


She explains that her planet is roughly 24.3 light years away from Earth and revolves around Beta Hydri, the most luminous star in the Hydrus constellation. Thomas also mistakenly identifies her as a male it is not until much later that he discovers she is female. Thomas believes her to be endothermic, or capable of generating her own internal heat, in a similar way to mammals on Earth. She is described as looking similar to a very large spider, with two arms and six legs, and her body is covered with a strip of blue cloth. Jericho is surprised by Hollus’s mastery of the English language.

Hollus meets Thomas Jericho, a paleontologist at the museum and a life-long atheist who has just learned that he is dying of lung cancer. Being a paleontologist herself, she is seeking access to the museum’s Burgess Shale fossil collection, which has a large and diverse range of specimens. When Hollus lands in the courtyard of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, she immediately makes her way to the information desk and requests to speak with a paleontologist. An alien named Hollus, a Forhilnor from the third planet of the Beta Hydri system, arrives on Earth to investigate its evolutionary history. A thought-provoking debate on the origins of life, Calculating God raises profound questions about science, philosophy, and theology. As the two work together to get to the bottom of things, they discuss the design of the universe through the lens of different scientific fields. Thomas Jericho answers the call and is shocked when he discovers Hollus has proof that her own planet eerily also suffered a series of five catastrophic occurrences around the same time as Earth. When a spiderlike alien paleontologist named Hollus arrives on Earth at the Royal Ontario Museum, she immediately seeks to speak with a paleontologist. Sawyer’s 2000 science fiction novel, which is set in the present day and is based on the premise that sentient aliens have come to Earth to study the five mass extinctions that have occurred on our planet over its history.
