Storytelling & Space Settlement: The Martian

Rise of the Planet of the Botanists

Image Credit: Erika Nesvold

Welcome to the next installment of my series on space settlement in science fiction. Last month, I wrote about resource extraction on Mars and communal vs. individual goals in space settlement via the board game Terraforming Mars. We’re going to hang around on Mars for at least another couple of posts— this month, I’m revisiting the novel The Martian (by Andy Weir) and its 2015 film adaptation of the same name.

Set in the near-future, The Martian opens with the Ares III crewed mission on Mars. A dust storm triggers an early evacuation of the surface, but astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon in the film) is left behind, presumed dead due to an equipment failure. But he’s actually alive, and we follow Watney’s struggles to restore communication with Earth and survive alone on Mars until a rescue mission can arrive. Fortunately, Watney is the crew’s botanist, and he figures out how to grow potatoes to stave off starvation, then Macgyvers his way through contacting Earth, planning his rescue, and launching himself off the planet to reach the rescue ship.

Like the creator of Terraforming Mars, author Andy Weir cared a lot about getting the science right in this story, and worked to make sure the characters solved problems using realistic technology and physics. The Martian not explicitly about space settlement— although Watney at one point claims to have “colonized” Mars by defining colonization as “growing crops”— but the story’s realism extends beyond the technology, portraying some of the human challenges of surviving in space, far from terrestrial help.

The Importance of Connection

One recurring issue Watney grapples with throughout his entire experience is isolation. Everything he does to survive, he must do on his own. This is more than just a practical problem: despite his stubbornly optimistic attitude, loneliness clearly weighs heavily on him. In real life, there are no plans to send space travelers on long-term missions by themselves— even in the story, Watney’s time as the lone inhabitant of Mars is an accident. But the incredible distance between Mars and Earth means that early travelers to Mars will experience isolation unlike anything humans have experienced before, compounded by the alienness of the environment. The film does a great job of illustrating the importance of the little things Watney uses to feel connected to home: ketchup for his Martian-grown potatoes; the variety of music his crew members left behind; the startling, fragile green of the first tiny potato plant he manages to grow.

Connection through actual communication with other humans is an even more central theme. The first act of the film focuses on Watney’s efforts to make contact with Earth, primarily to simply let them know that he’s alive, but also to relieve the stark isolation of his environment. His relief is palpable when he finally manages to get a signal back from Earth. Even the communication delay between Earth and Mars— which I’ve written about before as a potential complication for interplanetary relations— is only a mild inconvenience compared to the total lack of information that both Watney and Mission Control experienced before they made contact.

And yet, The Martian’s NASA leadership decides to withhold the news of Watney’s survival from the rest of the Ares III crew, who are heading back to Earth under the assumption that Watney was killed in the dust storm. Astronauts on the International Space Station today can communicate with humans on Earth that aren’t working in Mission Control, including amateur ham radio operators around the world, so it would be hard to hide any big news stories from them. But in The Martian, the crew are so far from Earth that Mission Control is their only source of information, so NASA leadership decides to lie by omission in an effort to keep them focused on returning to Earth safety. Will strategic control of communications between Earth and distant space travelers one day be used for more nefarious purposes? Or will we put technological and legal redundancies in place to ensure a free flow of information?

The Importance of Other People

Watney’s isolation, of course, causes more problems than loneliness. As I described in my post about the Great Man Theory of history and its overuse in today’s space narratives, space exploration is a team effort. It can’t be done by a single person, even in a story like The Martian with a clear, lone protagonist. Mark Watney needs many, many people working together to get him home safely, from his fellow Ares III crew members to the teams of engineers and astrodynamicists and administratora at NASA working the problem. Even China offers its assistance, sacrificing progress on their space agency’s own mission to help launch supplies to keep the Ares III crew alive long enough to return to Mars to rescue Watney, a heartwarming but realistic illustration of the way space travel has often historically been a rare place for international cooperation even between nations that are decidedly not friends and allies.

But ultimately, The Martian demonstrates that “other people” are vital for more than just survival. Watney loves Mars— he appreciates its beauty, he revels in the science and the opportunity to explore a previously untouched wilderness. But without anyone to share it with, what’s the point? We don’t truly see Watney whole and happy again until he’s joyfully reunited with his crew, and when we revisit him on Earth in the epilogue, he’s taking a moment to appreciate another tiny green plant— so plentiful on Earth but still so precious to him— before walking into a classroom full of astronaut candidates, eager to share his hard-won knowledge with other humans.

At the same time, the story of The Martian also celebrates the value of the individual. The humans of Earth come together, at great effort and cost and not an insignificant amount of risk, to save the life of a single human. “It’s bigger than one person,” NASA director Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) argues at one point, weighing the risk to the space program as a whole if the proposed mission to rescue Watney is a failure. “No. It’s not,” flight director Mitch Henderson (Sean Bean) responds, succinctly summarizing the theme of the film.

This makes for a great story: the world uniting to rescue a brave and heroic astronaut, celebrating human cooperation as much as our boldness and tenacity. And while it’s a rosy view of humanity, it feels realistic even today, given our culture’s uncomplicated reverence for astronauts. I just hope it’s a spirit we maintain as we continue to expand the demographic of space travelers beyond “astronauts as “heroic explorers” to a broader category encompassing tourists, paying passengers, service workers, and commercial pilots. If Mark Watney was an underpaid flight attendant stranded in space after a private spaceliner mishap, would the world still unite to save him? Someday, we might find out.