Location from Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Home — seven billion people waiting for an answer from a man who didn't volunteer, carried by a ship named after a prayer.
Earth in this story is not a setting — it's a motivation. It exists in Grace's flashbacks as the place where Stratt assembled the Petrova Taskforce, where scientists argued and built and calculated, where a middle-school teacher was drugged and loaded onto a rocket because the math demanded it. The Astrophage crisis means Earth is slowly freezing. The Sun dims by fractions of a percent each year, and the models show global agriculture collapse within decades. The human response — Project Hail Mary — is the largest coordinated effort in history, powered by Stratt's ruthless authority and the collective desperation of a species that has just learned it might be mortal. In the epilogue, Grace learns from Erid that Earth's sun returned to full luminance — the Taumoeba worked. Humanity survived. He just can't go home.
The blue marble, seen from twelve light-years away as nothing more than a data point in the Sol system. From the Hail Mary, Earth is invisible — too far, too small, too fragile to see. Everything Grace does is for a planet he can't even find in the sky.
Also known as: Earth, Home