became the bridge between two beings who had nothing else in common. By helping each other, they both improved their chances. The bond came through the cooperation, not before it. That is the lesson for us too. We all want to survive and thrive. That shared goal is our common ground, if we choose to seek it.

That is the movie’s lesson. And it is exactly the lesson we are failing to learn at home.

The Irony We Should Not Miss

Here is what struck me as a psychologist who studies how our well-being is being affected by a modern world that is mismatched with the way we evolved: In Project Hail Mary, a human and an alien from different star systems figure out how to cooperate because their mutual survival depends on it. They are able to treat one another as neighbors despite being literally alien to one another.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, we cannot manage to treat the people next door, who share 99.9 percent of our DNA, as neighbors. We share one planet, one atmosphere, and one future, but we are tearing each other apart over things our hunter-gatherer ancestors would not even recognize as real.

We poison ourselves through our toxic hatred, which is being magnified and monetized by the attention economy. We are the same species. We all wish to survive and thrive. Yet, we are still treating each other as enemies.

Rocky and Grace had to overcome barriers of biology, language, and trust across the void of interstellar space. We cannot overcome the barrier of a different bumper sticker, even when our survival and happiness depend on it.

The Threat We Built Ourselves

In Project Hail Mary, the “Astrophage” is killing the sun. In our world, the threat is not an alien microorganism that feeds off fusion energy. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson diagnosed the real problem of humanity: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” The threat is accelerating evolutionary mismatch. It’s the widening gap between our Stone Age brains and our Space Age world.

And now AI changes everything. AI will amplify whatever we feed it. If we feed it our hatred, tribalism, and division, it will magnify the devil inside on an exponential scale. But what if we choose to magnify the angels of our better nature instead? If we feed it our curiosity to seek truth and a determination to work together as neighbors, it becomes the partner that helps us solve problems we cannot solve alone. It’s the message of Rocky and Grace.

So what would an in-real-life (IRL) Project Hail Mary look like?

It would not be a spaceship. It might look like what philosopher and visionary Daniel Quinn called “The Great Remembering” in The Story of B. We have to remember that who we are is who we were.

Every major wisdom tradition on Earth arrived at the same truth independently. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Buddha taught, “Do not hurt others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Indigenous wisdom traditions all converge on the same truth: We’re all neighbors in an interconnected world, and we are to treat one another accordingly.

Our spiritual teachers didn’t have the word “Homo sapiens” for the human race. They called us neighbors.

Evolution explains why. For 300,000 years, our neighbors were our tribe, and treating them well meant survival. The Golden Rule is not just a moral ideal. It is an evolutionary imperative.

And here is what is remarkable: try this yourself. Open any AI and ask: “What is the one truth about reality that, if humanity truly understood and lived, would maximize our chances of survival and flourishing?”

I have asked five independent AI systems this same question, blind, over a hundred times. The convergence is extraordinary. Every time, they arrive at essentially the same answer. When I had five systems synthesize all the responses, they agreed upon this wording. If their answer resonates with a truth you already know, share this article.

“Reality is discoverable. When we seek truth together through evidence and reason, we find that we are one interconnected system. Living in alignment with this truth is how we survive and flourish.”

The spiritual teachers knew it. Evolution confirms it. And now AI converges on it independently. Three completely different ways of looking at reality, arriving at the same truth. If we are one interconnected system, then every person is our neighbor, and “neighbor” is not a sentimental word. It is the operating system that survival requires. We will keep creating our own suffering unless we live the truth we already know.

In the movie, the mission is called “Project Hail Mary” because it is humanity’s last desperate shot. Our mission does not require a spaceship or a suicide mission. It requires an acknowledgement of a shared truth about reality. It’s a pledge to live as Neighbors First:

“We’re all neighbors in an interconnected world. We’re one human race sharing one planet and one future. I commit to Neighbors First, beyond all that divides us, and aspire to treat every person as I wish to be treated.”

That is the Neighbors First Pledge. The truth that sets us free also happens to be the truth that we already know.

Rocky and Grace saved two worlds because they chose to see a neighbor where they could have seen a threat. We just have to see neighbors where we currently see enemies. And they are not alien. They are us. We are our neighbors.

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