The Martian Ch. 20-22: HIGHWAY TO THE SCIENCE ZONE | The Synthesis

The creators of Terra Genesis bring you The Synthesis: A show where we discuss how popular entertainment portrays realistic science. Today Lacey and Alex are discussing “The Martian” by Andy Weir Chapters 20-22.

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[00:00:04] Hey, folks, this is Alexander Winn. 

[00:00:07] Hi, I’m Lacey Hannan, 

[00:00:08] and we are here with the latest episode of The Synthesis. This week we are discussing The Martian by Andy Weir, chapters 20 through 22. 

[00:00:18] And yeah, we discovered yet again that I took all of the notes and Alex took next to none. 

[00:00:26] Comparatively, I took this many notes and Lacy took six pages of notes. 

[00:00:30] And I was a debater. I don’t know. I don’t know how many of you were debaters, but if I didn’t come fully prepared, I might not win. And that was totally unacceptable. 

[00:00:39] All right. Well, the odds are you’ll win tonight 

[00:00:43] when it’s a time and then I can accept. Oh, that was sweet. It took me a minute to catch that one. That was good. 

[00:00:50] All right. So we start out we start out this week in Chapter 20 as Mark is making his Rovere modifications. He’s still at the HAB, but he’s going to have to make the long and arduous journey to the Aries four launch site. And so he’s having to do a lot of updates to the rover to get it to carry everything he’ll need. 

[00:01:10] Yes. And he skips a bunch of the construction stuff, which is fine because that’s not what I’m here for this time. I mean, like, well, I mean, if this was a book that wasn’t about science, the engineering and all of that stuff, it’d be totally fine. But I’m I’m not here for construction when it comes to the Martian. So I don’t want to put down any construction workers because their jobs are hard. And I’d actually be curious about the jobs 

[00:01:34] if he does mention, by the way, tickled the heck out of me. He mentioned that he’s doing these modifications with the Pathfinder murdering drill. Yes. Which is very charming. Yes. 

[00:01:47] Yeah. Yeah. So I like the explanation of the Eric the atmospheric regulator external component, which is what freeze dry freeze separates the air and it and he puts it outside instead of so that Mars can cool it. 

[00:02:05] So it’s sort of like a air conditioning unit in your window. It’s part of it is inside and part of it is hanging outside. 

[00:02:11] Yeah. So I enjoyed that. I also like that at the end of that first log, he he says I’m essentially I’m going to do my logs every day and then he waits for days. 

[00:02:22] Yeah. I do a log every day and jumps from three seventy six to three 

[00:02:27] and I was like oh that’s me. Whenever I say when I start like a new like habit in my morning routine, like I’m going to journal every. No I’m not, I’m not going to. 

[00:02:37] That’s simply not happen. 

[00:02:38] It’s not how it works. 

[00:02:40] He does mention that he’s working four hours a day and then relaxing. Plus he’s taking days off, which, you know, is nice, like, you know, with with this kind of story. If this were a movie trailer or whatever, you would probably frame. This guy is sort of working all night, working all the time to try to survive. I really appreciate the fact that. No, it’s like that’s how you hurt yourself, man. It’s going to work for a few hours and then he’s going to go watch TV and he 

[00:03:04] literally does not have the time or, you know, help to get hurt. 

[00:03:09] Yeah, exactly. He cannot afford to get hurt. It’s better to take it slow, take days off, relax in the bath. 

[00:03:14] And shouldn’t we all be able to work like that? I mean, all right. We tried four day work weeks and it only didn’t work because everybody, like all of the other companies we work with, are on five day work weeks. And it was such a huge pain in the butt to communicate with anybody. 

[00:03:30] So the four day work week, we could all 

[00:03:32] just agree to do four day work week. Yes. 

[00:03:35] Yes. I guess the lesson here is approach self care like you’re stranded alone on Mars. 

[00:03:41] That’s right. 

[00:03:43] I like that. It’s a good lesson. We should we should get a get a sign. Yeah. Yeah. Get a sign made. Take care of yourself like you were stranded on Mars. 

[00:03:51] OK, so there’s a point where he talks about in his soul. Three hundred and eighty. Yes. Blog where he talks about the heat reservoir. Yes. And I read it and then realized I had skimmed, read it, skim read it. My goodness. Words are hard and didn’t understand it and didn’t feel like going back and reread it. So that’s why you explained. Yes. 

[00:04:13] So the problem that he has is that he needs to reduce the electrical requirements for the equipment that he’s bringing. Yes. And he realizes that several of the machines super cool the air for various reasons and then warm it back up because otherwise it would be pumping air at like negative fifty degrees into the half and that’s going to kill them. So they have a heating mechanism to heat up the air. But what he realizes is that the vast majority of the electricity that these things pull goes to heating the air. So if he can get that heating component to be unnecessary, he can radically drop the electricity needs and that means more power goes 

[00:04:55] to the road. We discovered that. Right. 

[00:04:57] So his solution is he has the RTG, the big box of radiation, and that is CONSED. Only putting out heat, yeah. And so what he’s doing is he’s taking the RTG, which you can picture is just sort of like a really big sort of cylinder. Right. And he’s he puts it in a in a Ziploc bag, basically. And I actually really love the fact that he struggles to get a vacuum seal. He struggles to get all the air out because if there’s any air in there, it’s going to get superheat and it’s going to melt the bag and it’s going to cause problems. So he just uses the airlock. He’s just like, oh, right, I’ve got an airlock. So he goes out into the airlock and sucks out all the air and. Right. 

[00:05:34] So wait, wait, hold on. I have a question about that. Yeah. So why is it that it would superheat the plastic with air in it, but not the plastic without the air in it. 

[00:05:43] So it’s I’m not a super expert in thermodynamics, but basically, 

[00:05:48] you know, everything there is to know. Why don’t you? 

[00:05:51] But the basic idea is that water is a very good conductor of heat and solid objects are often very good conductors of heat. Air is actually a pretty bad conductor of heat. That’s why, for example, if you fall into a freezing lake, it’s so much worse if you have on wet clothes because that water is going to conduct the heat away from your body really fast. But if you drop the wet clothes, if you dry off the air doesn’t conduct the heat nearly as fast. So if you have air pockets in this heat source enclosed with plastic and then water, that air is going to heat up. The heat is going to be distributed through the air at a different rate than through the plastic in the water. And so you could get a differential that could cause problems basically. So if you have one, if you have the metal against the plastic, against the water, the heat is going to distribute much more evenly. Whereas if there are pockets of air, it’s going to distribute unevenly and it could lead to certain parts of the plastic getting hotter than others and melting. And yeah, 

[00:06:53] let’s go back in your analogy, OK? If you fall into the water, you mean after you get back out of the water, take off your coat? Yes. OK, you get to not start 

[00:07:01] not stripped down while you’re in the 

[00:07:04] water. I mean, you might want to do that. So you don’t like drought, but that’s a whole different thing. I was very confused. OK, you skipped right here. 

[00:07:12] I’m here to confuse. That’s that’s my goal. But anyway, so he so he puts this the RTG in this plastic bag and then he submerges it in a basically a big tub of water. So now the RTG is spreading its heat out into the water. You’ve got sort of like a sink with a heating source in it. And so it’s radiating heat out into the water. So his goal is to heat up the air that is coming out of these things. So what he does is he takes the hose that would normally go into the heating component and he lays it down. You can picture like a hose going into a tub of water and then just coiling at the bottom of the tub. So the hose is just sort of in a spiral at the bottom of the tub. And then he pokes a whole bunch of tiny little holes in the hose so that this tub full of water, you pump air into this hose and it’s a whole bunch of tiny little holes bubbling up er into the water. OK, right. And so what that does is all those tiny little holes are all those tiny little bubbles are now moving up through very warm water. Yes. And so it heats up the air in those bubbles. And then by the time the bubbles reach the top and pop and join the atmosphere, it has warmed up sufficiently that it’s not going to be a danger to him. 

[00:08:31] Oh, it’s so fascinating. 

[00:08:34] And the other thing he says that he realizes is that the tiny little bubbles are agitating the water. They’re basically stirring the water all the time. The water is sort of bubbling and frothing like a like a boiling pot of water. And so it helps distribute the heat. You know, normally if you have a heat source in a in a sink, one side of the sink is going to be warmer than the other. Except he’s got all these tiny little bubbles constantly, like shaken up the water and stirring it around, which means that it’s much more evenly distributed. And so it’s it’s perfect. He’s just bubbling the air up through this warm water and now he doesn’t have to worry about running the heater. 

[00:09:13] OK. Well, yeah, fascinating. Very clever. It is very clever. I mean, they even say Mark is a clever man. 

[00:09:21] Yes. Yes, they do. 

[00:09:22] Um, I also like that in his cleverness that he discovers he’s a space pirate. 

[00:09:29] Yes, he does. And Mars is international waters and he’s going to be taking command of the areas for and because he lost connection to Earth, nobody can give him permission to do that. 

[00:09:40] I mean, so long as he is in the hab, he’s on American soil, essentially. But as soon as 

[00:09:45] in the rover, he’s on American 

[00:09:47] soil. Yeah, but as soon as he steps out onto Mars itself. Yeah. He’s in international waters based on what the the 

[00:09:56] an international treaty. 

[00:09:57] Yeah. About it. It’s the same international treaty that’s like it’s based on Antarctica. Is that right. Something like that. Yeah. Whatever we didn’t we didn’t like this type of research, but I do like that he kind of walks us through why this is true and he is so excited, very proud. Now, not only is he the king of Mars. Yeah. 

[00:10:18] But and the greatness about greatest botanist on this planet. Yes. 

[00:10:22] He is also a space pirate and. Oh, and he’s the first one. I mean, let’s be really clear here. Space Pirate. 

[00:10:28] It’s actually a funny little thing. This is deep nerds who are into the Martian will often point out that this line is kept in the movie, but actually doesn’t make sense because in the movie, he never loses the connection to Earth. The Pathfinder never gets killed. What? Yeah, he they just skip over that part. He’s still in in connection with Earth. And so why didn’t they give him permission like he he’s not a space pirate. He’s still in connection with Earth. So they probably would have given him permission. 

[00:10:59] Totally forgotten that. And I don’t like that at all. I know, right. It’s such a great obstacle, 

[00:11:03] to be fair. It is one of those things, if I if I remember correctly, it’s one of those things very much like Tom Bombadil in the Lord of the Rings movies where they never actually say he does still have a connection to Earth. He just they just don’t show him losing the connection to Earth. There is a point at which he stops talking to Earth, and 

[00:11:19] I wonder if it’s in one of those, like, deleted scenes 

[00:11:21] or something. Yeah, it could be. 

[00:11:23] We’re going to see OK, when we say, OK, let’s all make a pact right now that when we watch the movie, we go and find all of the deleted scenes. We can just 

[00:11:32] oh, I own The Martian and the Martian directors edition, you 

[00:11:36] guys. Yeah. This man is such a nerd. I someday someday I’m going to let you in on all of the little secret things that make him one of the weirdest people I’ve ever met. So I don’t know that you’re going to fully enjoy it. All right. We’re going to I’m going to play an order there. But, um, but I think that we I think we should. I think we should. Yeah. And if we can find it on YouTube and we’ll get kind of get everybody in on this, maybe we’ll do it via Twitter or something, but we’ll drop links to 

[00:12:08] deleted deleted scenes. There’s also, in addition to deleted scenes as part of the marketing campaign for the movie, they made a series of short films about Mark Watney that are not like they were never going to be in the movie. But they’ve got the cast of the area’s three. Yeah, what what they are. It’s actually kind of cute. They are Aries three promotional videos. So it’s like the videos that NASA made for the Aries three mission where they’re interviewing the astronauts and all that kind of stuff. And so you see the candidate selection. You see they’re like psychological profiles. You’re charming. I know, right? There’s a there’s a video that Mark Watney makes sort of like for the kids back home when they’re in orbit around Earth and he’s like giving them a tour of the Hermes and like introducing them to all the different crew members of Aries three. And notably, a lot of people’s favorite line in this entire book is when Venkat is wondering, what does it do to somebody to be so alone like that? What must be thinking right now? And then it cuts back to Mark Watney on Mars and he says, How come Aquaman man can talk to whales? They’re mammals. It doesn’t make sense. Yeah, that line isn’t in the movie, but it is in one of those marketing. 

[00:13:13] Oh, it was in the trailer. Right. Because people are like, where’s this line? 

[00:13:18] I don’t think I don’t think it was in the trailer, but it was in these videos that they released ahead of time. It’s reframed as a psychological profile. He’s talking to a shrink and he’s like, you know, these are the things that I think about, like, why can I come and talk to whales? You know, 

[00:13:32] I must have imagined that, which I mean, to be fair, I’m very imaginative. 

[00:13:37] It is true. 

[00:13:38] I guess you live in a world apart. OK, why don’t I hold are you guys why don’t you talk about your next. No, yes. I am super congested and you don’t want to hear this. So I’m going to go over there and grab some Kleenex. But you keep talking. 

[00:13:52] Yes, I did have to laugh. There’s a line that we came up with, came up to right about here where he talks about how the quote is. I spent a lot of it, a lot of his time sitting around on my lazy ass wall to me, but so do you. So don’t judge, which I really appreciated. That’s a very humanizing thing. That being said, he starts talking about his route that he’s going to take to get to the areas for launch site. And specifically he’s going to be going through a valley called Martha VALIS. Now, valleys on Mars are often named in Latin, so you’ll hear things like the VALIS Marineris, which just means Mariner Valley Martha, which just means Martha Valley. So this is one of those things where it’s an interesting kind of coming full circle with Martha VALIS because he talks about how, you know, he’s he’s currently in Sedalia, Polynesia, which is very flat and it’s very smooth. There’s not a lot of obstacles. It’s sort of the perfect place for him to be. But to get to areas for he’s going to have to cross a lot of really rugged terrain. But he’s been looking at the maps. And Martha VALIS, this valley takes him pretty much right where he needs to go. It is exactly the highway that he needs. And this is something that I thought was so fascinating because as we’ve been talking throughout this entire show about how using real science is such a boon to this story and how so much of it is real and so much of it is how you would really have to deal with things on the real challenges that you would face. And usually 90 percent of the time, the real science comes in the form of obstacles. You know, you can’t just make water. You have to figure out how to create water. You can’t just find food. You have to grow food. All these things are real challenges. But this is the kind of stuff that I love because the commitment to real science here actually created an opportunity. This is going to be easier than it could have been. Marvelous is going to take him right where he needs to go. And it doesn’t feel cheap because it’s real. 

[00:16:00] It doesn’t feel like a an author created coincidence. 

[00:16:03] Exactly. This is a real thing that really exists on a real planet and it just happens to be perfect. And so he doesn’t get dinged for the convenience. 

[00:16:12] And I love it. And I love when he talks about the geography like I had written this down to is I. I enjoy that. He tells us. OK, uh, Acedia, how do you pronounce it? Sedalia, Sedalia. Polynesia is 650 kilometers. Right. And then the mark that marvelous. OK, you guys, I’m I’m not I’m going to butcher these. So those are the only times I’m asking. 

[00:16:37] As far as we have mentioned before, Lacey is reading the book with her eyes, and I am listening to the book in audio book form. So we have a slightly different experience on it. 

[00:16:45] Yes. And and he talks about how combined that’s three hundred and fifty kilometers, which is just under half of the distance. Yeah, right. And so he just even hearing him talk about that, hearing him talk about how Martha, um, VALIS is a a an old river bed and then all of it. Not even a river. Not even a it’s a what is he. It’s a it’s a mega flood. Yeah. Yeah. Bed. Well he calls it a river bed the first time, but then he goes on to explain that it’s not a river that has been 

[00:17:19] it was a one day 

[00:17:19] river. Yeah. Yeah. And essentially it was like a flash flood on a major scale. But we’ll get to that. 

[00:17:26] Carved its way through. 

[00:17:27] Yeah. But I’m a person who I love maps. I’m not the world’s best at geography, but maps are fascinating to me and he does a great, great job of painting a visual picture of a map. And I think most people are really awful at it or are really boring about this, really. One of my one of Alex’s favorites, which someday we’ll get there. Yeah, we would love to. He would love to do the master spelling correction. 

[00:17:55] Yes, I would love to do the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. And one of the things whenever whenever I recommend the Mars trilogy to somebody, I always tell them it’s an incredible story. It is not paced quickly. It is a slow story. And what I often liken it to is when you’re on a road trip and you just sort of gazing out the window, you’re watching the landscape roll by and it’s simultaneously really boring, but also like kind of fascinating. Like you kind of can’t take your eyes off the window watching these hills go by and these beautiful images, you 

[00:18:24] know, I mean, that’s true depending on where you are. Well, that’s true because like, let’s take West Texas or most of Nebraska. Who cares? This is really, really boring. Yeah, right. 

[00:18:35] But if you’re going through, you know, like Utah or Colorado. Yeah. There’s some gorgeous landscapes rolling by it. It’s fun to watch. And anyway, that’s what the Mars trilogy feels like is is, you know, very slow but beautiful sort of scenery. 

[00:18:47] Yeah. So, um, uh, I, uh, I just I want you to know that I am appreciating the how he explains scenery and this and also I am super flattered, an economists that you’re hearing the book and my voice. I’m sorry that it’s probably a congested voice, but I’m still super flattered. 

[00:19:12] Well, she’s a very talented actress, don’t you know? Oh, yeah, very much. Like, well, we we 

[00:19:16] have gotten almost nowhere in this time and we are like deep. 

[00:19:20] So have a long welcome to this four hour episode of the episode. 

[00:19:26] This is what we this is what happens. And we have a lot of tangents and a lot of energy. Yes. 

[00:19:31] But moving right along, he decides to make a bedroom, which is so cute. He’s going to be driving and like crammed into this little rover that’s full of stuff. And he decides that he needs a personal space, which is totally understandable and also really scary. 

[00:19:44] So one of the things that I love about this is he actually takes the time to design something. And it’s not surprising from Mark Watney that he would do this. But whenever I’m doing any DIY project, I always wing it and then expect it to be 100 percent perfect, which is one hundred percent of the time, never the case. And then I get mad when I. Doesn’t work, and here he is, he’s going I’m going to test this three different, like I’m going to triple check my work and then I’m going to make a model of it. And and I forget that’s even an option. I just I don’t I don’t I don’t want to do all of that. And my my impression of things designing anything is you wing it or you don’t do it at all. And I forget that there’s a third option that you can be like an engineer about it. Repair. Yeah. And so there’s there’s just something there’s something awesome about watching this person do something for himself. This is absolutely self care. 

[00:20:42] This is not a survival priority. 

[00:20:43] Yeah, it is a it is it is mental survival. That’s that’s what it’s moral. It’s up quote unquote. All it’s about. Right. And so I love that he does it, but he really does take the time to make sure he does it right so nothing goes wrong. And I, you know, 

[00:20:57] taking pieces out of a have, which is terrifying. Yeah. There is another quote which I really like and I want to make a sign out of which is he’s talking about the canvas and when you inflate it, he says it wants to become a sphere and that’s not a useful shape. And I just I love the blanket. Just like spheres are not useful. That’s not, you know, I mean, unless I know that he’s talking about in this context, but I like thinking of it. It’s just like spheres suck. Just. Yeah. Oh, he does set aside a few meals, which is cute and totally understandable. He’s got five meals left that are actual meals, not home grown potatoes. And he sets them aside for departure when he leaves the hab halfway, when he’s halfway to areas for a rival, when he gets to areas for hilariously survived. Something that should have killed me which is. Yeah. And last meal, which I just 

[00:21:53] I love that it is it’s it’s like he said, I think it’s maybe a bad title for that meal. But one other thing before I know that we said we were going to move a little faster, I just meant tangents. Yes, I do. I have a lot to say. So here’s the deal. I like so so the whole triple checking and doing the model. He’s just such a Boy Scout and it’s like he’s a Boy Scout who’s who’s got a scholarship from for some prestigious engineering school. And then he undervalues it because he talks about sleeping in the hab and having a hard time sleeping because he it’s a terrible thing to have my life depend on my half assed handywork. And I’m sitting here going, dude, this is the last thing you can label. 

[00:22:41] In what world are you? Have asked, man. 

[00:22:43] Yeah. And so there’s a certain amount of like I wonder if undervaluing or understating his work is a sort of defense mechanism against against something. Just, uh, I don’t know what it would be. 

[00:22:58] I might be an indication of a little bit of imposter syndrome that, like, he’s a very smart guy, clearly, but maybe he doesn’t have as much faith in his knowledge as we do. Yeah. 

[00:23:07] And I like that, that there’s still this confident this this in perfect confidence. Yeah. You know, he’s he’s confident that if he does all of these things, he will probably live. Yeah. But, um, in in our reality, we know that he’s he’s going to live through this. This is this is not where he dies. Yeah. So it’s I don’t know, there was I, I think maybe I got too caught up in this whole cutting up the hab and making this room for himself. But for me it was very, very telling about who he is and what he needs and how he’s going to accomplish things. 

[00:23:43] So there’s also a nice little touch, which I really appreciated, which is that when he when he seals up the hab again, he’s taken some pieces out and then he he sort of patches it up in this kind of Frankenstein form. He’s looking for leaks. And so he pressurizes the hijab a little bit and he looks for, you know, leaking air. And the way he does it is with dust. And I really appreciated that because we’ve actually already figured out this problem, how to find a leak when the airlock blew up and what he used was smoke. 

[00:24:10] Yeah, but 

[00:24:11] smoke was not a great thing to use. Smoke was a last ditch option and it was hard. And so now he uses dust, which is just a great you know, it’s it’s another one of those things where a lesser rider would have just done the thing that they already figured out. But this guy has thought about it enough that he’s found a better way of solving the same problem. 

[00:24:30] Yeah, and I love that. I do have a problem with the fact that he used the word ghetto again, but this time he did it in quotations, which is weird because he didn’t do that the last time. And so I’m wondering what in the writer’s head, what designation and doesn’t he 

[00:24:47] was doing this as a blog, so maybe somebody called him up for it, maybe first time and now he 

[00:24:53] just didn’t get caught a second term. Yeah, well, there’s you know, there’s later he calls something an abomination. And I think he’s talking about the hab just like. What he’s done to it, I think he’s done with it. Yeah, he’s down by the river. And so there’s a part of me that’s like, you know, I just really am here for the idea that we get, like, you taking the term ghetto and getting rid of it from our vocabulary and using, like, the word Frankenstein or, you know, because it indicates the same thing. It’s something that, if 

[00:25:24] anything, it’s more applicable because ghetto just means, you know, sort of like poor and not not that great. But Frankenstein is specifically a crazy science experiment. Yeah. And it is something that was engineered. Yeah. 

[00:25:36] He’s talking about something being an eyesore. So for me, there’s like a vocabulary thing kind of going on, a little bit of this vocabulary war in my head that I, I would like to see play out a little bit in society as a whole. 

[00:25:49] But he does mention I don’t know if I’ve just been missing all of these references, but he drops a number on how many potatoes he has and whoa, it’s way more than I thought. He has one thousand six hundred and ninety two potatoes. That is a lot of potatoes. Like, I feel like he must have given a number earlier that I just missed, but that’s like picture seventeen hundred potatoes. That’s a lot of. 

[00:26:16] Yeah. And it’s amazing that he’s going to actually be able to take them all with him. Yeah, he’s going to do it. But you, you think of those five pound potato bags at the grocery store and yeah. 

[00:26:26] These have got to be a little like little or fancy restaurant potatoes or something, because he doesn’t mention that he’s eating ten of them a day. So they’re definitely not the big russets. 

[00:26:36] Yeah. 

[00:26:37] And then I have I have a note on the ending of the chapter. 

[00:26:41] Um, so hold on before we get there. I like that he he asks himself, oh, is this the Apollo. Yeah. Yeah. We’re in the same place. 

[00:26:50] Yeah. What would I what would an Apollo astronaut do. And then he answers his own question. He’d drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launch pad and then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my rover man those guys were cool 

[00:27:05] with said, let’s talk about Mark Watney is like concept, like his confidence and his concept of cool because Mark Watney is going to be the coolest guy on Earth. What do you get like 

[00:27:17] this, Daniel Armstrong? 

[00:27:18] Like, oh my God. Yeah. And like the fact that his concept doesn’t include himself. I’m sitting here going, man, you you have like I don’t know what happened to you in, like, middle school, but you have really put that into your, like, self aware and whatever. 

[00:27:35] But I mean, they do undeniably have more swagger than he did. Like, they’ve got they’ve got more style. He’s a little more practical. But man like this guy is surviving on loan on Mars for years on nothing but his own wits like there is. There is no like astronaut groupie who loved the guys in the sixties who isn’t going to love you, Markwayne. Like, come 

[00:27:57] on, I feel like, OK, so I feel like any time I’m in a jam now, I need to ask myself, what would Watney do? Yeah. And I know that the answer is like, I have no fucking clue, but I’m going to come up with something and and I’m going to triple check my work and be meticulous. And that’s. No, no, hold on. Yeah. This is important because we have those sorts of questions in our societal, um, you know, vocabulary. Oh, what would Jesus do with, like, a big thing in the 90s and early 2000s? I think it’s kind of fallen out of favor, which is, you know what? It is fine mostly. Um, but what would what you do is just kind of a fun one. Yeah. And for me, there is something very specific, which is the thing that I don’t do, which is be meticulous and triple check my work well 

[00:28:44] and and just work. The problem is sort of the constant answer to that question. What would Watney do? He would work the problem. He wouldn’t panic. He wouldn’t just give up. He would break it down into steps and work the problem. 

[00:28:56] Yeah, OK, so when the when the end of the world happens, we know that this is this is the starting point. Yeah. I’m just so you know, I have a lot of points about when the apocalypse happens. And this is entirely Alex’s fault. And I’ll explain that later. 

[00:29:13] Tune in next week. No, no, no. It’s later. My husband is going to destroy Western civilization. 

[00:29:19] Oh, I will warn you guys before that happens. Yeah. OK, so chapter twenty one. 

[00:29:25] Yes, great. I think you have like nine pages. I don’t. You take it away. 

[00:29:29] Oh my God. Oh my God. Sorry you guys. So much 

[00:29:32] to say. I’ve got like nine lines. 

[00:29:34] All right, listen, I thought chapter twenty one was way more interesting than chapter twenty, and I still like chapter twenty. So here we go. It’s fair. I will move 

[00:29:42] into our 

[00:29:42] six. I told you. Shut up. I told you he’s a Boy Scout and he’s such a Boy Scout because he’s packing and arranging his rovere and his trailer like it’s Tetris with these really high stakes variables. Yeah. And all I can think of is like all of the Boy Scouts that I grew up with and I mean, I learned how to pack a. Our camping trip because of them, so I’m I’m pretty exposed to this skill set that I have, but yeah, I need to know if Watney was a Boy Scout, like just putting it out there. If if Andy Weir has ever said anything about it or if I missed anything about it in the book, someone pointed out for me, thank you. Um, second. Mm hmm. He has made himself a makeshift toilet. Yes. And I say 

[00:30:29] it’s a bucket 

[00:30:30] list. OK, speaking of camping, we went to that. We went to that cabin that had this weird toilet that was just like I had never seen one. I know that. I know that they obviously I know that they exist now, but apparently they’re pretty prevalent in the camping cabins, which is it’s like just it’s a toilet seat on a bucket with a plastic bag and then like a trash bag. And then it’s got kitty litter at the bottom and then it just like winds up and then you go again. And then when you want to, you take it out and you hang it outside. And that’s what it made me think of. And I was like like I, I was I for someone who grew up in the country and can handle a lot of things, I hated that toilet. Yeah. But I was like, good for you, man. You made a makeshift one, you know, good for taking care of you. I don’t know. Uh, it took me back. 

[00:31:22] So I do love. So we cut back to Earth and Mindy Park, who is just so I love her little guy. Yeah. She drops a little bomb, which is fascinating, which is that the NSA has been using their image enhancement tech, which is fascinating and cool. Right now. They’re everybody’s pulling in to help Mark Watney here. And the NSA is chiming in with their satellite in. 

[00:31:49] It’s wildly creepy, but you’re like, yeah, me. I’m like, 

[00:31:53] good for you. 

[00:31:55] Yeah. Thanks for helping out. I don’t 

[00:31:57] know. We’re going to meticulously not try to think about what this was used for before. But, hey, you’re helping out the good guys now. 

[00:32:05] So essentially, she gets demoted, which really sucks. Yes. But as far as Venkat says is she calls herself a glorified peeping Tom because Benkert says, you know more about him. You know, like you can you know, all of the areas, three stuff. And you can you know what it is, right? 

[00:32:25] Nobody is better than you at identifying what we’re looking at. Yeah. 

[00:32:28] Satellite images. And so we need you to have eyes on Juani at all times and everything else we’re handing off to other people. She’s not happy about it. And she’s like, there’s nothing we can do if Watney falls behind on his modifications and he responds with how long have you worked for the government? Yeah. And I was like, oh, yeah. Like, the government wants to know every little thing. And that paired with the NSA thing just kind of gave me the heebie jeebies. I totally get why they need to know what is up. 

[00:32:58] Well, and I think that comment is not just the government wants to know everything, it’s also protesting. Inefficiency is not a winning argument here. 

[00:33:06] Yeah, it’s many things, but that was just one of the indications for me. So anyway. 

[00:33:11] Yeah, so next up, we we end up coming back to Mars and Mark is doing a series of tests to prepare himself for this drive. And in particular, he is now testing the machines in the rover overnight. And that is scary. He spends a night with no anything going on. 

[00:33:32] You have. Yeah, he has taken out the atmosphere regulator and the oxygen eater just to see if he can get them into the trailer, see how it works, bla, bla, bla. And and he and he says, quote, There wasn’t much room left for our intrepid hero talking about himself, obviously, and it’s in third person. And so this third person joke is just kind of interesting because he hasn’t spoken in third person. And I get that it is a joke based on, you know, things we read in science fiction and stuff like that. But it feels like it might be an indicator of something like that. 

[00:34:07] He’s like he’s de socializing a little bit. Yeah. 

[00:34:11] And then we learn that he’s been leader. We learn that like a reminder, hey, I’ve been on this planet for a year and a half, which 

[00:34:21] I had almost entirely alone. Yeah. You know, there 

[00:34:24] were fourteen days, 

[00:34:25] not even I think they were like six days. 

[00:34:28] So there’s just I don’t know, I wonder if it’s an indicator of anything. Yeah but what, what does like another thing that feels like an indicator is he reminds us how often he’ll have to use the oxygen later and how often he’ll have to charge it when he is on his way to the other to the Aries forsight. And he says one out of three souls he’s going to have he’s on the fourth day. He’s going to have to charge. He’s going to have to get out the solar panels so he can charge all of the stuff. And that feels like a. Cop’s gun is what I wrote, so anyway, 

[00:35:07] so about that, we cut back to Earth and all the big NASA bigwigs have been called in for a meeting and there’s some bad 

[00:35:16] news. Yes. 

[00:35:18] And the bad news is the weather. They have a Martian meteorologist come in and they’re talking about a new development, which is that there is a dust storm that is growing right in Marconi’s path. And these things are huge. Dust storms on Mars in real life can cover the entire planet. They can last for months and months and months, years, and they just choke out the sun. And Mark is working on solar power and there’s nothing they can do to tell him. 

[00:35:49] And they they know that it’s going to take him a minute to even recognize that he is in a dust storm because it’s not like you’re driving into a blizzard where, bam, suddenly you can’t see anything. No, this is one of the gradual it’s very gradual. Um, so I thought that was I thought that was interesting that, um, that they that that they have all of this fear for him. Yeah. I mean, you would of course. But, uh, yeah. 

[00:36:19] It’s that’s got to be a helpless feeling knowing that he’s just going to barrel into this thing that he couldn’t possibly know about. You know, it’s not like he has any kind of connection. 

[00:36:29] And and here this is the did I not say there’s a Chekov’s gun? And later in the chapter, you figure out how it’s rigged to go off in this guy. You know, it’s like he’s got it in his holster. He doesn’t it’s not his fault that this gun is going to go off, but it is, um. So I thought that was interesting. Uh, yeah. Before we move on to the HermΓ¨s crew, do you have anything else about that? Go for it. OK, I this there’s this thing that he does that just, um, it kind of killed me. He was triple checking the ammo regulator in the rover. And so what he does is he puts on his EVA suit and he cracks a canister of CO2 into the vents to see what happens. And, you know, as he hoped and expected, the computer panicked. And because, you know, CO2 poisoning and the regulator kicked into gear and fixed the levels. Voila. And I’m just for what my manager brain, just like all of these alerts went off. I’m going, man, I wonder what this man’s performance review is going to look like, because I feel like it’s going to say, uh, this man takes too many chances, but per usual, it all works out. So I guess we’re going to keep him, you know, something like that because he’s such a genius. But simultaneously, like what? 

[00:37:54] His break and stuff left and right 

[00:37:56] break and stuff all the time. And he compares himself to Q and he says very specifically, he’s not a James Bond. Yeah. And I want to know. Yeah. Are you a Q or a James Bond. Uh, that’s a good question. You guys, are you Q or James Bond or. There is there’s I will give you a third option is the third 

[00:38:18] option, which is m m I the commander. 

[00:38:21] I would love to be m I would love to say that that’s who I am. But I’m not. 

[00:38:25] I’m James Bond. Yeah. You’re James Bond. I’m an. 

[00:38:28] I don’t like this. Why? Well, because you don’t get to swing around. 

[00:38:35] You get to be James Bond. 

[00:38:39] Well, that’s true. 

[00:38:39] Who’s like, I’m James Bond and you’re em and screw you for being. I just don’t want to. Everybody wants to be sure, you know, who else doesn’t want anybody else to buzzing around James Bond. 

[00:38:52] I really do like martinis with gin. Thank you. I don’t care if they’re shaken, not stirred. I just. I don’t care. Well, I put 

[00:39:02] all of juice in it. I am, by the way, on the side of Jed Bartlet, who thinks that James Bond is being snooty because the reason that you stir a martini with a special spoon is to keep the ice from chipping. So a martini that is shaken but stirred is just a watered down Marginson. 

[00:39:18] Listen, you only agree with that because it makes sense. You don’t even like martinis. So I do not think that you get to have a real opinion on this. 

[00:39:26] I have found that in life one of the best doctrines that you can follow is to agree with Jed Bartlet wherever possible. 

[00:39:34] OK, you know what? I don’t think you’re wrong. 

[00:39:38] Fair enough. OK, to the HermΓ¨s. 

[00:39:41] So but I do want to know. Yes. James Bond, Q or M countrymen. 

[00:39:46] We are, by the way, seeing your comments. We got a comment from so fellow Trash Pande saying that the Mars The Martian takes place in twenty thirty five and loved hearing about Mars, its closest approach last year until 2035. And my immediate thought was that’s when the Martian takes place, which you 

[00:40:02] know what that’s really like. Good observation. And second, we’re of course, of course, he placed it when Mars was at its closest orbit and I just didn’t catch that. So thank you for pointing that out. 

[00:40:16] Not only did he place it when Mars is at its closest orbit, Andy Weir built a solar system simulator so that he could chart the path of the HermΓ¨s through the solar system. So I needed to know not only that, it was happening in twenty, thirty five. He knows exactly what day the Hermes took off, how long their flight plan was, how long they were in orbit around Mars. You can look up these videos on YouTube that he ran these simulations for the flight path of the HermΓ¨s through the solar system and the positions of the different planets as it flies. 

[00:40:44] Seriously, what on Earth? And then Jay Patel, I just I just really enjoy four spheres. Me and the boys like triangles. Yep. 

[00:40:55] Just like there’s are not a useful shape. 

[00:40:57] It just I really like globes. I’m a maps person, so globes I’m here for. So I disagree with you, Jay Patel. But I would join a triangle. 

[00:41:08] By the way, people are huge group or do we have to j. 

[00:41:12] I think we have to just really. So you must always when you are pointing out your nemesis, you you make sure that you use the whole day. 

[00:41:19] It’s got to be OK unless Jay Patel is J grap, in which case me. So back to the HermΓ¨s 

[00:41:28] then last thing I promise, he points out that pressure vessels hate right angles and I don’t know why it’s good to know, but it’s it’s it it feels good to me. Like I, I learned that thing today and I will retain it. And then here’s honestly why it’s important to me, because I feel like trivia and knowledge are going to be the things that get anybody through the apocalypse if anything happens. And like more than guns and barbed wire wrapped baseball bats and you know, knowledge is power and brutalities for those the powerful are willing to forfeit. So be smart, not strong. And I said 

[00:42:12] she’s enjoying the Martian from the perspective of a survivalist, 

[00:42:16] I guess. OK, we were talking about the apocalypse. And my my problem with it has always been, listen, I don’t know enough to live like I could. I could take a bat out there and, you know, live for half a second. But I don’t I don’t feel like I have the knowledge for, like, rebuilding radios and things like that. But apparently there’s a Kickstarter for a book on how to rebuild all of that stuff on Kickstarter. And so I think we have to buy it just to make me feel good. 

[00:42:45] Here’s Jacob, like Microtel tell is Jacob, 

[00:42:51] uh, Jay Patel. Why didn’t you tell him that? You could have said you could have had two different personalities going and had him totally confused and he could have loved one and hated the other, and then he could have, like, surprised him. Surprise. 

[00:43:06] And if anybody is doubting that I’m married to a supervillain, 

[00:43:10] I’m a jerk. So anyway, 

[00:43:13] so back to the Hermes 

[00:43:15] Hermes screw. 

[00:43:17] So they’re doing some repairs. You know, they’re they’ve been in space for way longer than the Hermes was meant to be without this round of repairs. And, you know, they’re going. Through some stuff, it’s all it’s all very interesting, but then the bomb drops. First off, I love the fact that Martinez can’t sleep in his room anymore. There’s just something kind of charming about the fact that his room is overheating. He says it keeps trying to cook me and he can’t go stay in Marquart in his room because it’s right next door, because they’re best buds and it has the same problem. So he so his solution was that he’s been sleeping in airlock, too. And it’s just so like I can just picture Lewis being like, you’ve been what, like, no, you’re not sleeping with one door between you and the void. He’s like, it’s the only place where people aren’t stepping over me. 

[00:44:06] He’s he’s being very conscientious of the crew’s needs, which is like, I don’t want to be. Yeah. And I want to sleep. 

[00:44:13] That being said, Lewis reveals that she is aware. She says you can sleep in the next room and Beck can go sleep with Johannsson because it’s the cutest love story ever. And the whole thing plays out in probably what amounts to like one page in the book if you if you total it all up. But it’s just so cute. 

[00:44:32] I was like, yeah, get it off, guys. 

[00:44:34] Like Million Mile High Club. 

[00:44:36] Yeah, I love that Lewis isn’t pissed. I like that she gets that people 

[00:44:42] and she mentions that she would have been like if this was a normal mission she 

[00:44:45] would have. Yeah. But she’s like just don’t let it interfere with your work and it’s fine. 

[00:44:51] And I love the Johannsson is just blushing and it 

[00:44:53] creeping into her shoulder. Thank you for this entire scene. Well except for OK, so I think it’s interesting that everything is kind of breaking down on the HermΓ¨s, so much like our cars and computers, less so much longer than this. And I’m just 

[00:45:12] well, it’s I think, you know, the ship isn’t breaking down because as they mentioned, the Aries, the Hermes was supposed to last for the entire Aries program. So it’s only halfway through its life. But what it is, the car equivalent here is that they’ve driven for fifty thousand miles and they haven’t had an oil change like they haven’t they haven’t been able to bring it into the shop. 

[00:45:30] Yeah, that’s true. OK, OK, I can I can get behind that a little bit more. I was just sitting there going, is this what we have to look forward to in space travel is just like constantly these essentially oil changes, but it does kind of feel like it’s a little bit faster than it should have happened. 

[00:45:43] But yeah, you know, they’re just they’re doing almost three times as much space travel as it was designed to do between Pitstop. 

[00:45:50] And I suppose that in our idea of what future space travel would be, you would have the replacements. Yes. Yeah. OK, so moving on. 

[00:45:58] Yes, I do. One more thing about back in Johannsson that I will never get the answer to, because this isn’t real life and there are no more details than there are included in this book. But I’m kind of desperate to know if Beck and Johannsson have been sleeping together or if they’ve just been flirting. And this is Lewis’s way of saying cut it out and just just. 

[00:46:19] No, I think they’ve I think they’ve been doing it well. 

[00:46:22] A part of me feels like they have been. But then also a part of me feels like they specifically said that Lewis told the guys not to hit on the hot chick. And they and so they were all being kind of standoffish. And so Mark knew that Beck had a thing for Johannsson and he was advising Beck to tell her. So clearly it had been going on long enough, unlike without actually coming together, it had been obvious that they wanted to. So the question here is who? Yeah, but I so the question here is, is that have they progressed since then or is this a matter of people looking at these two and going, like, stop fighting it, be together? 

[00:47:02] OK, here’s my head. Canon Martinez complained about talked about how his wife complained about not being able to get sex and johannsson. I was like, dude, yeah. And then she came on the back because 

[00:47:15] I’m willing to believe that she had to come on to him because he was under specific orders not to come on to 

[00:47:19] her. But if anybody finds any fanfiction out there about this, I’m here for it. 

[00:47:24] Martien fanfiction. How I not searched for the Martian. 

[00:47:27] I don’t know. But I am I’m here for some hot and heavy romance fan fiction for this. I’m not usually here for that. But yes. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so what now we go back to Mars. Yes. And Mark has a room. Yeah. And I like how there’s it’s just this small parallel that we are has created of on Hermes. Mark does not have a room that works through and he has, he has a room here, he has a room on Mars. And it’s very exciting. And it’s the thing that made me really like this little parallel is it’s not clichΓ©d. A lot of books would have like weird cliched parallels that are really 

[00:48:11] be really heavy handed. I didn’t even pick up on the parallelism there. 

[00:48:14] And then there’s this one. So the lack of cliche is really fun. Yeah. The other thing we I’m I feel like a lot of people know this, and I am late to this knowledge. I didn’t know that cooked food had more calories and a lot of things are starting to click around, you know, veganism and things like that. Yeah, I did get it 

[00:48:40] partially why we cook food in the first place. 

[00:48:42] I mean, yeah, I see that now, but I just I did. So anyway, I think that’s about the end. 

[00:48:51] That is also, by the way, why vegetables have crazy low calories. Oftentimes it’s not that there isn’t sugar and stuff in those, it’s that you actually end up spending as much or more calories digesting the thing than you got from the thing. So there is a lot of calories in like broccoli, but you have to spend a lot of calories digesting broccoli. So it comes out to be very low carb. 

[00:49:15] I obviously know nothing about dieting or tracking calories. So, um, this is fascinating. OK, all right. Chapter twenty two. Well, I do 

[00:49:24] want to just mention at the end of chapter twenty one, there’s a very sweet and kind of solemn ceremony where he takes down the hab. Yeah. And he says he could have just left it there but at the end of sole thirty one at the end of Thereas three mission they were supposed to take down the hab and so he takes it down as sort of a ritual of the mission that could have been. And I just there’s something about that that just got to me this this sort of poignant moment disassembling the hab alone, which he shouldn’t have had to do alone, but just kind of honoring the Aries three. That could have been. And, you know, we’ve talked on this show about different ways that the Martian could have gone. What if Lewis had been stranded there with him? What if he had died before he contacted anybody? And one of the ways that we actually haven’t mentioned yet is what if there was no storm? What if Areas three went perfectly and they were there for thirty one souls and then they left? And I know it’s a very beautiful moment as he takes down the hab, 

[00:50:20] so he takes nine days to write to us and I’m sitting here going, yeah, take your time Mark seriously. But one of the first things he mentions is psychological milestones and I thought that was fascinating. You know, we we talk about milestones in our lives, how, you know, like millennials aren’t meeting the milestones that other generations have had before them, buying houses, getting married, having kids like all of these things. But these are like very in a lot of ways, physical milestones. Um, we don’t talk about psychological milestones. And I would be fascinated to start setting, like, psychological milestone goals, because you can if you have the support or the help you need, you could totally do this. And I don’t know, there was just something really lovely and beautiful about that. And I was like, man, I want to start noting those and like putting them in my journal or which I never writing or putting them on a calendar or something just because I feel like they’re just as important or more important. Um, but we don’t note them. So I, I just thought that that was a good reminder to all of us. Psychological milestones. Note them, see them. 

[00:51:37] He does at this point talk about Martha or Martha Valley. He’s going into Martha Valley. And we come back to what Lacey and I were mentioning earlier, which is that this is not a river basin. This is a flood basin. This is a mega flood, a mega flood basin where something broke and this whole valley was carved out in a single day. And it actually made me recall one of my favorite facts about Earth’s history. Oh, this is, you know, people if you were to ask somebody like what’s the one historical event that you wish you could have witnessed? You know, a lot of people would say, like, you know, the crucifixion of Christ or I wish that I could have witnessed, you know, like D-Day or, you know, different things. Well, that’s right. I don’t know, you know, listen to Beethoven perform or something. Yeah. Mine pretty much without any rivals is actually from way before humans were around. And that is if you picture a map in your head of Europe and Africa, in between is a giant body of water called the Mediterranean. But it was dry. The Mediterranean was a dry basin, and the point between Spain and Africa was a dam of rock. And one day that dam broke. Oh, my God. And the Mediterranean filled in over the course of a few weeks or months from the Atlantic Ocean, a massive mega flood coming in between Spain and Africa and filled up the entire Mediterranean. 

[00:53:15] And so I take it this is before like any sort of human. 

[00:53:20] Yeah, this is hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. But whoa, that would be incredible. To watch and for those of you who are deep nerds out there, and this is a digression, but I apologize exacty the webcomic that a lot of people love one day posted a comic that sort of wasn’t anything. It was just a couple of characters, like sitting on the ground staring up at stars. And it took a while to realize that every hour the image was changing slightly. The stars were moving every hour. And then at one point one of the characters moved a little bit and then a little bit more. And then a few hours later, they had stood up. And what people realized was Randall Munroe, who does concede, was releasing a short film frame by frame on his website. And it is a future story, but sort of postapocalyptic. You know, it’s humans, but they’re living like cavemen and they’re witnessing something like the the flooding of the Mediterranean. And so you get to follow these characters on this journey that took months to release as they realized that their home is about to be flooded and they try to get their village to move to higher ground because this mega flood is about to happen. And you can tell what year it is because the stars in the sky are like the stars have moved relative to each other. And it’s all accurate to how the stars would look in like 50000 years. And as they walk their passing trees that are specific trees with specific leaf shapes. And so you can tell where in the Mediterranean they are. And it’s absolutely incredible. 

[00:54:58] Oh, my God. That is that is super, super cool. I, I was thinking about how I would love to have seen this flood and apparently that one too. And I would like to be a different cue, the one from Star Trek just to see it happen. Like I don’t want I don’t wish to be a God very often. I think it actually sounds really boring, but you get to see sights that we will never lay eyes on as a sole observer. Yeah, and I it’s not even about being the sole observer. It’s just being able to be an observer to these events that I think would be fascinating. 

[00:55:39] Um, yeah. I think, you know, to dig deep into nerd culture, I think what you want is not to be cute. You want to be the watcher from Marvel Comics. There’s a character who exists sort of between universes and watches the the universes unfold. And so the superhero sometimes deal with him because he has so much immense knowledge of the multiverse. And that’s yeah, being the watcher would be interesting for like occasionally. 

[00:56:06] Yeah, not very often. Not for eons. Yeah. Um, OK, 

[00:56:11] so we come back to Earth with the Warhola 

[00:56:14] for one second. Um. Oh yes, yes, yes. We can do 

[00:56:18] that. So we come back to Earth with the Watney report and it’s kind of depressing because everybody kind of thinks that Mars or Mark is just going to die 

[00:56:27] in a dust storm 

[00:56:28] and a dust storm. And it’s just are we are we just watching a tragedy? 

[00:56:32] And, you know, when things randomly hit you really hard and you’re like, what the hell was that? Where did like? What about that for me? I had one of those and I haven’t been able to dissect it or unravel it now in a way that makes a lot of sense. But when Venkat says Mark Watney is now an expert at living on Mars, I was just like, oh, I need to take a second. I need to take a long second. As I as I teared up and I was just like I was I was I was Wickland. And we’ll just say that, um. But yeah, that was a that was a good little scene. And then we jump back to Mark. 

[00:57:15] Yes. And he’s using 16th century technology. He’s using a sextant on Mars, which is 

[00:57:21] he made it under an hour. And I think it’s yet another thing we all need to learn before the apocalypse whenever that happens. Yeah. So we don’t know when it’s going to happen. So we should probably just learn it now. And, um, I feel like school should teach us about surviving in the world. So like taxes and sextants. Yeah. Um, it doesn’t do that for some reason, but I want to know these things seriously. 

[00:57:47] We need more sex and education and he’s using 

[00:57:51] what 

[00:57:52] she says. She doesn’t like buttons, but she likes you know 

[00:57:56] what I like. No, I don’t. But I do like your two today. Maybe I’m just in a kind of a mood. Yeah, um, 

[00:58:03] well, I’m very punchy. So there is this slow build up to him realizing about the dust storm. And it’s kind of like it’s not as terrifying as the slow build up to the Iris probe being destroyed, but definitely raises the tension. Yes, he’s like, you know, it’s kind of weird. And like, my solar panels aren’t working as well as they should, but 

[00:58:26] like before that. He explains to us he doesn’t know about the dust storm, but he explains to us what all of the obstacles are going to be. So we’ve heard from Earth about the solar panels, but he tells us he has to be able to see Phobos to work out his longitude and that he needs to be able to see Deneb Deneb, 

[00:58:48] Deneb, 

[00:58:48] Denpa. That’s a that’s I don’t like that. Yeah, he needs to see it specifically at night to work out latitude. And it’s just one more way that we see that this dust storm could start to screw him over 

[00:59:02] if you can’t see the stars. 

[00:59:03] Yeah. And then he talks about how he admits that it’s really, really bad to get off course in Arabia, Terra where the dust storm is, because if he ends up on a crater, he could, one, roll over his rover or he could spend a lot of energy going up in elevation. And so he wouldn’t notice immediately that you’re going up. So he has to navigate both longitude and latitude and by careful observation, which is also going to be impeded by the dust storm. And he needs solar panels for power. So there are three things here and way in which three ways in which the dust storm is going to screw him. Yeah, and I love well written obstacles. When we go through books together, you guys, you’re going to notice that this is something that I bring up a lot. I don’t like stupid obstacles. I, I think it’s really important when authors put in obstacles and put in lots because it makes the story more interesting. It’s true to life. I mean, come on, there are very few people who get through life just like super easy. Um, and if they do, they’re boring. And so. And if you like fantasy. Jim Butcher in the Dresden Files. Yes. Does it does obstacles super well. So I am again, yet again a huge fan of Andy Weir’s writing. Yes, indeed. 

[01:00:32] We have a couple of viewers, by the way, chiming in on Economist says, oh, I’d love to see the construction of some of those massive buildings that are now ruins of the Palatine Hill in Rome. That would be awesome, although it would take a while, because, as we know, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Jay Patel is also known as Jay Grap says, Maybe I would want to see the asteroid hit Earth, the one that yielded the dinosaurs. And, you know, I just have to say, it’s so fitting that Jay Grap wants to watch things die. That is just pretty on Brand for the the monster that is Jay Grabe. 

[01:01:07] Listen, Jay Patel, I like you. Don’t let him get to you. 

[01:01:12] She’s got terrible taste in people. God you were going to say man I. Well yeah. Just terrible taste in men, terrible taste in people. She’s just, she’s terribly untrustworthy. 

[01:01:23] So one of the one of the other things that I super just like it’s a little thing. Mark Watney is gathering rock samples and he he does it in case he can bring them home. And I didn’t realize that when he got to the to the MAV that he was going to be able to talk to Earth again. Yeah. And so I’m very excited for him. B, I love that he’s he’s doing this as a just in case. And because he knows that it would make all the science geeks at home really happy. And it just it shows what a good guy he is 

[01:02:02] and what a scientist like he as much as this is about survival, it is still about the science. He still wants to explore Mars. He wants to learn. He wants to gather samples. That’s who he 

[01:02:11] is. And to me, I was like, oh, acts of service. Yeah, I love you. This this Mark Watney is totally my kind of guy. 

[01:02:20] Yes, yeah, yeah. Mark Watney is deep huff and puff and 

[01:02:24] hot to trot for Mark Watney. 

[01:02:26] Yeah. Yeah. And I yeah. I love that he’s he doesn’t forget the science. He could just make this all about his survival, but he doesn’t. And the other thing that’s interesting about that is, you know, eventually there’s going to be injuries for and an area is five and you should go back for those rocks. Like that’s that is a treasure trove, because if you just land in this one spot, you’re going to have samples from for, you know, thousands of kilometers just already cataloged. You have to do is pick them up. 

[01:02:57] Can you imagine the geologist like if he has to leave them and he you know, because I would imagine that Aries four is still going to go to this spot because that’s where things are being dropped off. Could be. So can you just imagine the geologist being like, oh, 

[01:03:11] right, exactly. Yeah. Whoever whoever deals with the rocks on Aries for just being like a kid in a candy shop like Christmas morning, because here are the big pile of bags for Markwayne. Yeah. Yeah. 

[01:03:23] Um, awesome. So then we hit a premise again. Yes. And. Martinez and Lewis are talking about Mark’s survival. 

[01:03:29] Yep, and I just I love Martinez Martinez like there’s something, you know, for him. It’s obviously at least somewhat religious faith, like he has faith in in Mark. But he does specify that it’s faith in Mark. He’s not he’s not trusting in God. He’s trusting in Mark. And that, you know, Mars has tried to kill him so many times already and he’s still here. And so Luis is really concerned. And Martinez just in Martinez, just like now, he’s going to be fine. 

[01:03:55] What’s going to be Lewis when he says to have faith? Lewis is like she I think I think it’s written that she kind of looks at him sadly, and she’s like, you know, I’m not religious and I love that it’s written with this kind of sadness because she wants to you can tell that she wishes she had this right now, that it would help her feel good about about Mark living. But Martinez still points out you think he’s going to live like underneath a 

[01:04:25] hundred bucks now. You know, he’s 

[01:04:27] going to you know, he’s going to let 

[01:04:28] you give it. You get it. 

[01:04:29] Yeah. And I I’m I’m so Lewis and the smile and in that moment because not because of the religious thing, but it’s I’m an optimist like through and through. However, I often fight against it because 

[01:04:43] I’m a reluctant optimist. You don’t want to be an option. I know you 

[01:04:46] are, but I am and and idealist. And it’s because I don’t it’s because I don’t like 

[01:04:53] seeing the good in life. 

[01:04:55] I listen, I hate getting my hopes up and I hate being wrong. And so if my optimism leads me to be wrong, it really makes me mad. So I kind of feel like in this in this scene, I would totally be on Lewis’s side of I cannot put all of my eggs into this basket of believing that he’s going to make it out alive. And it’s sad. But also, on the other hand, when we go back to Mark, he’s an optimist and he’s so excited about the easy, quote unquote, navigation that he has to look forward to. 

[01:05:30] And I love. So, you know, he stops and he’s he’s trying to hit the crater in a specific spot and he stops because he thinks he’s in the wrong spot. So he walks up to the rim of the crater, which first off, what an awesome view on Mars. Lacy and I recently visited Meteor Crater Park in Arizona. And that alone is all inspiring. 

[01:05:52] You guys. They’re like, hey, can you see the flag that we planted in the middle of this crater? And you’re like, what in the world are you talking about? And then they’ve got those, like, telescope things. And you’re like, oh, my God, there’s actually a flag down there. Oh. And they put like crater 

[01:06:04] is so much bigger than I realized. 

[01:06:06] Oh, when the rock over there, that’s not a tiny rock that rocks the size of a house. But humans, our eyes are just they suck. Yeah. And it’s fascinating 

[01:06:15] to go to that depth, you know, but perspective gets out. He walks to the edge of this crater. And I love you know, everybody’s been talking about how is he going to figure out about the dust storm? How is he going to figure out in time about the dust storm? And this is such a plausible way to figure out about the dust storm, because he looks out on the rim of this crater and he can’t see the far end. And he’s like, that’s weird. And so he looks back at the path that he came and he can see like 50 kilometers away. There’s that, you know, that thing he passed. And it looks this way and he can’t see that far. And he starts thinking, why would that be true? 

[01:06:50] And that thing that’s 50 kilometers away, he’s like, I should be able to see that more clearly. 

[01:06:55] Yeah, but but it’s way hazier this way. And that means that there’s more haze in one direction than in the other. And then the power cell or the solar panels haven’t been working as well. And he starts putting it together. And it’s so plausible that he would have figured it out this way in time. Yeah, he didn’t have to go deep into the dust storm to figure it out. It’s absolutely the view is obscured that way. Not that way. 

[01:07:23] Dust storm and brilliant. And it speaks to his observation skills. Yes. What I I was tallying up Mark’s confusion about the dust storm, because first he thinks that the reason he’s not getting as much power out of the solar panels is because the equipment is aging, which is reasonable because we know that Hermes is struggling with equipment malfunctions because it’s aging. Right. So totally makes sense. And then he thinks he’s fucked up the navigation and what it could be because he ends up at the top of this crater and he’s like, wait, crap, how did I get here? And he he blames it on himself. And it could be a him thing. It could also not be he he can still see Phobos and the Knibb, whatever the star. But he’s he’s working by observation, as Venkat said, and it so it wouldn’t be terribly noticeable that the visibility is down. And that’s why he’s not as observing as well as he should be able to. So I think it’s interesting. So he’s got these two. He doesn’t have a third like assumption before he realizes now and there was something really lovely about the the observation skills 

[01:08:36] and the deductions. 

[01:08:37] Yeah, the deductions that he’s he makes a couple of reasonable assumptions and then realizes he’s wrong. Yes. It’s not him and it’s not his equipment. 

[01:08:47] So much scarier. 

[01:08:49] It’s so much scarier. Yeah. 

[01:08:51] Um, he does there’s a great line. It’s not even the whole sentence, but it really stood out to me because I feel like it’s sort of the the undercurrent of this entire book, which is I need to figure out how to figure out. And then he keeps going. But that that is the margin that is. Markwayne, I need to figure out how to figure out. Yes. 

[01:09:08] You know, one of the quotes that I love is he talks about how he can’t wait to be a grand parent because he will get to say to his grandkids, when I was younger, I had to walk on the rim of a crater uphill in an EVA suit on Mars. You little shit. You hear me? Mars? Yeah. 

[01:09:28] Wil Wheaton, by the way, makes an absolute meal out of that. It’s hilarious. He does this old crotchety grandpa thing like that or whatever, you know. Yeah. On Mars, you little shit. 

[01:09:40] It’s hilarious. I just there is something like I imagine my grandpa saying that and I feel like eventually it would get old, but there’s a certain amount of it gets old because jokes can get old and 

[01:09:55] jokes, but not puns. 

[01:09:57] And but there’s like this there would be a pride, there’d be a certain amount of pride. It’s like, OK, Grandpa, shut up. But yeah, you’re right. You know, 

[01:10:06] for the rest of Marquart in his life, he gets the the absolute trump card on anybody complaining about hardship. Oh yeah. Mars past. Just absolute. There’s no competing. 

[01:10:18] Um, then we have we go back to Earth and we’ve got Mindy and OK, you guys, I love her because she is changing her sleep schedule every single day by 40 minutes to keep it. Keep up with 

[01:10:34] Margaret. Mark. Yeah. This is, by the way, a thing that NASA employees really do. People working on, like the the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and these sorts of things will maintain a schedule of Mars time where, you know, a Martian day is twenty four hours and forty minutes. So they will every day they’ll go to bed. Forty minutes later they’ll wake up forty minutes later. And so I actually saw a video where they were talking about how like the employees at the Denny’s close to mission control know all the people who are working on the Mars missions because they’ll show up for breakfast at like two a.m. and then they’ll show up for breakfast at three a.m. and then show up for breakfast at four a.m., which just like rotates through. Yeah. And, you know, every month or so they’ve done a full cycle and they come back full circle. They’ve just lost a day. 

[01:11:20] There’s I have this like a little heart swells for her. I was like, oh, a water hero points, hero points or something that I’ve randomly handed out since high school. I don’t currently remember how they started, but yeah, she gets she definitely gets some hero points for for her sweetness. I don’t know, there’s just something lovely. And of course, wanting to get some to you for figuring the dust storm out before NASA thought he would. And I have a little bit like this. I have this conflicting feeling about NASA here because it seems like they should trust it by now. Yeah. That he’s he’s overcome so many things and he’s figured so many things out and he has defied them. You know, I’m going no, I’m going to take apart the water reclaimer. Screw you guys. Like he he is confident and capable and simultaneously it’s reasonable for them to be like, no, we’re going to check his work that he’s already checked because it means they make a ton of backup plans. And so there’s this like I had this conflicting feeling, you know, the feeling. 

[01:12:27] It’s interesting, you know, as we’ve talked about before, Andy Weir has talked about how the Martian was meant to be sort of science’s answer to the religious film. You know, you see these movies made by Christians for Christians in which the answer to the solution is to put your faith in God. And so it sort of reinforces this religious message, message that the way you handle a situation is you reaffirm your faith in God. And so that was the Martian. But for science, that every time he comes across an obstacle, the the solution to that obstacle is you figure it out, you go back to the math, you go back to the science, you figure out a solution. And that is sort of the constant affirmation of the Martian. But that being said, you know, religious communities often have a downside to their to their teachings. And the sort of the blind spot of science is that they don’t have faith. No, they don’t trust anything. And if they don’t see how it works, then they are they tend not to believe that it does work. And so. I like the fact that this is a community of scientists and they don’t know how someone could detect a dust storm, so they’re going to assume that he won’t detect the dust. Yeah, and you know what? That’s sometimes. Well, it’s true. And sometimes you haven’t thought of a way in this instance. You didn’t think of what if he takes a grand vista in and notices that it’s hazy? Yeah. 

[01:13:51] And you know what? That’s actually that’s a really lovely way to put it. Every community has its upsides and downsides. And this is science. And yeah, I, I would not have considered that. 

[01:14:01] So I am and I am loathe to say bad things about science. Science is my my homeboy. But that being said, one area that science does have a blind spot is scientists and doctors. And basically anybody who lives their life by science generally has a blind spot which can be described as if I don’t understand how. I don’t think it does and. Yeah, yeah. 

[01:14:27] Fascinating. Well, I think that wraps it up for 

[01:14:29] it for this. Not too much longer than normal. 

[01:14:32] A little bit longer. Thank you for sticking around. 

[01:14:34] Thank you for watching 

[01:14:36] for this slightly longer episode 

[01:14:39] and welcome to YouTube Live. Thank you for tuning in for our first episode on YouTube live. I think it’s gone. Well, we might turn off the camera and be told by our producer that everything was on fire this entire time and we didn’t realize it. But I don’t expect that’s the case. Know we’re going to be doing YouTube live for a little while longer, just trying it out. So be sure to tune in next week here again on YouTube live 

[01:15:01] and just know that we’ll be doing chapters twenty three, twenty four and twenty five. Yes. We’ve only got a couple more episodes before we’re done with more. Oh my gosh. And then we’re going to move on to something else and we’ll let you know what it is. Yeah. Feel free to blow up our socials with ideas of what you’d like to see. I can’t promise that we’re going to do it. We’ve already got a couple of ideas up our sleeves. 

[01:15:23] We’ve got some good ones, but we always want to know about more movies and TV shows and books that we don’t know about. The Synthesis is all about analyzing scientific and historical accuracy in film and television. 

[01:15:35] Think at this point it’s also psychological. Yep. 

[01:15:38] So if you know of any movies or TV shows that are really scientifically accurate or really historically accurate, be sure to share them. We would love to check them out. 

[01:15:47] And if we are ever in like a group funk together, we can pick one that we can just that’s just chaos and roast it, right? Yeah. So, um, you know, let us know what you’d like to see and we’ll see if we feel like accommodating it. 

[01:16:02] In the meantime, tune in next Thursday, same regular time, five 30 Pacific, for chapters, 23 through 25 of The Martian here on the Synthesis. 

[01:16:12] Great. We’ll see you then, guys.