Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.

Mark Watney, The Martian

Until I saw the trailer for The Martian, I was completely unaware of the best-selling self-published 2011 novel by Andy Weir that provided the original story for the movie. Intrigued by the concept, I took the book with me as vacation reading on a long weekend getaway, and found myself completely caught up in the trials and tribulations of American astronaut Mark Watney, left for dead on Mars after a piece of debris knocks him out and disables his suit telemetry during the evacuation of his mission team due to a dangerous dust storm.

When Watney regains consciousness, he finds himself alone and stranded, faced with the very basic challenge of staying alive, followed by the longer term project of contacting Earth in hopes of being rescued before he runs out of food. Watney's first person mission logs detail his ingenious solutions to the obstacles that he needs to overcome in order to successfully meet these two challenges.

Weir stacks the deck in Watney's favour in a couple of ways.*  First, the marooned astronaut is an engineer/botanist, the perfect combination for the situation – there might well have been a completely different outcome if the stranded crew member had been a psychiatrist/pilot.  Second, NASA has conveniently provided a few raw potatoes for the crew’s Thanksgiving dinner, which gives Watney immediate access to something that he can cultivate in the mission's habitat in order to extend his food supplies.

I found it to be a fun, entertaining read, although not terribly deep (any book which relies heavily on jokes about 70s television shows is not going to challenge Crime and Punishment in terms of psychological depth) and completely enjoyed it.  Oddly enough, I'm not sure I’d recommend the book to everyone, although I suspect it’s going to work very well as a movie, especially with Matt Damon providing the voice - and face - for Watney's narrative.

Why wouldn’t I recommend the book to all and sundry?  The plot of The Martian is made up of an extended series of scientific solutions to the problems of survival, solutions that are heavily based in math, chemistry and physics.**  Weir does an excellent job of making the science comprehensible, but even so, there's an awful lot of discussion of caloric units, wattage, surface areas, molecular composition and so on.

I've always been more interested in the more scientific side of science fiction, and as such I found Watney's solutions to be ingenious and interesting, but I know a few people who would blink a few times and then abandon the book in favour of less technical narrative.

However, the real question that The Martian raises is one that we have yet to face in our limited exploration of space:  how far would we go to rescue an astronaut marooned in space?  Space travel relies on a limited supply of resources and hardware which are incredibly expensive and time-consuming to assemble and construct.  Would we spend millions of dollars and jeopardize other missions in order to stage a rescue effort which might not even succeed?

Regardless of the manner in which that question is answered in The Martian***, I'd like to think that we would.  In my mind, there's an unspoken covenant between humanity and the people that have chosen to be our pathfinders into the universe, a covenant that says that if they find themselves in peril, we will do everything in our power to rescue them - it would be a betrayal of their dedication and courage to do anything less. 

- Sid

* This is surprisingly common in castaway stories. The original Robinson Crusoe has an entire sailing ship full of supplies to draw upon:  guns, gunpowder, tools, wood, clothing, canvas, and so on. The astronaut in the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars miraculously (and improbably) discovers open water, edible aquatic plants, rocks that release oxygen when heated, and an alien man Friday.  Tom Hanks gets the contents of random FedEx™ packages – including a volleyball.

** I spent about thirty minutes looking for an official name for the physics trick involving lateral pressure on a taut cable that Watney uses to get a flipped Mars rover upright again, without ever finding the right search terms to get the results I wanted. If anyone finds out what it's called, please leave a comment!

*** No spoilers here, Dorothy.

Planet Earth.

As an artist, I am inspired by the element of perspective within my paintings. I approached my earlier series “Sea Change” from a dramatic vantage point. The infusion of colour and texture expressed a wealth of emotions projected onto a landscape. While nature was the departure point, the series Sea Change (coined by Shakespeare in The Tempest) explored romantic illusions in life.

In the last couple of years, I have become more of a realist. I’ve seen great changes politically, economically and socially within our world. On an environmental level, we are seeing the impact of our civilization. There is a transition happening on every level of our society. It is because of this that I am compelled to paint my new series, Planet Earth.

Norah Borden

In 2010, my friend Norah Borden started to see the world in a different way - literally.

Norah is an accomplished artist, who, until that point in time, had been painting interpretive, ethereal landscapes and seascapes. But in 2010, she saw a world in a global crisis, a world that was being shaped and changed by political and economic forces that sharply emphasized the divisions between countries and cultures.  Norah's response to these changes was to begin seeing our planet from a higher perspective, looking at the world as an interconnected whole that ignores the lines between countries and ideologies.

Photographs don't do justice to Norah's work - the art is incredibly textural and conceptually developed, and the large canvases that she has chosen for Planet Earth emphasize the detail and artistry that has gone into the creation of her work.  The swirling colours combine with the thick layering of medium to create a perfect artistic interpretation of our world as seen from orbit, while at the same time evoking a microscopic view.

If you'd like to get a good look at Norah's art in person, her work is currently on display at Telus Science World here in Vancouver.  She's doing a show in cooperation with Urthecast, a Vancouver-based company that provides access to data from high definition cameras mounted on the International Space Station.  If you get a chance, I strongly recommend that you take a look at her show - everyone should have an opportunity to see the world the way that Norah does.

http://www.ourplanetearth.ca/ - on display until September 14th, 2015.

- Sid

*Norah, who is a tiny perfect blonde person, works on her large canvases in an equally tiny perfect studio space - I've never seen her painting, but I imagine it as the artistic equivalent of building a ship in a bottle.

The Secret of the Ninth Planet.

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.

Mary Roach, Packing for Mars

On July 14th, NASA's New Horizons probe did a flyby of Pluto, which resulted in a treasure trove of information about the erstwhile ninth planet and its five moons, and is considered to have been a resounding success in adding to our limited catalogue of data for the outer reaches of the solar system.  But, you know what my first thought was when I heard about the flyby?

I wish we were doing this with people.

Yes, people are not the ideal tool for space exploration.  As per the opening quote form Packing for Mars, people are a problem when it comes to life in space, and I can't deny that NASA is doing a brilliant job of expanding our scientific knowledge of the solar system with automated probes and robotic rovers that are indifferent to the difficulties involved.  But ultimately, space exploration has to include the goal of having human beings travel to the same destinations – otherwise, we’re just watching it on TV.

- Sid

P.S. The title of this posting is an homage to a 1959 young adult novel by Donald A. Wollheim which was part of the science fiction selection at my grade school library. I don't normally provide the sources for the blog titles (and most of them do reference other genre material) but Wollheim's novel has a bit of a special place in my heart, and I felt that it deserved a bit of recognition.