This week we continue our journey across the solar system and visit what will definitely be one of the top tourist destinations in the distant future: Saturn. This gas giant may not hold as many records as its giant neighbor Jupiter, but the dazzling ring system that the planet is known for make it a fan favorite. And today, we get to visit!
Even before telescopes could reveal the beauty of its rings, ancient observers held the yellowish light in the sky in high esteem. Ancient Babylonians recorded its movements meticulously, and in ancient Greece the planet was known by the name Phainon, later to be called the “star of Saturn” by the Romans. Saturn was the Roman god of agriculture and wealth, appropriate given the planet’s tendency to grow and fade in brightness over the years – much like fortune can. This cycle of gradual brightening and darkening is caused by Saturn’s rings. As the planet appears to rotate in relation to Earth, the axial tilt of the planet causes the rings to be seen more from above, below or from the side, at which point they’re almost invisible. That reflects different amounts of light, altering the planet’s appearance in the sky.
The astrological symbol used for Saturn is a stylized sickle representing the god’s agricultural association, and everyone’s favorite day of the week – Saturday – still bears the Roman name for the planet assigned around the 2nd century AD.
To the Hindu astrologers, the planet was known as “Shani,” the judge of everyone based on their behavior and deeds in life. Ancient Hebrews called Saturn “Shabbathai,” attributed to the angel Cassiel and governed by the beneficial spirit Agyal and darker spirit Zazl.
Detailed observation of the planet couldn’t take place without the aid of a telescope and while Galileo’s were powerful enough to see Jupiter’s moons, he mistakenly believed that Saturn’s rings were actually moons alongside the planet. It was Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens and his improved telescope who first recognized and recorded the rings in 1659.
Over the next several centuries the moons began to be uncovered which we’ll get into more detail during the next episode, and the first low-resolution images were obtained at a distance of only 20,000 kilometers by Pioneer 11 as it flew by. Pioneer also studied the rings more closely, identifying an additional thin ring as well as making note that many of the “gaps” noticed earlier were not quite empty after all.
In 1980 Voyager 1 completed a flyby as it passed through, accomplishing the first high-resolution photography of the planetary features as well as images of many of the moons. Scientists in charge of the mission decided to sacrifice part of Voyager 1’s mission in order to alter course for a closer look at the moon Titan. They learned that Titan’s thick atmosphere is impenetrable to visible wavelengths of light and were unfortunately unable to obtain images of the landscape through the quick clouds, and as a result of the mission modification Voyager 1 was unable to visit Uranus, Neptune or Pluto.
The following year in 1981 Voyager 2 passed by Saturn to obtain more high-resolution images of the rings to track any changes since Voyager 1’s visit, and it also scanned the atmosphere of the planet with radar to measure temperature and density. Voyager 2’s innovative spinning module was unfortunately stuck for part of the flyby and was unable to take more planned photos, and as it passed by the spacecraft was able to use Saturn’s gravity to swing onward to Uranus.
Altogether the two spacecraft were able to identify several new satellites interacting with the ring system and observed previously unknown gaps within the rings.
In 2004, NASA spacecraft Cassini-Huygens entered orbit around Saturn for an extended mission to study the moons and rings of Saturn. This was an ambitious plan to extensively study the moons and atmosphere of Saturn, and featured a detachable probe named for Huygens that would fall into the atmosphere of Titan to collect valuable data.
Photographs from the orbital Cassini module captured a previously undiscovered ring, and fascinating images of the atmosphere in unprecedented detail. As a final maneuver, Cassini accomplished a series of impressive passes through the gaps between Saturn and its ring system before completing the mission by entering the atmosphere.
The accumulation of telescopic images over the centuries as well as more recent sensory readings and photographs from these spacecraft have provided us a wealth of information about the planet. Many of its most interesting features were complete surprises to learn, and there are still many mysteries left to solve. Let’s dive in.
The second largest planet behind Jupiter, Saturn orbits the sun about nine times the distance that Earth does. Even clipping through the solar system at 9.7 km/s, it takes Saturn about 29 ½ years to complete one full trip around the Sun. As with most Gas Giants, it’s difficult to assign a length of day for Saturn, as the swirling atmosphere travels at different rotational speeds depending on where you look.
Saturn’s atmosphere primarily consists of hydrogen and helium, the same main components as the Sun and Jupiter, suggesting it formed along with the others in the early solar system from the same nebular dust before settling into its current orbit. Interestingly, Saturn’s density is less than that of normal water: if you had a big enough bathtub, Saturn would literally float in it!
Despite being around the same size as Jupiter, Saturn is much less dense with only about a third the mass of its larger neighbor. Together Jupiter and Saturn account for over 90% of the total planetary mass in the solar system, and as a result have likely done much over the 4 or 5 billion years they’ve been around to stabilize and maintain the orbits of the other planets where they are.
A particular orbital oddity about Saturn is that it does not appear to have any trojan asteroids at all. As we learned last week, Jupiter – admittedly much more massive – shepherds an estimated two million small asteroids along its orbit path ahead and behind it as it travels around the Sun. Mars, Neptune and even Earth have been found with small trojan asteroids, but somehow Saturn has none to be found. Fortunately for travelers on approach like us, fewer asteroids to dodge is pretty much always a positive.
Approaching from inside Saturn’s orbit, we’ll enjoy a full-lit front view of the gas giant as we get closer. The rich yellow-beige of the atmosphere shines brightly, and from here the icy rings twinkle brilliantly.
The ring system is impressive, and hugs the planet closely, well within the orbits of most of the larger moons. Striking banding patterns make it look as though there are dozens of individual rings nestled tightly together – which there are – but for classification purposes the bands have been grouped into fourteen rings. On today’s trip we’ll focus only on the inner rings named alphabetically A through F – that is, the rings that are commonly shown as visible bands around the planet. There are some larger rings farther out, but we’ll explore those in more depth in next week’s episode. We’ll imagine a close approach above these rings for a great view as we get closer.
Passing below us first we’ll see the faint F ring, outermost of the discrete rings and discovered first in 1979 by the Pioneer 11 mission. While relatively thin at only a few hundred kilometers wide compared to the other inner rings, the one has a very interesting visual feature – there’s actually a wispy spiral strand coiled around the main ring. This ring was likely formed when the moons Prometheus and Pandora collided sometime in the past. Now the two moons march just alongside the ring, Prometheus inside and Pandora outside. As Prometheus passes by, you might notice a “ripple” effect trailing it within the ring. These ripples are waves caused by the gravity of the moon when it gets near, pulling the smaller coil of material closer and closer to it.
Leaving the F ring behind, we’ll move across what might seem like a 2,600 kilometer band of empty space at first but there is actually a sheet of dust spanning the gap. This region is called the “Roche Division” after French physicist Édouard Roche and it separates the F and A rings. This shouldn’t be confused with the “Roche Limit” which is a term for the distance at which a large object becomes too close to a planet and will be torn apart by tidal gravitation forces. It just so happens that the Roche Division is coincidentally near to the Roche limit of Saturn, which is why these inner rings have not coalesced into a new moon.
The A ring will appear next for us, a comparably massive 14,600 kilometer wide ring. The boundaries of the ring are very sharp, and the ring is about 10 to 30 meters thick. Before we get far we’ll encounter the Keeler Gap, discovered by Voyager. The gap is only 42-kilometers wide and carved out by the small moon Daphnis. As we pass above the moon we’ll see great waves rising from the ring to a height of about 1.5 kilometers.
We’ll witness more of the A ring pass before we reach the next landmark (or… ring-mark?), the Enke Gap. Much larger than the Keeler, the Enke gap spans 325 kilometers and forms a path for the moon Pan. We can see three small intertwined ringlets within the gap from here, and spiral density waves within the ring on either side of the gap due to Pan’s gravitation and that of some small moons outside of the rings.
As the remaining A ring passes below us, you might notice small propeller-shaped wave patterns in the ring. These are caused by small moonlets passing near the ring, and it’s estimated that there could be thousands of them in the A ring.
The boundary between the A and B rings are a darker portion called the Cassini Division after their discoverer Giovanni Cassini in 1675. He can be forgiven for believing the space is empty, but Voyager revealed that the 4,800-kilometer-wide band is actually filled with many small ringlets of darker material similar to that found in the C ring.
The largest and brightest ring, B ring, now shines ahead of us, only 5 to 15 meters thick but more densely packed with particles from the size of dust up to the size of a house. The optical depth is greater than 5 in some parts of the ring, meaning up to 90% of the light shone from the Sun is blocked. The outer edge of the ring contains strange structures, they look like great plumes or ridges jutting out perpendicular to the ring, sometimes as high as 2.5 kilometers from the ring itself. These structures are mysterious, but likely caused by unseen moonlets.
Continuing inward, we reach the interface between B and C rings, called the Colombo Gap. The gap contains a small ring called the Titan ringlet named for the moon, which is actually located far out beyond the rings. It’s named for Titan due to an orbital resonance with the planet, which has slightly elongated the ring into an elliptical shape, rather than circular. The shape of the ring moves with the moon, so that the longer part of the ringlet always points toward the moon.
The C ring is composed of darker material, which is also sparser than the material in the B ring, resulting in a transparent, dimmer ring than the brilliant one we just passed. It’s also much thinner than the B ring at only 17,500 kilometers.
Marking the boundary of the C ring is another gap, called the Maxwell Gap which also contains a single ringlet by the same name. There is a wave-like structure in this ringlet hinting at the influence of a moon, but as of today no small moon has yet been discovered to explain the waves.
Now we arrive at the innermost ring, D ring. There are wave patterns observed within D ring as well, but scientists noticed there is no identifiable cause, and the waves appear to be dissipating over time. This suggests that the waves were caused by disruptions from passing debris falling to the planet. Similar patters observed in Jupiter’s ring caused by material from comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 support this theory. In 1980 Voyager 1 identified three ringlets within ring D, and by the time Cassini arrived 25 years later the innermost had actually moved 200 kilometers closer to the planet. It’s an example of the dynamic nature of the ring system, and a reminder that as material is lost either to ejection or falling into Saturn, the rings aren’t permanent.
The origin and fate of the ring system are still open questions. Some scientists believe the rings are very young, pointing to the fact that the ice particles still appear relatively fresh when it is known they should darken over time as more dust and debris accumulate. The theory proposed by Édouard Roche in the 1800’s is that the rings were once part of a moon named Veritas. This moon would have been destroyed, either torn apart by tidal forces at the – you guessed it – Roche Limit, or obliterated by a collision with another large object. The debris then eventually migrated into the current arrangement.
Cassini spacecraft data support this theory that they are younger, between 10 and 100 million years old, and by measuring and extrapolating depletion rates within these theoretical parameters it is thought the rings could completely disappear within the next 300 million years.
A competing theory is that the debris are actually remnants of a small planet that was torn apart by Saturn much earlier in its history, while still surrounded by a gaseous nebula. The planet’s heavier core would have been devoured by Saturn, leaving the stripped outer layers which could explain why there is so little rocky material currently in the rings.
There’s also a theory that the rings are accumulated from micrometeoroids over time, which would need a much longer timeframe to accumulate – more like a billion years.
The other mystery is how much longer the rings will last. One method scientists have tried to estimate this is by estimating the rate at which material is measured to be falling into Saturn. Charged ice material can be pulled along magnetic field lines by gravity in a process called “ring rain,” which the Keck Observatory in Hawaii calculated to occur at between 432 to 2,870 kilograms of matter per second. Added to good ol’ fashioned gravity pulling charge-neutral material to the planet, which the Cassini mission measured to be between 4,800 to 44,000 kilograms per second, scientists believe the rings will be completely gone in less than 300 million years, maybe as little as 100 million years.
So as you can see, there’s a lot to still find out when it comes to the rings – but we still have a journey to complete. Looming ahead of us, filling our view is the massive atmosphere of Saturn. Before we dive in, we’ll take a loop around for a look at the poles.
Heading north first, we’ll notice the aurora as we approach, a product of the magnetic field surrounding the planet. Slightly weaker than Earth’s – despite being more than 90 times as massive – the magnetosphere deflects solar wind particles from the sun and extends a modest one million kilometers behind the planet.
The north pole is consumed by a massive vortex with a curious hexagonal shape first observed by Voyager. Each side of the hexagon is longer than Earth at about 14,500 kilometers long and rotates once about every 10 hours and 40 minutes, apparently the same rate of rotation for the interior of the planet. The hexagonal pattern is an unsolved mystery, but most scientists believe it is caused by a standing wave pattern, supported by other polygonal shape patterns achievable in rotating fluids within a laboratory setting.
Zipping on around to the south pole (a trip which would have taken the Cassini spacecraft over three days to complete, by the way – aren’t virtual explorations great?) we find another vortex spinning, curiously this time in a circular shape.
The massive hurricane-like storm observed by the Cassini craft sits right at the pole, the size of Earth with a clearly defined eyewall and winds churning at 550 kilometers per hour. Eyewalls have not yet been observed in any storms outside of Earth – not even Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – which makes this a unique find.
Returning to the equatorial region, we can see banding patterns similar to Jupiter, although more faintly defined. They’re named according to similar classifications as Jupiter as well, but don’t let their faint blending fool you – the winds on Saturn are much faster than Jupiter. Large, persistent storms similar to the Great Red Spot of Jupiter are possible on Saturn, but even the standard winds are faster, blasting up to 1,800 kilometers per hour at the equator.
So buckle up as we head down.
First we’ll encounter the upper cloud layers which are mostly made up of ammonia ice, starting our descent at a temperature as low as 100 Kelvin or negative 280 degrees Fahrenheit. The pressure here is roughly comparable to what we experience on the surface of Earth.
As we descend and pressure begins to build, the clouds become water ice, transitioning to a band of ammonium hydrosulfide ice where temperatures rise to about 200 K or negative 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Eventually we reach an aqueous layer of water droplets with ammonia. Here pressure can reach about twenty times what we experience on Earth, with temperatures up to 330 Kelvin or 134 degrees Fahrenheit.
We’ll continue our fall until we reach the base of the atmosphere which begins to transition into a layer of liquid helium-saturated molecular hydrogen and eventually a metallic hydrogen inner layer. The interior of Saturn is hot – hotter than scientists expected to find. The planet radiates two and a half times more energy than it receives from the Sun. Scientists theorize the heat is generated by “raining out” of helium droplets into the less dense hydrogen liquid which causes warming friction and leaves the outer layers depleted of helium. Whatever the cause is determined to be, temperatures here in the interior can reach up to almost 12,000 K or 21,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Finally we reach Saturn’s core, which unlike Jupiter’s is theorized to be completely solid. Scientists have estimated the core to be about 25,000 kilometers wide with as much as 9 to 22 times as much mass as planet Earth crunched in there. And here concludes our journey. It would be nice to think we might find the remnants of the Cassini orbiter, but would have certainly been vaporized long before reaching the core.
We’ve come a long way on our journey today. We witnessed the dancing and rippling waves of the rings of Saturn before taking a dive into the turbulent and hostile gas giant, and we learned more about the important and inspiring work of the scientists who have made today’s journey possible. In the next episode we’ll tour the many moons of Saturn and learn what lessons they teach us about our solar system and the universe at large – and about what mysteries they still hold for future scientists to discover.
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Thank you all for listening, and as always, happy terraforming.
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Today we’ll be visiting Jupiter – one of the most historically significant, enigmatic, and downright dangerous locations in the Solar System. As you probably already know, Jupiter belongs to a class of planets called the “Gas Giants” which share unique characteristics that complicate visitation by humans. Currently the technology simply doesn’t exist to keep humans safe while visiting the planet, but with the aid of thousands of years of human observation from afar and remotely, we can do our best to imagine the conditions we might experience if we were to explore the planet in person. Before taking our imaginary dive into the clouds and storms of Jupiter, we’ll illustrate the planet and its characteristics from the perspective of the scientific observers, satellites and probes that contribute to our modern understanding of the giant planet. That being said, you may notice that conspicuously absent from today’s discussion is an in-depth look at the staggeringly diverse array of moons around Jupiter – we’ll be devoting an entire episode to those later.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, but simply saying that doesn’t quite convey the – well, gravity – of the fact. Jupiter is huge. If you combined the mass of all the other planets in the solar system, and then doubled it, you still wouldn’t come close to the mass of Jupiter. It is so massive that rather than directly orbiting the Sun, both objects actually orbit around a shared gravitational fulcrum just outside the surface of the Sun. Much like your body would lean back as you swing a heavy bucket of water around you, the Sun leans to accommodate the large mass of Jupiter. By measuring that lean, astronomers could actually approximate the mass of Jupiter without even having to visit the planet – but that hasn’t stopped us from constantly striving for a closer look anyway.
To the unaided eye, Jupiter appears in the Earth sky as a bright star, not quite as bright as Venus but still easily viewable. Of course, as a planet it follows a regular path across the sky against the backdrop of stationary stars, which made it an object of interest and importance for many early observers.
Among the earliest recorded observations of the planet are those of the ancient Babylonians, dating back to the 7th or 8th century BC, and a recent analysis published in 2016 claims that detailed calculations on Jupiter’s velocity were conducted in Babylon around 50 BC. The Babylonians recorded the nearly 12-year cycle of Jupiter across the sky and used it as the foundation of their zodiac calendar, associating the planet with the Mesopotamian god Marduk, patron god of Babylon. It is thought that the ancient Chinese also used Jupiter’s 12-year cycle as the basis for their own zodiac, surviving in the observance of the twelve animal years. Elsewhere in Asia, Hindu astrologers revered the planet by naming it Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods. They would refer to it as the “Guru” which appropriately translates literally as “Heavy One”.
The name Jupiter used today comes from the Romans who associated the planet with the chief god of the Roman pantheon and translates as “Father Sky-God”. Jupiter corresponds to the ancient Greek god Zeus, the name is literally a transformation of “Zeus Pater” or “Father Zeus.” But the Greeks knew the planet as Phaethon which translates to “shining one” or “blazing star”. So we can see that many ancient cultures observed and tracked the planet’s movements, but it wasn’t until the advent of optic technologies like lenses and mirrors gave rise to telescopes that astronomers really got a good look at the unique features of the planet.
The biggest name discussed today in relation to Jupiter’s early scientific observations is easily Galileo Galilei. Galileo was born in 1564 in Pisa, Italy and is often praised as the father of modern science and the scientific method. He meticulously studied physics under the patronage of wealthy and powerful Italian rulers, and his defense of the theory called heliocentrism, that objects in the solar system orbit the Sun as opposed to the Earth, famously ran him afoul of the Catholic church – earning him much ridicule and even legal prosecution until his death under house arrest in 1642.
But during his life he vastly advanced the understanding of speed, velocity, and inertia, all foundational principles in our understanding of the physical world and astronomy. While commonly credited as the inventor of the telescope, Galileo actually based his designs on a hazy description of the device that Dutch astronomer Hans Lippershey attempted to patent in 1605, without ever having seen one in person. These first telescopes were simple cylinders with a convex lens on one end and a concave eyepiece on the other and could manage a magnification of about 20 times.
Galileo’s early telescopes were intended for terrestrial use, to observe weather or distant armies on land or sea – but someone as curious as Galileo was bound to point it skyward eventually. And a good thing he did! Galileo is credited as the first person to describe the topography of the moon, which until then had been believed to be a perfect sphere, as well as the rings of Saturn, sunspots, and in 1610 he first viewed the four largest of Jupiter’s moons which still bear his name today as the “Galilean moons”.
It was the observation of these moons and their regular cycles around Jupiter that solidified Galileo’s conviction in Copernican heliocentrism which directly contradicted the prevailing belief that all heavenly bodies circled the Earth. He was eventually forced to recant his conclusions and lived the rest of his life a prisoner of the Catholic Church in his own home.
Jupiter’s larger moons were easier to spot, but eventually telescopes became advanced enough to observe even more detail of the planet. In the 1660’s fellow Italian Giovanni Cassini described spots and colorful bands in the planet with enough detail to be able to estimate how quickly the planet was rotating. English astronomer Robert Hooke was in competition with Cassini over who may have been the first to see Jupiter’s famous great red spot, but the earliest known drawing is attributed to the German astronomer and pharmacist Heirich Schwabe in 1831. Thanks to the careful notes of many of these early observers between the 18th and 20th centuries, we have seen that the great red spot has undergone periods of growth and fading over the years. But it wouldn’t be until the advent of space flight that humans would get their first up-close view of the atmosphere.
In 1973 the first flyby of Jupiter was completed by the Pioneer 10 probe. Along with Pioneer 11 which passed Jupiter in 1974, they were not equipped with photographic cameras, but contained a collection of sensors and detectors for magnetism and radiation. The data they provided helped confirm many unobservable details from the size of the magnetosphere around the planet, interaction of the planet with the solar wind, and chemical composition of the atmosphere. Anticipating the potential hazards for a spacecraft in crossing the asteroid belt, they were outfitted with twelve special meteoroid detector panels that could report on any small impacts encountered along the journey. The Pioneer probes were actually conceived as test flights for later launches that would take advantage of a rare alignment of the planets to visit Jupiter and Saturn, which would eventually be known as the Voyager missions.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 both reached Jupiter in 1979 and provided most of the rich color images that many of us are familiar with from our childhood textbooks. In addition to the photographic cameras used to generate these images, the Voyagers were also equipped with their own arrays of sensitive magnetometers, spectrometers and detectors to collect similar readings to the Pioneers. Building on experience from these earlier missions, scientists were also able to utilize the probe’s telecommunications radio to measure physical characteristics of the planets and their moons like density, gravitation, mass and atmospheric composition.
Not all of the equipment on the Pioneer and Voyager probes was scientific, however. Each of the four spacecraft also carried a cultural message. The Pioneer spacecraft each carry a special plaque designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and illustrated by Carl Sagan’s wife, Linda Salzman Sagan. Etched in gold-anodized aluminum, the plaque is designed to visually demonstrate humanity’s current understanding of science and convey some information about who we are. It includes a representation of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen, a universal constant measurement of length and time and establishes it as a basis for other measurements throughout the drawing.
Prominent in the image is a drawing of a man and woman whose height is provided in units of the hydrogen transition frequency, as well as a radial burst pattern of fifteen lines with their own distances recorded in the same units. These fifteen lines show the distances of various pulsars from the sun and their orientation in relation to the sun as well as the frequency period of their pulses for identification, allowing an advanced civilization to pinpoint the exact source of the message, the location of Earth. Finally, each includes a map depicting the path of the probes through the solar system and out into wider space and a silhouette of the spacecraft itself. Encoded within these measurements are depictions of various other measurements and characteristics intended both to demonstrate humanity’s understanding of the physical world as well as share information about ourselves and where we’re from. It was a hugely important message that we sent out into the stars, but the scientists behind the Voyager missions decided to provide even more information.
Affixed to the side of both Voyager probes is a copy of a gold-plated audio-visual disk, known as the “Golden Record” – just in case some alien civilization should ever intercept them. These disks are a sort of time capsule of human civilization and life on Earth, including music compositions, whale songs, and a baby crying as well as greetings in more than 50 languages. Each disk also contains an etching of some of the pictographs from the Pioneer plaques in addition to special instructions for how to read the contents of the disks.
All of these efforts are an interesting glimpse into a difficult question to answer: what is the most important information we could send to other advanced civilizations, and how can it be conveyed in a way that can be universally understood? It’s a question that didn’t have to be considered too seriously, but as these four spacecraft were the first ever that would exit our solar system, their status as potential interstellar messengers bearing a permanent record of humanity continues to draw interest and spark the imagination.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s get back to Jupiter – there’s still plenty of exploration to do there.
Never content with a simple fly-by mission, scientists conducted an extensive orbital mission for long-term observation in 1995 with the Galileo spacecraft to study Jupiter and its moons. Galileo was a special achievement of it’s time, utilizing a new design that featured a fixed portion for radiometric and spectrophotometric readings, with a separate spinning module to stabilize the craft and collect measurements from all directions. The Galileo satellite also included an entry probe which would offer the first-ever measurements from inside the atmosphere, including temperature, composition, cloud composition and radio signals.
The insights gained from the Galileo satellite were tremendous. In addition to confirming Jupiter’s 90% Hydrogen composition, wind speeds of over 400 miles per hour and temperatures reaching 570 degrees Fahrenheit before the entry probes were vaporized, the spacecraft also enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime show: the massive impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The comet had already been torn to pieces by tidal forces from a previous close call with Jupiter, so a bombardment of 21 impacts were observed as the fragments each collided with the planet. The largest of these is estimated to have released the equivalent of 6 million megatons of TNT, more than 600 times the power of the entire world’s nuclear arsenal combined. The result was a fireball visible from telescopes here on Earth, and a gaping dark spot in the cloud layer over 7,500 miles across.
The Galileo mission was definitely a big technological leap from the real Galileo’s quaint little telescope less than four hundred years prior, but one I’d like to think he would be proud to bear his name.
Following the Galileo mission is the ongoing Juno mission, which arrived at Jupiter in 2016 and continues valuable data collection even now, well past the budgeted mission end in 2018. The spacecraft managed to capture the first images of Jupiter’s north pole in 2016 and will manage a few more flybys of the planet and several of its moons before entering a controlled descent into the atmosphere in 2025. And in case you don’t think scientists have a sense of humor: Jupiter’s moons are named for Jupiter’s many lovers in Roman mythology, and the Juno mission to study those moons was named after Jupiter’s unhappy wife.
Now, the amount of data provided by these flyby and orbit missions is incredible, and will take years to completely analyze. But what kind of picture do they paint of Jupiter? What do the mountains of data show?
What we have learned is that Jupiter is very likely much older than the other planets in our solar system. Current models suggest that in the early solar system when the Sun was young, a solid core of water and other volatiles would have formed first, accumulating a gaseous atmosphere from the solar nebula before it dispersed.
Jupiter is mostly composed of hydrogen, so it’s a lot less dense than the rocky planets. To illustrate this fact, we can observe that while Jupiter’s mass is about equal to 318 Earths, its volume (the amount of space it takes up) is equal to more than 1,300 Earths. Interestingly, it is believed that Jupiter is about as large as a planet of its mass and age could possibly be – if it had any more mass the volume would actually shrink and become more dense due to the added gravity.
Gas giants like Jupiter are usually composed of hydrogen and helium, with an outer cloud layer made up of molecular hydrogen gas that gradually transitions to a liquid or supercritical fluid gas-liquid hybrid as pressure builds deeper beneath the clouds. It is believed that many gas giants contain a small solid core at the center of the planet, but from the Juno mission in 2016 scientists observed that Jupiter’s core is more dispersed, possibly as the result of a massive planet-sized impact early after formation.
The stunning photographs provided by the spacecraft visits have revealed a fascinatingly dynamic atmosphere. Because Jupiter does boast the deepest atmosphere in the solar system, it would be easy (and incorrect) to imagine that Jupiter is mostly made of wispy clouds. In fact, the atmosphere doesn’t actually account for much of the total radius. Of a mean planetary radius over 43,000 miles, the atmosphere only accounts for about the first 3,000 miles or so, near 7% of the total radius. Still very impressive as atmospheres go, but not quite a ball of air.
That thick atmosphere is divided into colorful bands we can easily see in the photographs. The lighter areas are called “zones” and the darker bands are called “belts,” and they’re fast-moving currents moving in opposite directions from each other. The color and intensity of these zones can vary over time, but most are stable enough that scientists have named them. The varying colors are caused by compounds called chromophores, probably consisting of phosphorus, sulfur or hydrocarbons being stirred up from deeper in the atmosphere and changing colors as they interact with the sunlight. Wind speeds can reach over 220 miles per hour in these streams, and where the bands meet intense turbulence and storms can occur.
The most notable of these storms is the Great Red Spot, possibly observed as early as the 1660’s by Hooke or Cassini as we discussed earlier, but definitely described in 1831 and closely tracked ever since. It has been shrinking over the last century, with small pieces observed in 2019 actually fracturing off into smaller storms that dissipate over time.
Currently the storm is still quite formidable, especially by Earth standards. It towers over five miles taller than surrounding clouds and stretches over 10,000 miles wide, or just a bit larger than the Earth. Similar to hurricanes on Earth, the center of the storm is relatively stagnant while the edges of the storm blast at a staggering 268 miles per hour. With no solid objects to break the storm’s momentum it has continued to churn for centuries, but some scientists believe it may dissipate within the next 20 years.
The Galileo mission provided evidence for lightning within Jupiter’s stormy clouds, which hint at the presence of water clouds perhaps below the outer layer of ammonia. These lightning blasts are a sight to behold, hundreds of times more powerful than any lightning on Earth and capable of producing dazzling shows high into the upper atmosphere.
And speaking of light shows, the north and south poles of Jupiter provide year-round entertainment. Here the powerful magnetosphere guides particles from the charged solar wind into dazzling interaction with the upper atmosphere, causing brilliant aurorae as we sometimes see on Earth.
If we dive deeper in the atmosphere, Jupiter becomes less familiar and difficult to imagine for humans accustomed to life on Earth. By about 700 miles below the surface of the clouds, you would notice funny things happening to the hydrogen surrounding you. Here the pressure and heat begin to build to such levels that the hydrogen behaves more and more like a liquid the further down you go. There is no distinct boundary between the states, but before long you would find yourself submerged in a transparent atmosphere of liquid hydrogen. As you dive deeper between 10,000 and 15,000 miles below the clouds the hydrogen molecular fluid begins to form metallic fluid. I would generally advise against opening the window of any vehicle which might survive such conditions, but if you’re strapped for cash it might be worth a try to strike it rich here. It’s been theorized that rainfall could be a regular occurrence here, but instead of water it would shower diamonds. Any conventional material protecting you would have vaporized long ago, but if you somehow had a working thermometer it would read almost 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit here.
If that sounds hot, just wait. As you approach the diffuse core, temperatures rise to over 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with an estimated pressure of 4,500 gigapascals – over 44 million times more air pressure than we experience here on the surface of Earth. If ears could exist down there, ours would definitely be popping.
This core is the source of some of the most awe-inspiring power in the solar system. Electric currents within generate the magnetosphere that causes the dazzling polar aurorae, the most extensive magnetic field we’ve encountered so far outside of the Sun itself. The field reaches all the way to Saturn, swallowing all of Jupiter’s moons and capturing and accelerating solar particles into bands of dangerously powerful radiation.
These radiation bands are extremely hazardous for both manned and unmanned spacecraft – much of the data and images collected by the visiting missions have been corrupted by their surprising strength. Human travelers would need to be incredibly well protected to venture anywhere Jupiter or it’s moons as the radiation fields enveloping them can be several thousand times more powerful than the belts surrounding Earth.
When it comes to space flight, there are plenty of reasons to be cautious. We have it pretty good here on Earth, and anywhere else we go will generally be pretty dangerous to visit – but Jupiter is in a class of its own in that regard. In 2022 and 2024 Europe and NASA will each launch missions to visit some of Jupiter’s moons, with more missions from NASA and China in the planning stages for possible launch later in the decade.
It may be generations before the technology exists to sufficiently protect human visitors, but in the meantime we’ll continue to send robots to quench our thirst for exploration.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our exploration of Jupiter today and hearing about some of the scientific leaps that have made our current understanding possible. We’re not done with Jupiter yet, though. In our next episode we’ll be taking a closer look at the diverse and fascinating network of moons and other satellites in orbit around this giant, and the interesting implications for human exploration and the continuing search for life outside of Earth.
In the meantime, be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already. Settle the Stars is available on pretty much every podcasting platform, and we’re also mirroring our episodes on YouTube at YouTube.com/EdgeworksEntertainment (and be sure to ring that bell so you know when there’s a new episode). We also have a patreon page at Patreon.com/EdgeworksEntertainment, where you can get early episodes and tons of other great rewards. The support of listeners like you is what makes this show possible, and I am so grateful to the people who have already joined!
Thank you all for listening, and as always, happy terraforming.
Settle the Stars is a proud member of the Edgeworks Nebula, a collection of intriguing and informative podcasts from Edgeworks Entertainment.
Today’s episode is special, we’ll be taking a break from our planet-by-planet exploration of the solar system and instead embarking on a whirlwind tour of the complex and dynamic system of moons orbiting Jupiter. These worlds range from rocky to icy, and from planet-sized spheres to small lopsided mounds, with a variety of compositions and characteristics that have scientists scratching their heads to this day. There are tantalizing hints of rich resources and potentially life-supporting regions that bode well for possible human exploration, and we’ll be taking a close look at many of the major objects in anticipation of what those first explorers might encounter. Much of the information we’ll discuss today is the result of the extensive Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo and Juno missions undertaken within the last century – we discussed these missions more in depth in the last episode about Jupiter, so if you haven’t checked that out, you might want to now for some context.
All done? Ok, welcome back. Let’s talk about the moons of Jupiter!
Viewed as a whole, there is a lot of ground to cover. There are currently 79 known moons in orbit around Jupiter, belonging to several groupings. The first is the regular satellites, which all have prograde orbits – that means they move in a counter-clockwise direction when viewed from above the north pole of Jupiter. That’s the same direction that most things in the solar system are moving. Innermost are the Amalthea group with four members which help maintain Jupiter’s small ring systems. Farther out are the Main Group of four large Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
The other broad grouping is the irregular satellites. These are much smaller and orbit much farther away, often on retrograde eccentric or non-circular orbits. There are some sub-families within this group that share similar orbital patterns and provide hints of a shared origin.
Most of these satellites have only recently been discovered, either by closer observation of one of the visiting spacecraft sent from Earth, or more commonly by advanced telescopes here at home. The four largest are known as the Galilean moons, named after their discoverer Galileo Galilei in 1609 or 1610. His discovery marked the first observation of a large body in orbit around an object not the Sun or Earth, which directly contradicted the prevailing Ptolemaic geocentric world system and earned him the scorn of the Catholic church. A close second-place prize for discovery of these four moons is enjoyed by Simon Marius who observed the same four objects only one day after Galileo. (He and Galileo also had some hilariously vicious animosity, with Galileo describing him as “an old adversary,” a “poisonous reptile,” and “the enemy of all mankind.” Then as now, science is a full-contact bloodsport.)
Any mythology buffs out there will recognize the names of the Galilean moons as Zeus’ beautiful favorites and recipients of the Greek god’s interest and sometimes questionable affection. This convention has continued as newer moons are discovered, but even Zeus’ notorious exploits have a limit; since 2004 the names have included his descendants as well. Additionally, all satellites named since Euporie that end in “a” or “o” are prograde irregular satellites, and names that end in “e” are retrograde irregulars. Any little hint to help us as we navigate all these moons today will be welcome, I’m sure.
Before we start moon hopping, let’s set the stage a little bit – after all, it’s not as though the early explorers will be able to just zip straight over. There are many challenges in even getting to Jupiter that are worth considering.
First is the distance. From Earth, a flight to Jupiter is no puddle jump. NASA scientists have some experience in sending objects to Jupiter by now, and current technology places the journey somewhere around six years to complete. Six years, just to get there at all. The current record for continuous spaceflight by a human is held by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov with a total of 437.7 continuous days. That’s about 1,752 shy of a trip to Jupiter, to say nothing of the mission and the trip back, so the lucky explorers selected for the first Jupiter visit will almost certainly be test subjects for long-term spaceflight in their own right.
Spaceflight boredom is far from the only challenge, however. There’s also the matter of the asteroid belt, a massive area of asteroids orbiting the Sun in a wide belt between Mars and Jupiter. Though the asteroids within are much smaller – the entire belt’s mass combined is equal to about 4% of Earth’s moon – and the belt is much more sparsely populated than science fiction would have you believe, even small objects can cause serious damage to a passing craft. Even a pebble or a grain of sand is enough to do serious damage when you hit it going 35,000 miles an hour!
And while we’re dodging objects, there are others we’ll have to be sure to avoid as we approach Jupiter: the Trojans. By that, I don’t mean the popular brand of condoms or the most excellent USC football team. No, the Trojans are asteroids that orbit with a planet’s orbital path, sheltered in gravitationally stable locations either just ahead or behind the planet as it circles the Sun. You can think of them like debris caught in the planet’s wake as it travels around the sun. Other planets have them, too – there are Neptune trojans, Mars trojans, even a recently discovered Earth trojan. But Jupiter has by far the most – possibly more than two million that are larger than a kilometer across, which is way more firepower than you’d need to end a spaceflight mission.
As spacecraft move between planetary orbits, they often transition between them by “merging” into them from outside the orbit, a bit like entering a highway from an on-ramp. The difference in this case is that the highway we’re merging into is jam-packed with traffic – so a little extra care will be required to make sure we arrive at Jupiter outside of rush hour, so to speak.
But by far the greatest danger on the journey to Jupiter will be radiation. Radiation is always a concern on flights in open space, since leaving the protective shield of Earth’s magnetic field leaves spacecraft vulnerable to charged particles from the Sun and outside our solar system. The good news is, our destination Jupiter has a nice large magnetosphere of its own, like Earth’s but supercharged. The bad news is that the planet generates its own radiation fields that are very large and very powerful, enveloping many of the closer moons and complicating human exploration.
But, once we arrive in the Jovian system for our virtual journey, thankfully without any holes from tiny asteroids or damaged DNA from harmful radiation, we can begin our exploration of the moons.
Starting closest to Jupiter and working our way outwards, we begin with a small group of four innermost moons. These moons are, in order, Metis, Adrastea, Amalthea and Thebe. They might not seem particularly notable as tourist destinations given their small size – Adrastea is smallest at about 16 km across, and Amalthea is largest at 167 km – but they have a special position as originators and maintainers of Jupiter’s faint ring system. Metis and Adrastea keep the inner ring replenished with dust and ice, while Amalthea and Thebe each keep their own faint outer ring. The really spectacular ring show will have to wait for our future episode on Saturn, but a flyby of these moons from behind Jupiter would allow the sun to illuminate them as faint halos stretching from one edge of the sky to the other.
As we head farther away from Jupiter we’ll encounter the first of the four Galilean moons, Io. In contrast to the glowing welcome of the ring systems, Io makes no effort to be inviting. It is one of the most hostile environments in our solar system for humans to visit, but… that almost makes it more exciting, right?
Io is named for a mythological priestess of Hera who became one of Zeus’ lovers. Until the Voyager missions revealed stunning details of the planet’s surface, very little was known about this world.
Io is slightly larger than Earth’s moon, and shines brightly with yellow, orange and brown hues pockmarked with craters and volcanoes. A moon of this size so close to Jupiter experiences intense tidal forces, being constantly crunched and twisted by the gravity of Jupiter and the other Galilean moons with every rotation. You can think of it a bit like playdough or gum: the planet is constantly being squeezed and worked and kneaded, which keeps the interior hot and fluid instead of letting it cool off and solidify. The result is a constantly churning and shifting interior creating the most geologically active object in the solar system.
Thousands of volcanoes eject gigantic plumes of sulfur and sulfur dioxide hundreds of miles above the surface, and intense uplifting events have produced massive mountain ranges taller than Mount Everest. Lava flows can reach over 300 miles long and spread across the surface which is composed mostly of silicate rock.
There is a thin atmosphere, but it offers little relief in the form of moisture or clouds – water simply doesn’t exist here. Io contains the least water by percent composition of any known object in the solar system, probably due to Jupiter’s heat during formation being great enough to drive water molecules away from the nearby moon. The ultra-thin atmosphere consists mostly of sulfur dioxide ejected from volcanoes, certainly nothing you want in your lungs.
We mentioned radiation earlier, and Io is definitely the moon to be most concerned about it while visiting. Io’s composition and location give it an interesting role to play in the magnetism and radiation around Jupiter. Scientists are still studying these complex interactions, but from what we have observed the dust and molecular compounds surrounding Io from its volcanic ejections interact with Jupiter’s magnetosphere to produce some interesting effects. One is a giant torus, or donut-shaped cloud of plasma surrounding Jupiter, consisting of ionized sulfur, oxygen sodium and chlorine from Io’s atmosphere. The second is what has been called the “Io flux tube,” an electric current surrounding the moon generated by the passage of Io (along with its cloud of dust) across Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field. This current is powerful enough to produce an aura in Io’s atmosphere as well as Jupiter’s polar region called the “Io footprint”. Scientists have also found during the Juno mission that the position of Io relative to Jupiter could have a powerful effect on the strength of radio transmissions from the spacecraft.
Before we head to the mountaintops to get a better view of the magnetic auroras, you should know: temperature works a little different than we’re used to here. On Earth, the atmosphere acts as a blanket, keeping lower altitudes more temperate while higher altitudes become colder. On Io, the opposite effect occurs. Extremely cold temperatures at ground level averaging around -260 degrees Fahrenheit keep the sulfur dioxide vapor cool enough to form frost, while higher in the atmosphere temperatures can scorch over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit due to warming from the plasma torus mentioned earlier.
While a fascinating study in magnetism, radiation and volcanology, Io isn’t very inspiring as a destination for future settlers given the difficulty in actually existing on the surface. I hope you packed your parka though, because on our next stop you’re gonna need it.
It’s hard to believe how much more different Europa could possibly be from Io – and while beautifully dangerous in its own ways, at least we can cool off a bit here.
While Europa is the smallest of the Galilean moons, it’s still almost as large as our own Moon. In photographs it appears like a frost-covered Mars, brownish-red with an icy white sheen and deep lines carved across the entire surface. A careful observer will notice on approach that despite the giant cracks lining the surface, there are relatively few craters. Relatively few of… anything, actually. Europa is the smoothest solid surface in the solar system, an interesting curiosity that hints at the possibility of large bodies of water capable of refreshing and smoothing the surface.
Like Io, Europa experiences intense tidal forces from Jupiter and her sister moons, which continuously warm and stir a vast internal ocean and move the surface ice similar to plate tectonics. Evidence for these kinds of activities have come from the Hubble Space Telescope and updated data from the Galileo probe which indicate huge plumes of ice and water vapor could be the result of gigantic cryogeysers. (And if anyone is looking for the coolest word in the English language, I would like to nominate “cryogeysers.”) These cryogeysers erupt as the result of pressure building deep within the icy surface like volcanic geysers here on Earth, which then release that pressure by ejecting materials high into the sky.
The few craters visible on the surface and data from previous missions tell us that the ice covering Europa is quite thick, averaging around 5-20 miles deep. Beneath that scientists believe there is a vast ocean of liquid water estimated to be about 60 miles deep, kept warm by those tidal forces we talked about. Even given Europa’s small size relative to Earth, that could mean the ocean of Europa holds two or three times as much liquid water as our planet. The implications for supporting human activity or even extraterrestrial life in an ocean of liquid water (even if it is encased in ice) make Europa a very attractive proposal for future exploration, and the evidence for geyser plumes could make finding a sample of that ocean easier than drilling miles deep into granite-hard ice.
As radiation is still a serious danger on Europa for humans – a lethal dose would be received within 24 hours – unmanned missions will have to do for now. NASA is currently developing a mission to study Europa more closely to investigate the potential for supporting life. It’s called the Europa Clipper and will conduct 45 low-altitude flybys utilizing radar to penetrate the thick ice sheet, spectrometers and a topographical imager.
We’ll leave the mysteries of the deep for future scientists for now as we make our way farther out from Jupiter to the next moon on our journey: Ganymede.
Named for a beautiful young man taken by Zeus to become the cupbearer of the gods, Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system. If it weren’t orbiting Jupiter, Ganymede would probably be considered a planet in its own right. With a diameter over 3,000 miles, it’s slightly larger than the planet Mercury, though only contains about half its mass. Its crust is composed of about equal parts silicate rock and ice, and its liquid iron core has earned it the distinction of being the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. This field is completely buried within the massive field around Jupiter, however, so it would be more difficult to detect than that of a planet. There are some interesting eccentricities of the magnetic field that scientists are still trying to unravel, but the field does generate an auroral belt with brightening at the poles.
Although about one and a half times the size of the Earth’s Moon, Ganymede resembles it somewhat as a pockmarked grey sphere with lighter and darker regions scattered across the surface. Giant grooves thought be caused by tectonic forces crisscross the planet with many prominent craters. But it’s there that the similarities to our own Moon end.
With data from the Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s and confirmed from observations of the moon’s aurora from Hubble, scientists found evidence of a vast underground ocean covering the surface of Ganymede. The effect observed in the aurora suggests a conductive ocean, meaning the water is probably salty and could exist as several distinct layers of ice, slush and liquid. But by current estimates for a moon of Ganymede’s size, a water ocean that large would easily be the biggest in the solar system.
Like Europa, Ganymede’s sparse atmosphere consists of mostly oxygen. Though it would be easy to assume that the existence of molecular oxygen is an indicator of biological life (that’s where it comes from on Earth, after all), the presence of oxygen can be explained on these watery moons of Jupiter as part of a process whereby water molecules are split by radiation leaving the heavier oxygen atoms while lighter hydrogen is gradually blown away by the cosmic wind.
Human exploration or even habitation of Ganymede is a possibility entertained by some scientists, although even at this distance the radiation from Jupiter is still quite dangerous – a human could last about a month before receiving a deadly dose. But the next stop and last of the Galilean moons might provide some relief in that regard.
Callisto is named for a mythological nymph lover of Zeus’, and in the lineup of Galilean moons is a bit of a black sheep in several regards.
Callisto is very striking visually, and very different from any of the other moons we have visited so far. In stark contrast to Europa’s smooth surface, Callisto is completely covered in craters. Many of these shine bright white or grey against a dark brown or black background, making the moon almost look like a deep-field space image from Hubble.
About the size of Mercury, Callisto lies relatively far outside of the orbits of the other Galileans and is therefore free of much of the tidal forces and planetary interactions that drive so much activity on the other moons. As a result the moon is completely geologically inactive, showing no signs of any current tectonic or volcanic activity – or any evidence that any existed in the past, for that matter.
Instead, Callisto’s most striking visual feature is the sheer number of impact craters. Large, small, old, new, the entire surface is littered with them. In fact, the surface of Callisto is the oldest in the solar system, and is thought to have been formed entirely by impacts as opposed to accretion from the materials present in the early nebula. As a result, Callisto is almost entirely undifferentiated, meaning there aren’t distinct layers of specific compositions making it up. It is possible that the accumulation of mass over time by gradual impacts generate enough pressure within to maintain a subsurface ocean, which is music to a biologist’s ears – but more evidence will be required to confirm.
A tenuous atmosphere of carbon dioxide surrounds the planet, so fragile that scientists estimate it would only take about four days for it to be blown away by the solar wind. That suggests a continuous replenishing from the frozen carbon dioxide within the frozen crust, but the implication is that this is about as robust as Callisto’s atmosphere is going to get.
For all the hopeful moon tourists out there, Callisto is getting some real attention from visionary scientists here at home with regard to possible future habitation. Callisto’s relatively light radiation dosage, calm geology and resources make it capable of supporting fuel production facilities as a sort of gas station for travelers on their way farther out into the solar system, or as a home base for more extensive exploration of Jupiter’s more dangerous moons. An extensive conceptual study conducted by NASA in 2003 called Human Outer Planets Exploration (or HOPE) put Callisto on the map for more detailed planning toward these goals.
And speaking of maps, we have a ways to go on our tour – 71 more known moons are waiting out there for us! Not to worry though, the remaining moons are generally smaller so we won’t need as much time to explore.
With the Galilean moons behind us, we’re passing Themisto now, a sneaky little bugger – only 9 kilometers across, it was first discovered in 1975 before astronomers lost track of it entirely for almost 30 years, before finding it again in 2003.
After that we’ll come up on the Himalia Group, a family of seven prograde irregular satellites named for the largest among them. They vary in size from 3 to 140 kilometers across, and all share some common eccentricities of orbit, suggesting they all came from the same larger asteroid probably pulled from the actual asteroid belt after straying too close to Jupiter long ago.
Up next are a couple of moons with very interesting orbits, Carpo at 3 kilometers and Valetudo at 1 km. These two are not on similar orbits but share a high probability of collision with the Galilean moons sometime in the distant future or perhaps even ejection from the system if a near miss disrupts their orbit.
Most of the remaining satellites are small irregular retrograde moons, many of which haven’t been named yet. The vast majority of these were discovered from the year 2000 right up through 2018 by a team of scientists on Hawaii led by Scott Sheppard using a 3.6 meter optical/infrared telescope atop the summit of Mauna Kea.
One notable group within the remaining set is the Carme Group. These 12 retrograde satellites are grouped close together and share similar eccentricities of orbit like the Himalia Group, again suggesting a common origin. They range from relatively tiny 1 km diameter up to the 47-kilometer-wide moon Carme for which the group is named. They’re also all a similar red color to the Himalia group which could mean they originated from a shared fragment of that group or were pulled from a Jupiter trojan that strayed too close.
If you’re feeling dizzy after all these moons, just imagine how the poor astronomers feel after finding them all. But thanks to their dedication, we’ve learned a lot about how these objects move and interact with each other in space. From orbital collisions to merging magnetic fields and plasma torii, the science has sparked an intense interest in future exploration and observation with many more fascinating discoveries to be made.
I hope you’ve enjoyed zipping around among the moons of Jupiter with us today. Next time we’ll be looking at Jupiter’s stunning neighbor Saturn and finding out more about those mysterious rings. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already. Settle the Stars is available on pretty much every podcasting platform, and we’re also mirroring our episodes on YouTube at YouTube.com/EdgeworksEntertainment (and be sure to ring that bell so you know when there’s a new episode). We also have a patreon page at Patreon.com/EdgeworksEntertainment, where you can get early episodes and tons of other great rewards. The support of listeners like you is what makes this show possible, and I am so grateful to the people who have already joined!
Thank you all for listening, and as always, happy terraforming.
Settle the Stars is a proud member of the Edgeworks Nebula, a collection of intriguing and informative podcasts from Edgeworks Entertainment.
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.
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕪𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕚𝕤 is a live talk show that aims to find the relationship between science and fiction in pop culture. We’ll discuss a book, movie, or show each week that’s science-focused and talk about just how realistic it is, where reality is cooler than fiction, and exactly where certain liberties were taken. Join us!
[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.
[00:31:57] 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 Hermès 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 Hermès.
[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 Hermès 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 Hermès 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 Hermès
[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 Hermès, 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 clichéd. 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.
Alexander Winn and Lacey Hannan are back discussing chapters 17 through 19 of Andy Weir’s The Martian! This episode, they’re probably gonna fight. IDK yet, I haven’t finished listening to it, but man things get heated. The book is also present.
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕪𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕚𝕤 is a live talk show that aims to find the relationship between science and fiction in pop culture. We’ll discuss a book, movie, or show each week that’s science-focused and talk about just how realistic it is, where reality is cooler than fiction, and exactly where certain liberties were taken. Join us!
ep. 8.mp3
[00:00:04] Hey, folks, this is Alexander Winn
[00:00:06] and I am Lacey Hannan, and we
[00:00:08] are here for the latest episode of The Synthesis. And right now we’re reading our way through The Martian by Andy Weir.
[00:00:15] And I’m just going to put this out there. You guys. You guys, I’m so sorry. I’m still so congested and so disgusting. So bear with me. There’s nothing I can do about it.
[00:00:27] Well, this there this week we’re talking about chapters 17 through 19. And let’s dove right in. Let’s do it. So Chapter 17 starts and Mark has been told that the Hermes is coming back for him, which
[00:00:45] on its own, it is a very sweet moment, really. This chapter we start with a really this this sweet the sweet little couple sentences and then we get into some boring shit for a couple of pages
[00:00:58] and then things get worse.
[00:01:00] Yes.
[00:01:01] This is a very this whole episode has a very sort of downward trajectory. Yes, it does. Yeah. And, you know, the funny thing is I hadn’t really clocked this the first time I read The Martian, but there’s this funny sense that the Hermes is coming back and now all of a sudden he has to hurry. You know, the whole problem in this entire story is that he’s stuck there. He has all the time in the world. And all of a sudden he doesn’t he has to get going, which is a funny little inversion of the of the norm there. It says it. He has two hundred and fifty seven souls before he has to leave for a 100 soul journey. And just for those out there who aren’t familiar with the jargon, a soul is the word for a day on Mars, which is twenty four hours and about 40 minutes long. So it’s not the same length as an Earth Day. So they distinguish between days and souls.
[00:01:51] Yes.
[00:01:52] So twenty four and a half hours. Yeah, approximately. That’s what he
[00:01:55] says. So we’re just going to
[00:01:56] leave it there. He has a lot of stuff to carry to the rover. Yep. And he makes a Granny Clampett reference about the Pathfinder Pathfinder writing on the roof. And I don’t understand. I’ve heard that name, but I don’t understand that reference. So I feel like that is a reference for the Gen-X and older crowd. Sorry, I’m not there.
[00:02:22] I’m pretty sure that show was in there like the 70s.
[00:02:24] I think so, too. But I feel like people that are even. Yeah. Five to ten years older than us are going to understand that. And I just want them. So, um. And then at what point. Yeah, I don’t remember why I have this in my notes, but I write that this is the part of the book where you get to imagine Venkat Kapoor as one of the prices. Right. Models and I don’t remember why, but reading that note gives me a lot of joy and I
[00:02:59] write, I don’t know, I’ve no idea what you’re referring to.
[00:03:03] I think this might be a fever dream or fantasy.
[00:03:05] I’m going to figure it out.
[00:03:06] He’s got a crush on Venkat Kapoor, apparently. But that’s fine.
[00:03:10] Yeah, I’m
[00:03:12] fine. Don’t we all have crushes on shortly before?
[00:03:14] I mean.
[00:03:15] Yes, absolutely.
[00:03:16] Um, so we do also get introduced to a very important and potentially horrible piece of equipment, which is the drill. Yes. Mark has to drill his way through the rover to make some extra room and do some modifications. And so NASA has told him to basically drill a whole bunch of tiny holes. We’re talking over a thousand holes. So he wires it up to have power so he doesn’t have to recharge it constantly. And that is a decision that is going to be consequential.
[00:03:53] That was. Yes, yes. Foreshadowing. I mean, OK, so I’m not I’m not finding it fast enough, but there’s something in here because when goes on to explain how he’s going to use the rock sampling drill for the construction and they need to step down the voltage and the rover so it can act as a battery charger for the drill. And it’s yet another way that Mark could very easily kill himself.
[00:04:17] Yeah, the quote that I had to just write down in its entirety is I’ll be playing with high voltage power tomorrow. Can’t imagine anything going wrong with that.
[00:04:25] He yes.
[00:04:26] Because, I mean, come on.
[00:04:28] Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:30] Well, um, I don’t I would like someone to tally up how many times Mark has been in a situation where he could get killed. And then I would like. You mean aside
[00:04:45] from just the constant danger?
[00:04:47] I mean, yes. Just just take out the constant danger because like in a lot, because for me, it’s about a comparison. I want to know
[00:04:55] who is
[00:04:56] consistently the most likely to die, just in general. Is it Mark Watney or is there somebody on Earth? Like I get it, I hear that he’s on Mars and that super sucks, but my job puts me in danger multiple times, you know, like I want to know because he
[00:05:15] does, Mark, have the most dangerous job in all of humanity. Exactly.
[00:05:20] Because in the world. Right. But like being on Mars, you might compare to a war zone every single day. You could die, you know. So I mean, yeah.
[00:05:30] I mean, I imagine soldiers have it worse than Mark Watney because there are people actively trying to kill him instead of just an environment that is passively trying to kill him.
[00:05:38] Right.
[00:05:39] So so for longtime viewers of the Synthesis, you will have picked up on a tradition, which is Alexander talking about how this is just one of the things that makes this book great. And here’s your latest episode of this is just one of those things that makes this book great, which is how boring the drill is. I really appreciate I mean, like, it’s boring and it’s kind of boring to read.
[00:06:02] But I like I like I like the word choice because it bores.
[00:06:07] Yes, because it bores. That was intentional. That’s not something that I stumbled into sideways.
[00:06:14] That was a good pun. And those are hard to come by.
[00:06:16] They’re not. Lacey loves ponds. Don’t believe her. I don’t there’s. But the thing about the drilling that I really appreciated is, you know, he’s under constant threat of death. They’re all these big, crazy, exciting things happening, like the hand blowing up and all these crazy storms. And, you know, like there’s so many big, scary things. The have is filled with hydrogen and it’s a bomb. I really appreciate that. You know what? Sometimes you just have to spend like two weeks drilling tiny holes. And that’s part of this. It’s not a nonstop adventure. He’s not Indiana Jones. Sometimes he just has to drill a whole bunch of really tiny holes. Yeah. And it’s just it adds to that sense of realism. It makes everything else more powerful because you recognize that he’s not a superhero. He’s living a dangerous situation and this is his life. And I just so appreciate how that is rendered
[00:07:09] so that I don’t seem like a total crazy person being where
[00:07:12] you are
[00:07:14] or
[00:07:16] so because I. I put that image of Venkat Kapoor in a
[00:07:23] cocktail dress and. Yeah.
[00:07:25] And a beautiful gown on prices. Right. Yeah. Doing the arms. Yeah. Yeah. Now that I’m throwing thanks. Because it’s at one point they’re talking about how is he going to eat. Marc says how is he going to make this whole and the rover or a.k.a. the trailer. And he says I’ll let my lovely assistant Venkat Kapoor explain further. And that’s where I started. And then when it does. Yeah. And, you know, it’s it’s actually a lot more interesting. So how do I put this? I Mark must feel really good about not having to be the only person to problem solve. Like there must be a huge weight off his shoulders to not have to do that. But as an audience member, I can feel that way for him and also recognize it’s not as interesting. Mm. And I feel like that that is seen. Yeah. This the beginning of this chapter. So yeah. Anyway I, I imagine he’s relieved I as an audience member I’m not.
[00:08:37] So before we started filming this episode today, Lacey warned me that she was going to ask me a question but aha. I Schoop to you, what’s your theme song.
[00:08:46] RWD We’re not even there yet. I’m there yet. OK, but like go ahead, you just skip to the end of the chapter
[00:08:52] and this is the middle of the chapter.
[00:08:54] This is listen I write so many more notes than he did. I was obviously a better student, which she’s not wrong.
[00:09:02] It’s not wrong.
[00:09:03] I’m an overachiever. Yes. OK, fine. We can jump there, but we’re going back at some point.
[00:09:10] You think do your thing, take it away.
[00:09:12] OK, OK. But I want to hear what everybody else is. Theme songs are too. So just. Yes, just consider for
[00:09:19] those who maybe haven’t read the Martian who have only seen The Martian. By the way, we are referencing a scene in which Marquart may take some time to decide what his theme song is from the huge library of disco music. He goes through options such as Life on Mars, Rocket Man alone again, naturally, but ultimately he settles on staying alive. So what do you want to talk about? What did I pass over? What interesting thing did I not notice?
[00:09:48] OK, so to me, dazzle us. Oh, my God, we’re going to fight first of all, I have a reminder note to myself, yeah, duct tape is magic and should be worshiped, so says Mark Watney. And I need to stop procrastinating and putting duct tape in my car because it should always be in your survival kit.
[00:10:13] It’s just not even your car, not like you. You don’t have a thing to repair. You just need to have access to.
[00:10:18] Now, I might have told you that. Yeah. If I had gotten into an accident, but I thought I could repair duct. There’s another thing he makes a that’s what she said joke. And I got really mad at them
[00:10:33] because they’re like Mark
[00:10:38] clutching their pearls and
[00:10:40] sitting here going, listen, dudes, as stressful as your lives are right now. Yeah. This man needs an outlet and you’re the only people he has. You can go home and you can make off color jokes to your significant others are your roommates or whoever. And and you get to do that. This man has you.
[00:11:01] So you deal with whatever jokes
[00:11:03] and whatever he wants to say. You deal with it even if it’s going to be public, because this man needs an outlet and defense mechanisms are important. Yes, actually,
[00:11:12] that’s an interesting point that I had never considered before. I all of a sudden, I’m kind of wishing that Andy Weir had gone into this a little bit, because we are told specifically that NASA is a public agency, which means that everything that they find has to be turned over within 24 hours and that all of their conversations with Mark are being broadcast all over the world. But I’m suddenly realizing that if this were real, if this had actually happened, they would have passed some like exemption or some executive order from the president or something. That guy needs the ability to make private statements, Mark. What he needs to be able to send messages that are not broadcast all over the world, some message to his mom or like, you know, something that is personal. That’s a that’s a that’s a need,
[00:12:00] except for, you know, the the things that the rest of the crew talk with their SOS with, those probably are private, you know. So I’m I’m guessing that there’s probably a certain amount of privacy depending on what the topic is.
[00:12:14] I would imagine so. But we are specifically told that all of Marquart in these conversations are public, which is why they keep critiquing him when he draws boobs.
[00:12:24] Yeah, I like it. By the way,
[00:12:27] we’ve got a question from everyone’s favorite EMON economist. Is Lacey the note taker in your days and games? No, Lacey likes hitting things with axes.
[00:12:38] I mean, that is mostly what I do. But once she’s there, I also never remember the storyline, not not for the life of me, actually, not for the OK, whatever
[00:12:49] the the note taker in our DNA games is the wife of our game master.
[00:12:54] Yeah. Because even he doesn’t take notes half the time as pretty funny. But yes I, I get too into my character.
[00:13:03] She would like to rage.
[00:13:05] Yes she would like to rage most of the
[00:13:06] time except for this character is not a barbarian, which is maybe why I’m not in love with her. There’s a moment in here where he says, oh yeah that’s right, I’m either getting rescued on Sol five hundred and forty nine or I’m dying. That means I have thirty five souls of extra food I can indulge once in a while.
[00:13:27] Mm.
[00:13:28] And I was like, that is the brightest silver lining I can imagine. And in what is one of the most terrifying lines in the book.
[00:13:37] Yeah. That’s some Ted Lassos style like optimism. That’s really, that’s, that’s candid right there.
[00:13:43] Oh I was
[00:13:44] just my, I just, I had a whole heart and gut clench when that happened because I was like, you only have thirty five days. That’s worth it. Yeah.
[00:13:54] Like oh boy.
[00:13:56] Well and like maybe keep your margin. We don’t want to cut this one too close just in case something happens.
[00:14:04] Hard labor is hard labor. You got to you got to take care of yourself. Yeah. Which he does in chapter eighteen in a way that I super enjoy. But OK, we are now up to the theme
[00:14:14] song Mark theme song is Stayin Alive.
[00:14:17] But did he or did he pick the right one.
[00:14:19] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:21] Stayin Alive by the Bee Gees just annoys the hell out of.
[00:14:23] I’m not a fan of the song, but what I’m saying is life on Mars, Rocket Man alone again. Naturally, these are all songs that are relevant, but staying alive is both relevant and aspirational. That is what he’s working toward.
[00:14:36] But OK, so I feel like this man is enough of a hero that he should at least get a soundtrack like he. His life currently warrants a soundtrack and not just a theme song.
[00:14:45] He has a soundtrack. It was written by Harry Gregson Williams. But, you know. Oh, my God.
[00:14:50] Oh.
[00:14:52] Sorry, excuse me, I have something stuck in my throat.
[00:14:55] It was a husband.
[00:14:57] Uh oh. Let’s ended it. Sorry about that, guys.
[00:15:02] That was a cannibalism reference and nothing else.
[00:15:06] Oh, my God. Oh, you make everything worse.
[00:15:10] How do you do that? Oh, I’m going to be terrified.
[00:15:15] It’s going to be our tombstone’s Alexander Wynn and Lacey Hohnen. Oh, my God. Somehow you make everything worse.
[00:15:22] It’s, uh.
[00:15:25] All right. So what’s your theme song?
[00:15:27] I actually referenced it earlier for anybody who’s a a Broadway musical fan. Yeah, it’s called Not for the Life of Me from Thoroughly Modern Millie. It’s when she gets to New York and she knows it, she’s like, it’s one block north to Macy’s and it’s two brothers, Brooks. And she she has figured it out. And she comes from this tiny town where nothing’s over. Three stories high at which this is my life. You guys, South Dakota to L.A., this is. But she has a one way ticket back home and she pulls it out of her pocket and she goes,
[00:16:04] no, no.
[00:16:06] And it’s just like, yeah, I’m going to figure it out. And that’s nice.
[00:16:09] Nice. Yeah. Well, I only had like forty five
[00:16:12] misleaders students, so just sorry guys,
[00:16:17] I only had about forty five minutes to think about it and I mostly listened to movie soundtracks. So it’s ultimately what I settled on is a Jonathan Coulton song called Code Monkey. Do you think it’s about a developer, no shit. Yeah, totally.
[00:16:33] Yep, I can’t believe it.
[00:16:35] Yep, that’s boring. I know you are so much more interesting than that.
[00:16:40] I know.
[00:16:42] I thought about I thought about going showtunes as well and saying that my theme song was anything you can do, I can do better. But I decided I didn’t want to get punched on Twitch.
[00:16:53] So you would have I
[00:16:57] would have thrown myself at you and wrestled you.
[00:17:00] Yeah. And not enough on way. So some of the bacteria in the soil survived.
[00:17:04] My God. Oh.
[00:17:12] So we one of the one of the interesting moments that I really appreciate in this chapter is Mark Watney is talking about how just to pass the time he did some soil tests because he’s a nerd and he noticed that some bacteria in the soil survived, which is kind of cool. I loved that. I know, right? Just like resilient. He actually even says life is amazingly tenacious. They don’t want to die any more than I do, which is. Yeah, it’s a great little
[00:17:40] fun, you know.
[00:17:43] And then
[00:17:44] I have.
[00:17:45] Oh, my God, Pathfinder now.
[00:17:48] Yeah, I have sold one. This is the beginning of the section. So one ninety six. I fucked up, I fucked up big time and you’re just like oh no. Like my blood pressure. Just shut up. Oh man. What happened.
[00:18:03] It was a gut punch. So what happens is now. Yes. I don’t totally you know, so, so.
[00:18:12] So it starts with a small observation. As he says, the worst moments in life are heralded by small observations. And the small observation is that the breakers have tripped on the drill, which is odd. And so he just replaces the breakers and moves on. But that’s weird.
[00:18:31] Yeah, I, I found the ending of this chapter so so we won’t go into exactly what happened. But the Pathfinder is no longer transmitting. Yeah. So he can’t, he can’t deny not just say we weren’t going to go into what happened.
[00:18:51] No more concerned about spoilers.
[00:18:53] Hey you don’t know. We’ve never gotten an answer from them. I know who’s reading with us and who’s not very helpful.
[00:19:01] So really I guess what he’s saying is that this is on, you
[00:19:05] know, that wasn’t it at all.
[00:19:09] Anyway, I’m sticking by it.
[00:19:11] OK, whatever. So Pathfinder is no longer communicating, so he has no way to communicate with Earth and while he can communicate with Earth through Morse code, that’s the thing that they had decided to set up.
[00:19:25] You send messages by putting blocks on the ground,
[00:19:26] but he can not hear back from them. Um, so I, I, I found this to be one of those moments of like, do you just collapse in a heap and just cry and curse the universe? Like the way I feel like an animal there would be like a whole bunch of this streaking lines.
[00:19:46] Yes. Yeah. I’m on my own is the end of that chapter.
[00:19:52] And you just got so excited for him because he didn’t have to problem solve all by himself.
[00:19:57] Oh yeah.
[00:19:58] And so then Chapter 18 starts and I felt entirely like this was my own fault for jinxing it, as if this wasn’t written years ago
[00:20:08] because I was like,
[00:20:09] it makes you feel any better. I blame you too.
[00:20:11] You are in what is you you were. Oh, my
[00:20:17] God. I’m an economist and I’m not going to be able to pronounce solice. They have both read the book so well.
[00:20:25] We’ve got to.
[00:20:26] Yes, yes. Yeah.
[00:20:28] Um, so Chapter 18 is back to making his own plans. It’s sort of a return to form from our Watney. He’s got to figure this out himself. We are back to the Martian.
[00:20:39] He’s figuring it out. It is so much more interesting to me as an audience member to watch him go through the mental process of figuring out how he’s going to do things rather than just getting instructions from NASA, because we’re not seeing their thought process and their scientific process, which they get to have more fun than he does. So I was I was kind of losing interest with all the back and forth.
[00:21:06] Yeah. It became less about problem solving and more about solution implementing.
[00:21:10] And I mean, the things that kind of kept you interested were the character development, the the underhandedness that different characters had mej and, you know, like that sort of stuff still kept you interested. But I for me, the bread and butter of this is who is Mark Watney and what can he do? We know he’s not a superhero, but he’s a badass scientist. Yeah, he’s an engineer. Like what what is his brain capable of? And we’ve had a return of that, which is I don’t know. For me, that’s the most interesting. So I’m here for it.
[00:21:46] Uh, greed.
[00:21:47] Um, I don’t understand some of his plans with the regulator.
[00:21:54] OK, like what?
[00:21:56] No, I don’t know. I just I read it and then put it aside. I was like, to hell with this. It was it was all about the the regulator. And it’s making everything cold to do something and then having to heat it back, like, I don’t know how with that.
[00:22:11] So the the short version is that the the oxygen and the atmospheric regulator, uh, they each draw a lot of power and he has to reduce how much power they draw so that he doesn’t kill his batteries because as much as possible has to go toward traveling in the rover. But what he realizes is that each of them have heating functions, which are important parts of the process. So the way that they strip the carbon out of the carbon dioxide to make oxygen, they freeze it down and then they run it over a catalyst and it strips away the carbon. But once you freeze it down that cold, if you just release it back in to the air, it’s the air conditioner from hell. So you need
[00:22:52] like a model for this because I just don’t see it. But, you know, whatever
[00:22:57] I mean it just from the outside, it just looks like an air purifier. It’s bringing in air and it’s blowing out. It’s bringing in carbon dioxide. It’s blowing out oxygen. But in the in the meantime, it takes that carbon dioxide freezes it to super crazy cold, runs the super cold gas over some chemicals, some some catalysts, and that strips the carbon atoms out of the air. And then now you have O2. And so it just blows it back out. But it doesn’t just blow it back out because it’s way too cold. So it has to warm the air up, which takes a lot of electricity. So Mark realizes, hey, he’s still got the RTG, as he puts it. As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation,
[00:23:43] which I did find, which is very funny.
[00:23:45] Awesome. And so he’s going to use that to heat up the air by bubbling it up through hot water. Basically, you take cold air like in a fish tank with a bubbling oxygen to the fish tank, super cold air. You bubble it up through hot water. By the time it comes out of the top, it’ll be warm enough that it’s safe.
[00:24:05] I so appreciate that he’s explaining. All of this to me, but I hope someone else caught it because I stopped paying attention a long time ago, my focus is not here. And I apologize because normally I love your explanations. I really do. I am just I’m I’m incapable today. But what I hear I liked the first portion of this plan was, hey, I don’t have to have the water reclaimer and it’s justice. There is justice in this because he’s like, I’ve got enough water. I’ll just bring the water with me and I can just shit and pee on this planet that’s constantly trying to kill me. And I was like, yes, man.
[00:24:45] You tell them. Yeah, uh,
[00:24:48] I mean, you’re not going to tell the planet much, but Mother Nature. Oh, that’s an interesting question. Does Mother Nature exist on all planets or does every planet have a different
[00:25:01] character, different
[00:25:02] character?
[00:25:02] Yeah.
[00:25:03] Oh, I mean, I think probably demonstrably Earth has Gaia and Mars has Mars, Mars as
[00:25:11] like
[00:25:12] what about other planets, which, by
[00:25:14] the way, makes sense that this planet is trying to kill him, considering it’s named after the God of violence and awfulness.
[00:25:20] I really now need a short story about all of the different versions
[00:25:25] of
[00:25:26] all the different characters of the planets.
[00:25:28] Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:29] I somewhat do this for me. Listen, when I request things in here, people, people do them. I you guys, if you have not read, I’m an economist. Forty five tweet thread on her barbarian that she plays. You have to do it. I got choked up. There is, it’s so, it’s so good and I cannot thank you enough. I cannot thank you enough for sharing it.
[00:25:57] Oh that out there.
[00:25:58] By the way while we have you I’m an economist and everyone else chime in with where you are. Yeah. Because I’m an economist mentioned that she watches us on her lunch break, which is odd because for us here in L.A., it’s five thirty in the evening. So either you have a weird shift or you are somewhere else. So everybody chime in. We love to hear where everybody’s from. If you’re watching this after the fact on YouTube, comment with where you are,
[00:26:23] I want to know. Yeah, it’s
[00:26:24] just it’s just fun.
[00:26:25] The world is big and interesting. Right.
[00:26:28] Um, you know what else is big and interesting? Marc’s bathtub.
[00:26:32] Oh, and pirate and just pirate ninjas.
[00:26:37] Exactly. Mark joins a new unit of measurement, the Pirate Ninja, because of course he did,
[00:26:43] because he didn’t want to say
[00:26:44] what
[00:26:45] kilowatt hours per soul
[00:26:47] that yepp, that
[00:26:49] which is, by the way, not even a fifty percent reduction in syllable count, but whatever,
[00:26:55] you know. But it’s way more interesting. Yes. And it’s fun. Yes. And I appreciate it.
[00:26:59] Yes. Because what is the only thing that could make his situation more dire, the arrival of pirate ninjas.
[00:27:06] Yeah, but yes, he takes a bath. Yes. And I love this for him personally.
[00:27:12] I love that. Like, this is one of those things that I’m I love the how in character. Andy Weir writes, because he spends a lot of time talking about his bathtub. Like this is clearly a very important project. Yeah, exactly. He goes on and on and on about his bathtub and how he made it and how much he loves it and how often he uses it. And it really feels like a guy who actually cares about this. It doesn’t feel like a novel. It feels like you’re actually this guy really loves his about
[00:27:38] listen, he deserves it because, like he said, there are no chiropractor’s on Mars. So he’s got to take care of himself and his body and he can’t just take Vicodin forever. Yeah.
[00:27:48] Which, by the way, we’ve had a running list on this on this show of the sort of alternative universes of the Martian, different ways this could have gone. What if it had been Mark and Lewis stranded on Mars or, you know, those sorts of things? And one of the interesting little versions, that sort of a nightmare to imagine. But it’s one way this could have gone is Mark Watney hurts his back and it doesn’t get better. Yeah. And like, he’s just stuck on Mars for hundreds of days and there’s no saving yourself.
[00:28:26] Well, yeah,
[00:28:27] like, yeah.
[00:28:28] Yeah. This is that is too depressing. Can we not go there. Yeah. Um, I personally I’m just very excited for him to take a bath. I don’t actually enjoy baths myself. I don’t understand. I don’t understand sitting in. In it, it just it doesn’t it doesn’t appeal to me, but I love that he got to pamper himself a lot.
[00:28:53] As Chandler Bing says, why don’t you just sit there stewing in your own filth?
[00:28:56] Yeah, kind of like no. OK, serious. You know, I’m just going to ask the question. You wash your hair and then you, like, try and rinse it off. But there’s already like you’ve had your shampoo in the water and now you’re trying to get your conditioner out and now your hair just feels like,
[00:29:13] yeah,
[00:29:14] I don’t know, baths are great for washing your hair.
[00:29:16] Like, I feel like you’re supposed to be able to do all of this. I don’t know. I just think it’s weird. I am I am outside side tracked, but I just I have questions for the ladies. I think it’s just sounds awful.
[00:29:30] OK, hey, you know what? We all wash our hair. Thank you very much. I spend so much time
[00:29:35] guys from hair,
[00:29:37] his shaved head. I have hair jokes
[00:29:41] are delightful and she can never get enough of them. Anyway, Mark Watney is smiling. A great smile, the smile of a man who fucked with his car and didn’t break it. I myself have never smiled. The smile.
[00:29:57] I’ve. I have. You have. I have had to do. You’re a
[00:30:01] car thief.
[00:30:02] A couple of things with cars that I’m just like I’m quite proud of. Listen, I came up with the El Brackett’s a couple log entries ago and obviously I’m a genius. You should be working at NASA and not in Hollywood. But yeah, I just wanted to put it out there. When he brings up the brackets, I was like, yeah, do dah. And I was quite pleased with myself. And so I think I should be Hollywood’s genius at Girl personally, but
[00:30:30] I’m here for it. He does bring up at the end of the chapter an interesting point, which is sort of upsetting. But, you know, that’s just where you are, which is that he’s not going to know how the launch, when he’s he hopes that Hermes is going to get him, but he doesn’t actually know if it’s going to work. Yeah, he might be working for the next, what was it, three hundred and fifty seven days and show up and then there’s nobody
[00:30:57] waiting for him. Yeah, because because because Pathfinder isn’t working. Yeah. He can’t, he can’t know. And he, you know, he’s concerned about the Hermès Re-supply not for himself so much but for his crew because he could die. But if his crew dies like that really upsets him. And I find that just so sweet. It’s just another way of pointing to Mark being a superb human being, superb character, just very well written in the fact that the audience never doesn’t want to root for him. Yeah. And he can have his his breakdown moments and he can make off color jokes like all of these things. But ultimately we’re always there for him and he’s always there for his crew. And it’s just so sweet.
[00:31:46] Yes.
[00:31:47] So we come to chapter nineteen and there’s an odd thing that happens. I don’t know if you if you picked up on this. We’ve had about a chapter and a half since Mark Frid Pathfinder and is no longer in contact with Earth. And now we come to Chapter nineteen and chapter nineteen has a structure where we’re jumping back and forth between the Hermès, where the crew is prepping for the supply launch and they’re all talking to their families back home. And we get this another one of these interesting tableaus where each character gets highlighted individually and you get some insight into who they are. And then it cuts to Earth as they’re preparing for the launch. But they don’t mention the fact that Mark is out of contact. We never actually get Earth’s response. We never get anybody reacting to the fact that they can’t talk to him.
[00:32:38] Oh, peculiar.
[00:32:38] Well, they just sort of like continue on with the law.
[00:32:41] And I have it’s far enough beyond when it happens. Yeah, it’s probably
[00:32:45] why it’s just interesting that we never get that moment. That scene
[00:32:49] doesn’t
[00:32:49] the closest we get to it is in chapter eighteen when he says, Oh man, I haven’t left the Hab in six days because of my back. Yeah. And they don’t know what’s happened to me, so they might be panicking essentially. So he, he kind of fills in for us with is.
[00:33:10] But I feel like it would have been interesting to get Venkat. I like realization of what’s going on and get and we
[00:33:16] weren’t going to get it for the moment because they were going to stay on Mark. Yeah. So I’m, I’m OK with it. Yeah.
[00:33:25] I think it’s the right call, but it’s a shame because I would have liked to see Annie being like, are you fucking kidding me. Right. But yes, we go back to the Hermes and Lewis is talking to her husband who has found a mint mint, you know, quality version of ABBA’s greatest hits because he’s a nerd.
[00:33:45] I have it right.
[00:33:46] He was talking to her husband, knew ABBA’s greatest hits, period nerd.
[00:33:50] It’s so cute. Oh, I love that. Like the rest of the world is probably on Mark Watney side making fun of disco. And here is Lewis and her husband being like,
[00:34:03] we still love it. Screw you guys. All right.
[00:34:07] She’s she’s going to be the most infamous disco fan in human history.
[00:34:11] She’s I will I will put this out there, you guys. All of these chats with their significant others or their family members or whatever some of them had one of them in particular had me in real tears. And I cried on the book, Sorry, honey, and I couldn’t read my notes. And so just stop taking them. But it might come up again because who it really got, it just so got me.
[00:34:34] It’s something that they do a really good job. You know, we get a few of these moments where over the course of a chapter, each character gets the spotlight. You know, there were marks, notes to each of his crew members or his crewmates. And then in this chapter, we get each of them talking to their families. And it’s interesting how anywhere does a great job of individualizing them, because they each have their own thing going. They each have their own relationships, but they each have it’s like each character is in their own genre. You know, Lewis is talking to her husband. She’s very much in love. Vogel has more of like a family medical drama thing going on. It’s like each character is has a very different tone in how they are sort of reacting to all of this. And it really helps bring them to life.
[00:35:22] Yeah, he did a very good job of not making he’s not putting them on too similar. Andy Weir is not writing them on like these parallel paths. It’s yeah. It feels very independent of each other. It doesn’t none of the conversations kind of echo one of the previous conversations or anything like that, which I’ve I found charming, that he could write so many different voices. Yeah, I
[00:35:51] agree. He’s a great writer. Yeah.
[00:35:53] As we keep talking about.
[00:35:54] But anyway but we come back to Earth and the NASA folks are heading to China. Yes. And they are arriving, they’re getting ready to launch the resupply probe on the tank and the Chinese rocket. And it’s not
[00:36:12] easy. And Venkat is being a reasonable whiner. Yeah, jet lag about jet lag and tells their guide, Mr. Su, that he loves him. And I found it, darling. He’s just so tired and so, like, doesn’t because Teddy is like, yeah, just don’t forget, man, we have to go through customs. You, Shina,
[00:36:33] you get the sense that, you know, Teddy, the director of NASA, is probably the guy who like, visits the White House periodically and he like goes to conferences and he’s done a lot of networking and all that kind of stuff. And Venkat is more of a stay in the lab kind of guy. And he’s just not used yet.
[00:36:47] No. And I just I,
[00:36:50] I find it just kind of funny. Yeah.
[00:36:53] From there we cut back to the Hermes and we get Vogel, the German astronaut, and talking to his wife about their monkeys, which we have already established, is what they call their kids, which is very sweet. And then he asks, how is my mother doing?
[00:37:08] And what we learn is he’s a he was afraid before they even left that it was the last time he was going to see his mom. And now they’re going to be on the Hermès for over five hundred more days. And his wife does tell him that, you know, they think that, you know, she’s stable. She doesn’t always recognize her daughter in law and blah, blah, blah, but nothing has changed. So hopefully nothing will change by the time he gets back. And I was just like, oh, like my mom’s one of my very favorite people. So I oh,
[00:37:43] I yeah, I was a
[00:37:45] mess. And it didn’t even come up when he was saying that we have to go back and get Marquart. Watney. Yeah. Like you retroactively realize how hard a decision that was for Vogel because he is again risking never seeing his mother. Yeah. And it’s uh.
[00:38:00] Yeah that’s.
[00:38:02] And then so we cut back and Teddy is talking to the Chinese space administrator and there’s a very darling exchange where he the the Chinese guy describes Mitch as, you know, very, very passionate or something like that. And Teddy says Mitch is a pain in the ass. And he says, You can say that. I can answer.
[00:38:26] Yes, I
[00:38:27] did really like that. The thing that I thought you were trying to say that I just truly loved was someone says love of science is universal across all cultures. And I don’t know, OK, listen, my pregnancy hormones are out of control. This entire chapter made me want to cry and that. Line, I was just like, I’m getting choked up thinking about, I don’t know, there’s something about, OK, OK, take it away.
[00:38:52] All right, if if I can just provide you with something that will harden your heart and make you stop feeling the feelings. J Group lives in California.
[00:39:03] Oh, so do we.
[00:39:04] Yeah, I know he’s so close, I need some distance from grape. Oh, please. Like I’m on economist lives in Canberra. In Australia. That’s awesome. Like, why can’t I can’t. I’m an economist b around here. We got to have Jake listen.
[00:39:20] And she says it’s the greatest city in the world and I’m just putting it out there that I have not been there yet. And it we’ve got to go to go because Australia was awesome.
[00:39:30] And we’ve also got the eastern United States. Yes. Represented. So keep them coming, folks. Post in the comments. Let us know where you are. It’s excellent to learn unless you’re age group and now you need to go away.
[00:39:43] J Grape, please excuse my husband. He is a jerk.
[00:39:48] Oh, it’s, uh,
[00:39:50] it’s not a jerk when you take shots at your nemesis,
[00:39:54] OK.
[00:39:54] Oh, Grape and Valley are locked in an epic duel.
[00:39:58] Listen, you could be like the Joker and you could love him like the Joker loves Batman.
[00:40:04] I am clearly Batman in this relationship.
[00:40:06] I mean, come on. Uh oh.
[00:40:10] Uh, clearly I am Batman in so many ways anyway,
[00:40:16] so that
[00:40:17] we need
[00:40:17] to back. Yes. We jump back to back
[00:40:19] who’s talking to his sister, who
[00:40:21] I might argue is sort of the least developed of the of the crew, I think is the one that I feel like I have the least of. Yeah, but talking to a sister and
[00:40:31] it’s kind of funny, he quite
[00:40:32] clearly a little like kind of little sister, not not like five
[00:40:36] but. No, but she’s she’s younger and but she’s worried about him. And then she has a lot of questions about Martinez.
[00:40:44] Yes. And the cute one.
[00:40:46] He’s like he’s married with kids.
[00:40:49] Yeah. Home wrecker.
[00:40:53] It’s just that got me. But then there’s a moment where she says, well, what did you know? She’s asking what everybody’s jobs are. And he tells her that everybody has to be able to do multiple things. And so she asks him, what did Mark Watney do? And he says, don’t talk about him in the past tense. Yeah, of course. I get choked up for that, too.
[00:41:14] Great. See, these are the things that, like a lesser writer, wouldn’t have thought to do that. But that is so true to who back is just that. That’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t be particularly important to the sister, but is important to back.
[00:41:30] Yes. Yeah. All right. All right.
[00:41:34] We’re going to we’re going to read you guys.
[00:41:36] So this is this is Lacey’s, I think, favorite scene in the entire book.
[00:41:40] I mean, it’s not totally
[00:41:43] because there was that other guy who kind of made the jokes about you can never tell with managers. Who’s that again?
[00:41:51] Was that Rich Purnell? No, that was not him.
[00:41:54] Yeah.
[00:41:55] So far, so good. Yeah. Uh, no. So this is one of my favorite exchanges, so I’m just going to have us read it. Of course, we’ve only got one. Thanks. Yeah. Good luck to us. Uh, do you would you like to take Mitch or Venkat.
[00:42:12] Uh, why don’t I take Venkat.
[00:42:16] OK, so you are you going to read just the line. Are you going to do the. He said, she said
[00:42:22] not just just did OK.
[00:42:24] Uh, all right. They’re a weird bunch these Chinese nerds, but they make a good booster.
[00:42:31] Good.
[00:42:32] How’s the linkage between the booster and our probe.
[00:42:34] It all checks out. JPL followed the specs perfectly. It fits like a glove.
[00:42:39] Any concerns or reservations?
[00:42:41] Yeah, I’m concerned about what I ate last night. I think it had an eyeball on it.
[00:42:46] I’m sure there wasn’t an eyeball
[00:42:48] that engineers here made it for me special.
[00:42:51] There may have been an eyeball. They hate you.
[00:42:54] Uh, why?
[00:42:55] Because you’re a dick, Mitch. A total dick to everyone.
[00:43:01] Fair enough. So long as the pro gets to Hermès, they can burn me in effigy for all I care.
[00:43:06] I just I think Lacey’s been cackling every time she thinks about that scene.
[00:43:10] I just love
[00:43:12] the idea that Venkaiah is like this. They’re you’re just saying there is an eyeball on it because in China, they eat things that we might not necessarily eat in America. Don’t worry about it. And then he’s and then Mitch says, well, the guy’s made it for me, you know, I’m special, special and homey. And then banquettes like, oh, yeah, there was definitely an eye on it.
[00:43:34] Definitely not all in it. Yeah. Because you’re a dick. Yeah.
[00:43:38] And I just there’s something so charming about that and I love it. I mean not charming, it’s, it’s horrifying but I like that Mitch is like, OK, whatever, so long as this all works out they can, they can hate me, they can, you know, do your voodoo, whatever you want. I don’t care which which then turns around and shows the dedication that Mitch has and. Do you take it back to that quote about, you know, Ted says he’s a pain in the ass and Ming says, You can say that I cannot. And the whole reason they’re saying that is because Mitch has a has like the workers the Chinese engineers have mentioned. Yeah, Mitch is a work ethic. Yeah. He’s very dedicated. And so I think it just kind of all comes together that all of the Chinese engineers are probably on Teddy’s side,
[00:44:40] like, yeah, screw this dude. I would fire him if I could.
[00:44:44] Um, so there’s I don’t know. There’s just something lovely about it to me. Um. All right. Then we go back
[00:44:50] to we come back to Martinez. And I’m glad that somebody wasn’t perfectly selfless. Martinez’s wife is pissed that he’s going back to Mars. And you can tell that it comes from a place of love. You can tell that it comes from a place of worry. You can also tell that he comes from a place of wanting to get laid, which is hilarious. Yes. But, you know, it’s it’s nice. It’s one of those human things that, yeah. Not everybody is, like, selflessly telling their their spouse, yes, you have to spend another year and a half to go back to Mars and save this guy like, no, I’m
[00:45:22] home because, you know, Martinez is not going to have his kid is not going to have any memories of him. Yeah. And he’s going to be going into kindergarten by the time Martinez comes home. So, you know,
[00:45:31] if he comes home at
[00:45:32] all. Yeah, exactly. So there’s like this you kind of understand the power of what they’re dealing with because Vogels kids are in high school. It’s not to say it’s anything that’s got its own hardships, essentially being a single mom of of teenagers. Like, I can’t I’m sorry to my mom, but, you know, Melissa’s dealing with a toddler at home. And that’s just got to be really hard, especially when you weren’t expecting to have to do all of this. So to me, the the different. I love that they’re all kind of different stages of their lives and that they have different concerns. And this was this was lovely. I love that they’re high school sweethearts.
[00:46:15] Yeah.
[00:46:16] Um, I don’t do we jump back to China or do we just go straight
[00:46:21] and I don’t have any notes from China. So if we did, it was uneventful. And so now we come to Jill Hansen Johansen, who is, you know, the the the cute girl of the crew who nobody’s allowed to hit on and, you know, posters all over, you know, college students, bedrooms and all that. And you get dark, so dark.
[00:46:47] And she’s like talking to her dad. Dad is like, where did we go wrong? You were such a good kid. And now you’re doing this and your mom is worried sick and she can’t even like this is a person who’s obviously like her anxiety or depression or whatever she’s dealing with is so bad that she can’t even come to the phone.
[00:47:07] Yeah.
[00:47:08] You know, and the father is characterized, interestingly, because, you know, you get the sense that he’s not
[00:47:14] he’s kind of a
[00:47:16] hard ass. Like he’s not necessarily the kind of dad that you would want. Like, he kind of hits her over the head with guilt over all of this.
[00:47:23] And he’s
[00:47:25] pretty rough. And she tries to reassure him in these vague terms and he’s not getting it. And she keeps trying to reassure him.
[00:47:33] I mean, I wouldn’t get it either. She’s been very good at being vague about why it’s going to be OK. Like, I will
[00:47:39] be not going to die. She just keeps saying I won’t die. And he’s like, what are you talking about? And she says, I won’t die. And finally he gets her to tell
[00:47:48] him, which I thought this was this was kind of telling I hear you on the hard ass thing. But he says, I have never I’ve always thought you had your privacy. Yes. And you I’ve never pushed you. And I need to know what you’re talking about.
[00:48:03] And clearly not an abusive father.
[00:48:05] No, no.
[00:48:06] But he’s calling in his his favor to know what she’s saying. And what she’s saying is that if the resupply mission goes wrong, they’re going too fast. They won’t be able to slow down and stop at Earth. They’re going to Mars one way or another, but they might not have enough food. So Lewis brought them all together and told them the plan, which is that if the resupply mission fails, everybody but Johansen will take suicide pills and then Johansen will survive and eat through the stores of food. And then when her father asks, is that going to be enough? She says, no, but the food won’t be the only sustenance available. And oh damn, that gets dark.
[00:48:59] Oh, my God. I just like I just. Sobbing Yeah, I was
[00:49:06] he didn’t notice I,
[00:49:09] I was working on other things, I
[00:49:11] was like I did collect for this was
[00:49:13] it. This wasn’t his fault. But he’s like sitting across the table from me and I’m just, like, trying not to be noticed as tears are just streaming down my face onto the as I’m just like, oh, this is horrifying. But now I have a question.
[00:49:25] Yeah.
[00:49:26] Can you eat a body that has had a suicide pill go into it?
[00:49:31] I’m sure Lewis knows what you know, something that something that expires after a little while so that it would be safe or
[00:49:40] whatever, maybe just doesn’t get into the muscle tissue or
[00:49:43] something like that, or he or she would probably need to freeze the body. So maybe it breaks down and in cold or something like that. But whatever it is, I’m sure Andy Weir has thought through every single detail of this absolute horror movie that could have been this is the darkest timeline of all the alternative universe, Martian stories.
[00:50:02] And like I, I obviously could barely handle it. Still can barely handle it. Yeah. But then we get to the launch. Yeah. And we get through the piloting, the great piloting that Martinez does.
[00:50:18] You and the masterful bringing you back from the brink of darkness. Andy Weir knowing exactly how to lead his audience where they need to be. Martinez sticks the launch. They get the supplies, they’re good to go. And he turns around to Joleen’s and says, So who would you have eaten first?
[00:50:38] Like, Oh, my God. And she doesn’t
[00:50:40] want to she she will not engage. And he starts chasing after her going, hey, I’m free range. You know, Cornfed, come on, I thought you liked Mexican.
[00:50:49] And I was just like, that’s such dark humor.
[00:50:53] It is so dark, but like smell, taste. I am so glad that we are included it because I needed.
[00:51:00] Yeah, it takes the fangs out. Yeah.
[00:51:03] And we don’t just get Johanson’s reaction to it. Yeah. We get, everybody else has you know, essentially agreed to it. Yeah. Green dish. Yeah. And this, it’s a release of the tension and a way that
[00:51:20] I
[00:51:21] did that.
[00:51:22] Yeah.
[00:51:23] Anyway the only person who could have had a worse time of this than Mark Watney is Johanna Johansen.
[00:51:30] Yeah. That Oh no I don’t do postapocalyptic. So this that is not the storyline that I can
[00:51:38] engage
[00:51:39] with. Engage with. Yeah. No, no, no, no horror, no apocalyptic anything. Which is what that would be. I mean if you’re in space. Yeah.
[00:51:47] They go God
[00:51:49] and kind of zombies.
[00:51:51] Guess the worst part of everything. Yeah. Anyway so that’s the end of chapter nineteen. So that is the end of this episode of The Synthesis. Next week we’re going to be doing chapters twenty, twenty one and twenty two. And important note, everyone make a note that starting next week we are going to be shifting venues we see and how that works where rather than streaming live on Twitch and then mirroring to YouTube on Friday morning, we are going to be doing YouTube live, same bat time, different bat channel. We are going to be doing the same five thirty time slot that we always do, except we’re going to be doing YouTube live from the Edge Works Entertainment YouTube channel, which is which is YouTube, dotcom, Edgeworks entertainment.
[00:52:38] If if that turns out to not be true and we can’t do it next week, we will let you know. We will put it on all of our socials. Yeah, but we wanted to we’re going to try and make that changeover pretty quick. Yeah. So join us, please
[00:52:52] join us on YouTube and everybody except DJ Grape DJ Grape tune in on Twitch next week.
[00:52:57] God damn. I’m just.
[00:53:00] Oh, all right. I don’t I don’t know what to say do I? I’m sorry.
[00:53:05] Lacey literally can’t even, um. So tune in next week. YouTube live and we’re going to have a dabba doo time. So in the meantime, be sure to check out our Patreon on Page Edgeworks Entertainment. You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and everywhere in the world really
[00:53:27] apparently, apparently Edgeworks is moving the Tic-Tac.
[00:53:31] Yeah.
[00:53:32] Lost our marketing people because. Yeah, there’s not you could not get me on there.
[00:53:37] I’m too old for that shit.
[00:53:38] Yeah.
[00:53:39] Except for the sea shanties
[00:53:41] except for the 20th centuries are amazing. They might give me that one final note for everyone to keep in mind, anybody who is a long term Edgeworks fan knows that every year the anniversary of America’s founding is February 9th. And I’m next to be not ready to tell you anything about it. But the smart money is on. There being an announcement of some kind on February 9th, so
[00:54:06] let’s
[00:54:07] be
[00:54:07] sure to check out our social pages or EdgeworksEntertainment.com, get ready.
[00:54:13] Yeah, get get your popcorn and get ready for a cool announcement. So, yeah.
[00:54:19] All right.
[00:54:19] Otherwise, we will see you next week on YouTube.
Alexander Winn and Lacey Hannan return yet again to discuss chapters 14 – 17 of Andy Weir’s The Martian. The pair debate on which is deadlier, Martian Snakes or Martian Vampires, and whether or not the fabric is wracked with guilt over letting Mark Watney watch his potatoes go extinct on its watch.
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕪𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕚𝕤 is a live talk show that aims to find the relationship between science and fiction in pop culture. We’ll discuss a book, movie, or show each week that’s science-focused and talk about just how realistic it is, where reality is cooler than fiction, and exactly where certain liberties were taken.
[00:00:03] Hey, folks, this is Alexander Winn
[00:00:06] and I am Lacey Hannan,
[00:00:07] and we are here with the latest episode of The Synthesis, reading through The Martian. This week we’re doing chapters 14 through 16.
[00:00:16] And I actually want to know just to kick us off. Yeah. Who’s reading with us?
[00:00:22] Yeah. Chime in in the comments and let us know if you’re reading along.
[00:00:25] Also, you guys, I’m super congested, so I will try not to just, like, sniff the entire time, but give me some leeway because it’s a lot up my bed.
[00:00:40] So jumping right in. We are picking up in Chapter 14.
[00:00:45] And there was a there was a cliffhanger.
[00:00:48] There was a cliffhanger. Exactly. Mark Watney has been having some good times. Things have been looking up. He’s finally in contact with Earth. He’s got his potatoes, girl, and everything’s going good. And so one day he walks into the airlock and it explodes. It rips off of the side of the hab. And once again, we are reminded that the hab is not a building, it’s a tent. And so the hab canvas rips all the way around the airlock and essentially becomes a cannon. And the force of the air pressure inside launches mark in the cylinder of the airlock, 50 meters across the Martian surface. And he lands and just he’s about had it. And that picks up with Chapter 14, which I think is a long overdue tantrum.
[00:01:42] Well, yes, but I will start by saying that this chapter, more than any other one that we’ve read so far, is the most fun to quote.
[00:01:52] Yes, there are
[00:01:54] so many great lines. Yes. So just bear with me because it’s so fun. I’m going to read, like, practically the entire chapter to you today. Yeah, I’ll restrain myself.
[00:02:06] Oh, no, I’ve got a few, too. But yeah, he has a tantrum, which I think is, you know, it’s good to see it’s good that this guy who is in this incredibly deadly situation is constantly under threat for his life. And, you know, everything keeps going wrong and then he solves it. And then another thing goes wrong. It’s nice to finally get him just being like, you know what, fuck this.
[00:02:26] And he just he just drops f bomb left and right. It’s great.
[00:02:31] Leans into it. It’s very cathartic and it’s totally understandable. You know, it’s one of those things where it’s like you sort of amazed that it took him this long to get to this point of frustration. But he can’t be too frustrated for too long because he is actually in a crisis situation. Which brings us to the very first quote that had me laughing out loud because he realizes that the air is leaking as he as he puts it, there’s a hissing sound and he says either it’s leaking or there are snakes in here.
[00:03:05] Either way, I’m in trouble.
[00:03:07] Either way, I’m in trouble, which is the idea. Like, how could it get worse if you’re stranded on Mars? What could be worse? It would be worse if there were snakes in the air.
[00:03:17] Yeah, yeah. I that that is also one of the ones I wrote down. And I am now imagining the things that could make it worse. Vampires, vampires that. Yeah, yeah. I’m just putting
[00:03:30] it out there. There’s, you know, we’ve talked before about how Lacey is reading the book and I’m doing the audio book and every like for the most part, whatever it’s equivalent. But every once in a while I do really feel bad for you that you’re not getting Wil Wheaton’s delivery because his delivery on, you know, it’s leaking or there are snakes in here is just so I
[00:03:52] don’t need Wil Wheaton. I am an actor. I don’t need him.
[00:03:56] You don’t always make the same choices that he does. He’s making good choices.
[00:04:00] Maybe mine would be better. Maybe. I don’t need a
[00:04:04] man Darton shit in here,
[00:04:09] OK?
[00:04:10] You know, I expect this kind of grief from Jacob, not from you.
[00:04:14] You’re already starting it, are we?
[00:04:16] It’s necessary.
[00:04:17] No, it’s
[00:04:18] part of the fabric of this show is how terrible geographies.
[00:04:22] Oh Lord, yeah. OK, well enjoy it guys. I can’t stop that train. Yeah, it will go on until the joke is dead ten times over. So I like that he gets his little tantrum and then he goes straight into problem solving mode just full on. And he’s like, things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’m so fucked, mind you, just not as deeply so.
[00:04:50] Yeah, and, you know, the first challenge is there’s air leaking, and that is a tricky thing when it’s a small amount, which is an interesting thing to think about is the sort of it would be easier if it were scarier, you know. And so what he does is and again, this is a great little bit of self-awareness. Mark decides to set something on fire and he has a moment where he’s like, yes, I know that a lot of my solutions deal with setting things on fire.
[00:05:23] He calls himself a determined arsonist. Yes. And I just I love. I love that
[00:05:29] that’s a good band name the determined arsonist’s,
[00:05:32] that’s a good like early aughts IMO. Bad name.
[00:05:38] Fair enough, just to point out that I don’t know my band name genres and eras well enough of Ali.
[00:05:45] Get it together, man. Oh, I, I, I like to that I also like the the quote NASA never considered what would happen if it the hab or the the airlock was launched 50 meters Lacey bums. Me, I’m just like I love that he just calls them names. Yeah. And everybody can like this is this is just. It brings me joy and happiness, which is the same word, so I’m being repetitive. Yeah, OK.
[00:06:18] But this this chapter, I confess that even for me, this chapter did start to drag in certain places. But I did also have to stop and really appreciate the fact that this chapter is kind of a tour de force of all the all the ways that Andy Weir’s writing is better than it could have been. Because, for example, you know, a lot of writers when when writing this prompt would make Mark sort of a superhero. And I really appreciate the fact that, no, Andy Weir does take the time to be like there’s a leak. What if I just, like, put my hand over it? OK, it’s getting cold. Getting really cold. It’s getting pretty paint. All right, I’m not doing this. And, yeah, we just we took that moment to have him just like see if you can do it the easy way. No, you can’t do it the easy way. And then he does a little smoke thing. It creates a little fire. He starts producing some smoke and he has to do it like four or five times. Yeah. Because he keeps like breathing and or
[00:07:19] smoke or something else happens. Yeah. And I, I love the amount of patience that he has to have while not panicking, you know, to to be able to say, OK, I’m on a time limit here, I’ve only got so much available to me, I keep screwing up. He doesn’t do it as third time’s a charm, which I appreciate because the rule of threes gets a little bit boring sometimes. So fourth time. All right. No panicking. He just got the work done, which I don’t know, there’s just something about like, no, he’s not a superhero, but this man is capable and patient and that’s why he’s here is because he threw his he threw his tantrum. He had the emotional outburst and then he got to work. And I think all of it speaks to why he’s he would obviously be picked to be an astronaut. So, um, but I do like that. Before he even tries, he says, um, if in fact, this is exactly how Apollo, the Apollo one crew died, wish me luck. And I’m just like, whoa, yeah. That like Worf, um, that was that it was it was both funny and also.
[00:08:36] Um, it’s a little
[00:08:37] dark, it’s really dark, little dark
[00:08:39] Vermaak Yeah, yeah,
[00:08:40] yeah, um, so that I appreciate that. I also apparently put a note in here to myself that I used to carry duct tape in my car and I should carry that shit in my car. And also don’t forget to put scissors or a knife in there, too.
[00:08:55] So just in case your airlock gets launched 50 meters,
[00:08:59] listen, now we see if NASA trusts that we should trust it. Exactly. So it used to be a part of my emergency kit. It’s no longer there. And why. Yeah, why.
[00:09:09] So it’s a clear mission, clearly. Yeah. Um, so he’s able to patch the hole. He’s able to get his suit to stop leaking,
[00:09:21] not without losing his hand to the helmet. Yeah. Which I think is great. And he tells us to stop laughing and I didn’t.
[00:09:31] Disrespecting Martin. So the next thing I’ve got is rolling the airlock.
[00:09:38] No, we have to talk about how he actually did the EVA suit, EVA suit, pressure, math, OK, and just how dull that was. I appreciate listen, like we’ve said, appreciate all of the fine detail, the extras, because most entertainment wouldn’t include that. I think this may have crossed the line just a little bit because it got really it got dull and I was like. I’ve been working really hard not to skip. And this is this is one of those moments where I just kind of. Skim read it because it was it was a little too much,
[00:10:17] we like hearing that he did the math, we didn’t actually need to see the math that’s calculating it out
[00:10:24] for whatever reason. It has worked in the past, but I can’t quite figure out why it didn’t work here. I think maybe it was because the tension, it didn’t add to the tension, but the tension was there, too. It wasn’t really high, but there was this level of tension that wasn’t being challenged by this math. We knew it had to be like, yeah, to be done to a certain point. To a certain degree, he needed to know, but we didn’t actually need to know. And there have been times that he’s skipped the math and science. And I think this would have been a good time to do that.
[00:11:00] There’s also something to be said for the fact that it’s sort of secondary math. You know, a lot of the time in this book, you know, the problem is he needs water. And so here’s how I made water or hey, he he needs to, you know, set up the rover properly. And so here’s how I set up the rover properly. Whereas in this chapter, the problem is that the hab just blew up. And so spending a lot of time on the nitty gritty details of how he patched his suit is a little bit missing. The point of what’s happening right now, like it’s important. And to Marc, it’s obviously very important to to deal with these nitty gritty details. But to us, I found myself kind of wanting to. Go address the fact that the whole hab just blew up, you know, the nitty gritty of patching the suit kind of paled in comparison to what was happening in the background. So let’s get to that.
[00:11:52] Yeah, yeah, I do like that. The one thing I will say for the math is that it’s set up why he needed to roll the airlock. Yes. And I found that to be pretty interesting. I found it to be really smart. He’s not taking chances. He’s he’s doing the math. And he figured out what’s doable and what isn’t. So he has this plan and he knows it’s going to hurt his body. But he has to do this so that he can do the rest like he’s not and he’s not coming up with plan B, he’s OK. This is what I know. So this is what I’m going to do. That’s it.
[00:12:31] Well, and that sounds painful. Rolling the airlock, he talks about having to jump diagonally and sort of body slam up into the corner, which, by the way, one of the things that is always a shame when there live action movies and TV shows set on Mars is that I don’t think I have ever once seen any movie try to accurately render low G. You know, every once in a while on The Expanse, they’ll do something where somebody like pours a drink and it pours real slowly. But for the most part, it’s just actors and the actors are on earth. And so they just deal with it like it’s earth gravity. But, you know, if you were actually on Mars, it’s low gravity all the time, which means that like every step you take, you would fall a little bit slower and like every every thing you pick up would fall a little bit more slowly. And so when he jumps, he would be able to get way higher than would sort of seem. Right. And that would be fun to see in a movie. And they don’t do it, which is a shame. But yeah, the idea of sort of launching yourself up and forward to body slam a wall over and over and over just to keep rolling the airlock just sounds awful.
[00:13:40] I now need that. I feel like maybe it was an outtake and I feel like it’s important that we find the scene and then. The soundtrack to it would be every step you take.
[00:13:56] Yeah, I could see you just waiting for me to shut up so that you could listen.
[00:14:00] It’s now stuck in my head and it’s going to be here for a week.
[00:14:03] You’re welcome.
[00:14:05] So everybody can join me in this hell and I will be living in.
[00:14:10] So he does ultimately get back to the deflated hab.
[00:14:16] Not without skipping. OK. He says that it is it is more efficient to skip than run. And I felt like, man, there was more humor to explore there. And I really enjoy the mental image, which maybe Andy Weir is like, hey, I did all the math. You can do the heavy lifting of imagining him skipping after all of this work. And I suppose I’ll give that to him because he’s doing so much math. But I, I really enjoyed that. He included that little tidbit. It’s more efficient to skip. Yes. Good to know. So next time you guys are on Mars. Yep.
[00:15:00] It’s important to keep that in mind. Yeah. Good tip. That being said, he gets back to the lab and I was surprised by how hard it hit me that the potatoes are dead, the farm is dead. I mean, it’s like it’s sort of a given, you know, the high blew up. But there’s a line where he says potatoes are now extinct on Mars. And that was a moment that was, you know, he he worked so hard for those things and I think he only got like two harvests I and
[00:15:30] see for me. OK, as soon as everything went wrong and the air airlock was launched 50 meters, I my first thought was the potatoes. Listen, we’re only halfway through the book. Well, a little bit more, but pretty much only halfway through the book. We know Mark Watney survived. So my first thought was the potatoes. I have been grieving for the potatoes for all of this math and all of this physical labor. He’s doing so.
[00:16:03] And, you know, obviously, like I knew to, there’s no way that they could survive. You know, when you’re watching the movie, there is a shot of when this thing launches. There’s specifically a shot of all the potato plants and they all kind of go as the wind just blasts out the room.
[00:16:18] The other thing that I grieved, weirdly, was the loss of the bacteria. Yeah. So hard that bacteria so that he could even soil bacteria. Yeah. And like, dude, he lived with that smell in the rover. Yeah.
[00:16:34] Although one could argue he could make the bacteria again.
[00:16:36] Sure. But like what’s the point now. Right. So there was a. There was a part of me that also grieved the bacteria, and I don’t exactly have a good reason. That’s kind of weird,
[00:16:49] a little bit, but it’s understandable. That was a that was a real sort of. Yeah, exactly. And I just I really appreciate, you know, so on the one hand, this chapter is kind of storytelling 101 when things are going really well for your hero, especially when it’s a survival story, you have to just throw a rock at him, like you just have to do something to keep the keep the tension up, keep the the audience on their toes. But at the same time, I really appreciated in this story that it wasn’t totally random. Like it’s not like he literally got hit by a meteor or something like this is this is something that was always kind of lurking in the background. What if the hab breaches one of the breaches and you know what it did and it just really does a good job of keeping us from ever feeling too safe?
[00:17:41] You know, I kind of wish that we got the perspective of the fabric and like, how do I really. Yeah, listen,
[00:17:51] as the fabric wracked with guilt that it has let Marquart me down like.
[00:17:54] Yes, yeah. I don’t know why that sounds funny to you, but I as as a once pronounced Catholic. Yeah. I’m feeling the guilt for it. OK, ok, ok. See I am I was raised an only child and so I like to, to, you know, make everything around me come alive and I want to know all of its thoughts and feelings and I want to know about this fabric.
[00:18:20] And also the fabric feels terrible. It should.
[00:18:23] But more importantly, I want to know I’m maybe not. More importantly, I want to know the people who made it. What happened to. Is that a publicly traded company?
[00:18:35] Yeah.
[00:18:35] Because what happened to their stock. Yeah, right. It’s not going to save it. No. Um, just
[00:18:44] somewhere off screen there’s like a tech who worked on that had fabric that was like, oh this is my moment to work.
[00:18:53] So I definitely wanted to know ancillary thoughts and feelings around it because even the NASA guys don’t really comment on it. They’re like, yep, there’s always a possibility. There’s always a possibility. And, um, yeah.
[00:19:07] Thanks for leaving the little he writes OK with rocks. Morse code message for NASA just so they know he’s alive because that must have been a very scary thing to wait, you know, like how smart do it. And the image comes up on the big screen and it’s a blast.
[00:19:20] So I wanted to see I wanted to see the gal or what’s his name that I fell in love with. That’s like we’re waiting on a picture. Oh, shit. Like, I just, uh, I wanted to hear their perspective. We know what it is. It’s ours, too. But the gist
[00:19:37] of it, there was a period of time there where they didn’t know if he was alive and. Oh, damn.
[00:19:43] Um, so at the end of this chapter, at the end of Chapter fourteen, we know that he knows that he has to be rescued by souls. Six hundred instead of soul. Eight hundred and fifty six, which is a big deal.
[00:19:57] Yeah. That’s, you know, almost a year. Yeah.
[00:20:01] But then we start chapter fifty and with now he actually has to be rescued by so five hundred eighty four, not so six hundred. And I was like oh those 16 days are a big deal. Like that’s a lot of potatoes because what they said that’s like one hundred and sixty potatoes he couldn’t find because later we find out the math is he has to eat ten potatoes a day. Yeah. Maximum. To get to function, yeah,
[00:20:31] you know, one of the things that jumped out at me about the beginning of Chapter 15 is we suddenly switch to a dialog transcript. And, you know, it’s an interesting thing in this story that we kind of jump story types a lot. You know, it starts out as a first person narrative and then several chapters in it jumps to a third person narrative with the characters on Earth. And then all of a sudden we’re getting a flashback and then we’re getting a computer log from the Pathfinder and now we’re getting a dialog transcript. And it kind of it’s an interesting choice to keep switching it up. I feel like it kind of gives some of the gravitas that stories like Game of Thrones have where it jumps from character to character to character to give you the sense of the whole world. I feel like this is a much more narrow story in the sense that it’s really just everybody focuses on one person, but it still gives you some of that breadth to have all these different perspectives on the same situation.
[00:21:26] I mean, it keeps it interesting and in some ways I almost don’t notice it. Yeah, because for me, it’s just the story is moving along. And so I almost I it took me a minute to remember what you were talking about. Yeah. Um, because it kind of doesn’t matter. I, I need to know how they’re communicating. I need to know who’s communicating and so long as I know all of that. I can get to the next page. Yeah, so
[00:21:54] so we pick up on Earth and they are trying to figure out how does this affect the planet? Like what do they need to change? What do they what can they do? And one thing did jump out at me, which, you know, if I ever get to talk to Andy Weir, I’ll ask him. This seems like the kind of thing that he would have an answer for. But they’re all sitting around and they’re talking about how they can only send food. They can’t send any complex machines like the oxygen or the water reclaimer or anything like that. And my overwhelming thought was like, yeah, but guys, you could send parts, right? Like you can you can IKEA that ship and just send them a whole bunch of stuff that he can build a water reclaimer and oxygenate or at least repair the one he has, like he’s got nothing up there. At least send him some baggies of washers and screws and stuff just in case something gets stripped or a hose gets punctured. You know,
[00:22:46] I don’t know for me. I’m just sitting there thinking he needs he needs food. And yeah, all he had, like, why why swap out food for parts when they think that the more food. Yeah. Yeah. Um, which we’ll see what comes of that. They have forty eight days to make a probe
[00:23:05] which is nothing
[00:23:07] insane. Yeah. And OK, so I kind of love that Bruce is being a good leader here. He is communicating clearly. Here is the deadline, here are the problems we have and here are here’s what we have going for them. And so I just like I was like, this is a minor morale boost. Which is better than no morale boost, since these guys are going to have none in forty eight days. Yeah, but I
[00:23:38] yeah, it is a funny character. He doesn’t have a lot of personality, but I appreciate, you know, he’s sort of Bruce is probably sort of the most realistic character in this entire book because he’s the one who’s like, you know, he probably lost two inches of his hairline over the course of this book. Like, Bruce is kind of the long suffering guy who’s always getting bad news and is just like, you know, we’re already working around the clock. I don’t know how much faster we can work know he’s he’s the guy who actually works at NASA and isn’t a superhero in a novel. And I appreciate that. You know, I appreciate that this guy is he’s working the problem, I.
[00:24:13] OK, so then they name it Iris. Yep. Which she’s the goddess of Something In Rainbows. What was the first thing.
[00:24:20] Oh, if you haven’t asked me, I could
[00:24:22] have told you something about the wind, right? She makes things. Yeah, so whatever.
[00:24:26] And North Wind or something.
[00:24:27] Yeah. And, um. I love that Mark Watney says, you know, cool, the gay probe is coming to save me. Got it. Gay probe. I like that more jokes could have been made off of that phrase. Yeah, and some writers would have done it because it’s low hanging fruit. Yeah, but in more characters have like lots of characters have been written to go for that low hanging. Yeah, but I liked the exercise and restraint. I appreciated that the level of humor is a little bit higher than that. Not always, but he’s funny without being derogatory and that’s kind of what you backed out.
[00:25:14] So I saw an article talking about the humor of Brooklyn nine nine because the captain in Brooklyn, nine nine is gay. And they do make kind of a lot of gay jokes. But it’s a different kind of gay joke than you really see in a lot of television because it’s not making fun of him for being gay. It’s playing with humor about being gay. And it’s interesting. And I feel like this falls into that same category, like he could have made a joke about gay people and instead he just made a joke about rainbows.
[00:25:44] Right, exactly. It’s like this. There’s something to be said for. We can make fun of ourselves. We can you know, we can make these jokes can be brought to a higher level while still in some ways being based on stereotypes. Yeah, and that’s what it’s from. But the fact that some people know how to elevate that humor is just really fun to see, because I feel like we’re kind of entering into this era of, you know, like the good place. You know, there’s just a higher level of humor that doesn’t appeal to everybody. It doesn’t have to. But I just like that it’s out there. And this is another good example of it.
[00:26:21] Yeah, for sure. So so we do meet one of the last big character additions in this world. Apparently, he’s very happy to meet Rich Pournelle.
[00:26:33] It’s Donald Glover. It is Donald Glover. And it’s
[00:26:36] Donald playing. Playing Obied.
[00:26:38] Oh, Donald Glover’s so great. He can do no wrong. And I say Donald Glover. Twenty twenty four maybe. I just I Rich Pernell is my job and he’s played by Donald Glover, which means he’s even more my GM. He’s my jam times too and I’m just.
[00:26:59] Awesome, yeah, it’s interesting, I think Rich Pernell might be the most different between the book in the movie, and obviously we’ll get into this more when we get to the movie. But he’s he’s much more specific in the movie and the will. We’ll get into some of the inspirations there. But I was kind of surprised when I read the book that he he’s the one who doesn’t match up quite as well, but he’s a very fun character. And, yeah, he’s just, you know, great at what he does. Rich Pournelle calculates orbital trajectories, and that’s a cool job for I mean, if you love math, if you hate math, it would be a nightmare. But if you love math, like, that’s cool. Calculating orbital trajectories go on. So, yeah, he’s
[00:27:42] he’s a guy that I would absolutely be interested in talking to at a party. I know he wouldn’t be there because, as he says, he doesn’t have friends. Yeah. But I would want I would want to I would just
[00:27:54] latch on to him and like the whole party would go by and you just be like, tell me about you.
[00:27:58] You know, how like you introduce a dog to a party and everybody’s like, oh, the dog. That’s how I would be with rich poor. Now I’d be like.
[00:28:08] Just so excited to hang out, just
[00:28:10] tell they’d be like, you’re obnoxious and weird and please stop talking to me and asking me stupid questions. And I’d be like, but you have to tell me everything. I’m not going to understand even half of it, but I need to know. Yeah, I, I listen, it’s dog lover. Um. OK. OK, are you ready? OK. So. I have a little thought experiment.
[00:28:36] OK, take it away. This is.
[00:28:40] And he talks about the Watney report and how it’s like the number one show in its timeslot, in its timeslot for two weeks running, I need including you. I need everyone to just close their eyes. Do it, OK? Close your eyes and I want you to consider the most likely deadly situation you based on who you are as a person that you could ever be in. Like for me, I like to climb mountains. I like to climb things I shouldn’t. I most likely going to climb something someday on a mountain that I can’t get back down and it will be a life or death situation. So find yours kayaking, hiking, something to do with an airplane. I don’t care. Pick something where based on you, maybe it’s a zombie apocalypse. OK, now. You are there by yourself and you have only your wits and the supplies you brought with you, and for God knows what reason, no one can get to you right now. Maybe a drone can see you, but it has zero weight capacity. Now, imagine there’s a show. How about all of this, can you imagine the amount of armchair quarterbacking, the amount of picking apart every single thing you do and you know this. You know that? The people you love most, like put yourself in your mother’s shoes or your partner’s shoes or whatever, and they’re watching you every cent, like it’s not even every second because they don’t have access to that. They are only given what the news gives them. And they see what everybody else does and everybody else is treating it like reality TV, but there you are sitting on your mountain or whatever, and you’re trying to figure this out while also knowing that everybody is watching
[00:30:46] you do it. Yeah, that’s one part that got left out of this book. And thank God is all the people on the Internet who would be I mean, first of all, the people on the Internet who would be calling it a hoax, calling it a conspiracy. And then also all the people that are like, what a dumb ass. Why didn’t they, like, keep some of the potatoes in a plastic bag in case this happened?
[00:31:04] Right. But like. Yeah. And then can you imagine the other stuff that the kind of tangential stuff, you know, who people buying ad space during the Watney report, how much money they’re spending on it. This is kind of the moment she said Watney report. This is everything that hit me. I was fascinated and horrified. But as we know, it’s it’s important that it’s happening because as as is noted in the chapter, this is how they’re going to get their emergency funding is because everybody’s interested. So while it might be horrifying that his life is being put out there like this, it’s how they’re going. It’s part of how they’re going to save him. I don’t know. I there’s just something so fascinating about.
[00:31:55] Some yeah, some of the people in the some of our viewers have chimed in, Emon economist says she would be negotiating with a white dragon, which is pretty awesome. Jay Graps says, Get me into a pit with a ranko and see how fast I die. And all I can say is, if only,
[00:32:11] oh, my God, first of all, rude. And I feel like I’m an economist. You and I are on the same page about a lot of things. And I appreciate that you are here just. So, yeah,
[00:32:27] so we get this conversation about how to buy more time as they’re preparing the Iris probe because Bruce is running behind and we need to buy a few more days. And there’s one of the you know, every once in a while, Andy, anywhere does something that I just sit back and I was like, and I’m just going, how did you do that? And one of those things is, you know, normally in any other context, inspections are an annoyance. They are a bother. They are something frustrating that the bureaucrats require or at the very worst, that that that is a necessary evil or whatever. But he somehow wrote a story and maneuvered us into a situation where skipping the inspections is the scariest thing that anyone could possibly suggest. And it’s I’m just blown away in this scene. How when when Teddy asks basically what would happen if we skipped the inspection? How often do the inspections find a problem? Everybody goes silent. And even I was like, what
[00:33:33] would my first thought was, you know, someone should have warned me of this when I was younger because I skipped a lot of oil changes and then put six holes in my engine. And then you were there. My car gave out on the freeway one hundred miles outside of L.A. So, like, inspections are important. People are get your oil changed. I know you need it done. Um, but yes, I they they made it strangely scary. Yeah.
[00:34:01] Um, especially because they gave very honest numbers like they say, how often do we find something wrong. And it’s like one in twenty. And then how often would that cause a mission failure. It’s about half. So we’re talking about one in forty which is a pretty low chance. And yet it’s still so scary, huh.
[00:34:21] What they say it was like three percent chance.
[00:34:22] Yeah. It’s like yeah it’s just uh.
[00:34:25] So yeah that was. Yeah. See lovely math. Yeah. You’re cool man. That was, that was good.
[00:34:32] Exciting math. Yeah. Um, in the meantime Rich Pernell has an idea. Yeah. And he’s going to take the time necessary to find out about that idea in one of the funniest scenes maybe in this whole book, Rich Pernell asks if he can take a vacation and his boss is like, yeah. And so he just starts working on what he wants to work on. And his boss is like, are you going to give me that thing? And he’s like, I’m on vacation.
[00:34:59] I was cackling. Yeah. You guys, I love Donald Glover. That’s just not
[00:35:07] Donald Glover in the book. But yeah.
[00:35:10] I can he can be whoever I want him to be.
[00:35:13] True, true, we all have a little clever inside ourselves.
[00:35:18] That’s not true. I don’t believe that at all. Yeah.
[00:35:22] I am glad that somebody mentioned that this is the best bonus Mar’s experimentation time since opportunity. Like, that’s one of those things that I’m kind of amazed that we got this far into the book with B before someone said this is awesome. Like it’s scary as hell, but it’s also a huge opportunity.
[00:35:40] I like what Mark had to say in response. Yeah, opportunity never went back to Earth. Sorry. Bad analogy. Yeah, it’s like. Oh yeah. You didn’t think before you typed man. Yeah. That’s so um. I have. Oh. Oh right. Because they do so. All I have written here is no Desco.
[00:36:03] Yes. Yeah. They’re sending a USB drive with music
[00:36:06] from all time period.
[00:36:07] No disco disco. It’s a great little touch.
[00:36:10] I just that made me laugh pretty hard. Yeah. Uh the next thing I have is another quote. I don’t remember who’s asking him, but someone says, Do you believe in God, VANKA? Sure, lots of them. I’m Hindu and I don’t know why, but that also just got me giggling because it’s just so. I don’t to me, I heard it dry, yeah, it’s like Yemen, duh, and there is I don’t really know anything about. Hinduism. Yeah, like, I don’t really know anything about it at all. I do love that. I mean, that’s like about the thing I know. Yeah. You know,
[00:36:58] I really like that line for a very particular reason, which is that, you know, in the movie, Venkat Kapoor is changed to Vincent Kapoor because they cast the actor whose name I can never tell you for, I think. Yeah, but he’s black. He’s not Indian. But I really appreciate the fact that they kept a little bit of that in this line is in the movie says, do you believe in God? And his response is, yeah, my father was a Hindu and my mother was a Baptist. So I believe in a bunch of them, which is it’s just nice. You know, they kept they kept the fact that he’s part Indian. Yeah, he’s he is he does still have that Hindu back story. Would’ve been so easy for them to just make a black guy and just cut off that entirely. But I really appreciate the fact that they didn’t. It’s just that that kind of, you know, dedication to authenticity, dedication to accuracy, that it’s like the same way that Andy Weir is being accurate to science. They are being accurate to the book with the same level of focus. Right.
[00:38:05] So we get is is the lunch.
[00:38:08] Well, the next thing we yeah. We get the launch. And specifically, it’s always scary when Andy Weir goes into exposition mode. This is hearkening back to the hab canvas right before the explosion when Andy Weir started zooming in on certain objects and the ominous music starts playing and you’re like, why are we talking about how the Iris probe was packed in here? This is scary.
[00:38:34] And then they go through, you know, they’re they’re doing all of the checks and you don’t even know what they’re talking about. They’re not telling you what any of these words stand for. Yeah, but you know what’s happening. OK, we’re going through the launch sequence. Yeah. And it’s taking up like three pages. What’s what’s going to happen? And you have Venkat is watching. He’s like, I’m an administrator. My work is done now. So he’s leaning against the wall. And at one point talking about the iris, he says he’s thinking about the outright outright lies and borderline crimes he committed to put this mission together. And it would be worth it if it worked. And you’re just like, yeah, but I sense it’s not good.
[00:39:20] And there’s that ominous music playing in the background.
[00:39:24] Exactly. I will say they also talk about how every single employee is there and present for the launch. And that made me tear up. I like it. It is get. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is just something about the amount of heart and soul that people are pouring into this project. And it’s not just because, hey, I’m good at my job or I’m getting over time. It’s people people are putting their whole lives on the line to help this man get back to Earth. And it’s just there’s something so beautiful about that. And I need that and this crushing time of day where people are not working together. So, yeah,
[00:40:09] I was fascinated by how the Iris probe fails. Like he walks you through step by step. It’s very interesting talking about how the food was packed, the food particles getting compressed to half their size, but the oil doesn’t. So it starts to slosh liquefaction. And, you know, there’s something that I’ve always sort of hasn’t exactly bothered me. But in in sci fi stories and fantasy stories and superhero stories, there’s a thing that I noticed years ago that I sort of can’t stop noticing ever since, which is that nobody ever deals. How do I put this? Characters are whole objects. Characters are not a collection of organs. And so whenever you see a for example, if there’s a supervillain who has the ability to move things with his mind, he will pick up the hero and throw him. But he will not pull his arms off of his body like he’d never just reaches in and squeezes the guy’s heart. He just deals with the person as a unit. And so he throws the person. And then the same thing, like with Tony Stark in his armor, if his armor gets punctured, he will get injured. But as long as his armor is intact, he can hit the ground, going one hundred miles an hour and he’ll be fine. There’s there’s this sense that like, you know, Darth Vader can reach out and choke you, but he’s never going to just crush your ribcage. There’s always an external force that he’s applying. And so when I was reading about this, this liquefaction, it was very interesting because that’s the whole thing that’s happening here. It’s not the. The IRS probe breaks, it’s that the internal particles are moving relative to each other, the internal structure of the food that is being packed gets changed, and that’s what throws it all off. And I thought it was a fascinating sort of microscopic effect, having a macroscopic effect. Very cool way of of blowing up this probe, frankly.
[00:42:14] Your brain did a whole different thing that
[00:42:19] I went off in a hole.
[00:42:20] Yeah, I mean, that’s fine. I’ve done that before. I do that plenty. But it’s just funny that that’s where you went. Yeah. Whereas I went more in the direction of I wonder if it’s just the audience that gets to know why this happened. Oh yeah. Or if NASA figures it out, like
[00:42:38] if they figure out exactly what went wrong.
[00:42:40] Yeah. Because you imagine that those scientists, they’re scientists, they’re their whole job is to figure out like how to fix things and end to to discover new things. And all of this stuff like don’t you have to be innately curious to be a scientist? And so I just wonder how much this just drives them crazy that they don’t know what went wrong. Yeah. And the likelihood is they probably never figure it out.
[00:43:09] It’s probably I mean, they probably have a they probably they probably end up with like here’s one of the three things that could have gone wrong. And one of them is that the food, you know, sure.
[00:43:20] I like I like the idea that they don’t quite figure it out. And like 20 years later, some physics students still at university is
[00:43:32] like writes his dissertation about
[00:43:34] like their theory on it. And everyone’s like, uh, I’m glad my dad’s dead. So he doesn’t know that this is what threw off the IRA. It’s like, yeah, that would be so infuriating that it’s the oil itself. Yeah, I, I don’t know.
[00:43:50] I mean, one screw that was weak that would have made it’s so heartbreaking. He specifically says if they had had more time for inspection, they would have found it. You know, it’s not often that God gets to weigh in on how this could have gone. Well, usually it’s just whatever happens, happens. But we are told it was it almost got caught.
[00:44:10] There are two things that if if these two things had changed, this would not have happened. It’s the bolt. And then also, if the if there had been during the sequence, if there had been two seconds or so, that the bar could have re solidified. But there was only a quarter of a second. Yeah. And you’re just like, it’s amazing how a second like one point seventy five seconds could do all of this and that a bolt fails and it’s like these are all reasonable things. Yeah.
[00:44:43] But they’re all totally and they’re totally like quantifiable. You know, it’s not one of those things where you just kind of throw up your hands like, oh, well, what can you do? It’s like, no, that could have we could have figured that out if we just had time. That’s so fixable. Oh, yeah. Heartbreaking. And it’s just that that’s the ending of the chapter as Iris just disappears. It’s just a gut punch. Yeah. So he does such a good job of making you feel the weight of that failure. And that leads us straight into Chapter sixteen, which has this very interesting framing system of Mark’s notes to the areas crew. Yeah. Keep cutting back and forth between things happening in the story. And then the next note to one of the areas, three crew. And it’s interesting, he’s got very different tones with each of the different characters. And I really appreciate that he didn’t just write one letter to all of them where he sort of singles them out. Now, these are different notes and they’re very different types of notes. And so he starts out with his note to Martinez, which is to talk to his parents that you’re my best friend, man.
[00:45:48] So I know that this is hard. I’m sorry that I’m asking you to do this, but but I need you to do it.
[00:45:55] Yeah, and that’s that’s so. Powerful, notably, it changes in the movie, notably, he asks Commander Lewis to talk to his parents. Yeah, I wonder why they do. They do a few things. They take a few things that other crew members have and they give them to Commander Lewis, I think, to to sort of bolster her character. Right. But, yeah, it’s very poignant. And then welcome to China, of all places I love. We are suddenly introduced. An entirely new character is totally unrelated.
[00:46:27] I love this part because it’s so pragmatic. Yes. And I love the idea that. OK, so. There’s this pragmatism, there’s this capability of like, OK, but if we if we go this route, which is the route we’re supposed to take, this is what’s going to happen and it’s not going to go our way, OK, or we’re not going to get what we want in the end. So we’re going to take this alternative route to get what we want. There’s just something underhanded about it that but in a very
[00:47:01] real
[00:47:01] way. It’s still within the rules set, for example. OK, I know we’re behind, but I, I too am watching Bridgton and there’s this, there’s this point in the second episode where, yes, I can totally relate it. Listen, there’s this point, the second half in weird
[00:47:17] ways
[00:47:18] episode where you know, the lead character, Daphne, is that our name, whatever she’s like, no one’s going to listen to us about this information because we’re not mad at her mom is like, we don’t have to be men. We will. We’re ladies and we can we’ll just talk because that’s all they have to do. Like they’re thero is not to be direct and be the man who says this is how things are going to work. No, no, no. They’re going to they’re going to do the route that was available to the women at the time, which is we’re going to gossip and ruin someone’s reputation so that we get what we want. Yeah, exactly. And that’s exactly what they’re doing here. They’re like, yeah, if we just talk straight to NASA.
[00:48:00] Yeah. Keep this between scientists.
[00:48:02] Yes. And it also is the guys at the top are going to eat it up if we save the Americans. Yeah. And it’s just so it’s so I thought it was brilliantly written.
[00:48:13] Very much so. And the other thing that I really thought was fascinating was it’s a very different kind of organization, you know, that we’re we’ve been living with NASA for so long and they’ve made these comments about how, like, you know, once they have the photos, they have twenty four hours to release them because they’re a public agency. This is not something that we can just keep secret because we’re not allowed to. And now all of a sudden, we cut to China where NASA doesn’t even know we have this rocket because it’s a state secret and we can’t share this and we can’t share that. And they don’t even know about this because it’s all state secrets. We don’t
[00:48:43] remember anything.
[00:48:44] Yeah. Here I am filling out a form where I have to provide enough information to be helpful, but also hide enough information because this is all state secrets. And it’s interesting to watch the sort of political machinations and the different way that this fundamentally similar organization has to operate.
[00:49:02] And he even says this isn’t actually a state secret, but we keep everything secret so that nobody knows when there is something that’s worth being hidden that would make it more obvious. Yeah, I just I appreciated the little insights that they give to the way another and another culture and government would handle this. So, yeah, it was it was really nice, very cool.
[00:49:25] And and a great statement about international support. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s just awesome to see another country coming in and helping out with this effort to save one man.
[00:49:39] And that that. These scientists and this and this space. Um. Group also feels the same way. Yeah, you know,
[00:49:52] they’ve got the same spirit, they’ve got a very different structure and very different requirements, but it’s the same kind of person that’s working
[00:49:57] here. And I love that they say, you know, the American people are sentimental, but their government isn’t. Yeah. And it’s like, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:04] Just yeah. Before before you write this off, as the Chinese are the practical ones and the Americans are the idealists. No, no, no. The American Space Agency is ideal as the American State Department is not.
[00:50:15] Yeah, exactly. Which I really enjoyed. Yeah.
[00:50:19] Next up, we have marks note to Joe Hansen, which was hilarious. I love this one. Aspire to a level of cool known only as botanist cool and talking about how Lewis pulled him aside and made a rule that there’s no hitting on the hattrick
[00:50:34] to all of the guys. Yeah, well, and then. Well, the other thing that I love is he’s like, you’re really pretty. How did you get to be a nerd? And don’t get me wrong, you are a nerd. He’s like underlining that you’re very smart. And I don’t I’m having to do what you did and I don’t get it. Everybody has to walk me through like word for word. What needs to be done. Yeah. And dude, you’re a nerd and I am not a nerd botanist. Cool. Yeah, he’s cool school and he’s like, so when I see you again, let me give you a wedgie. Like, oh, remind me to give.
[00:51:12] Yeah. He’s not asking for permission. Yeah.
[00:51:14] Like I just said, there’s something so validating about him being like, yeah you’re pretty but dude you’re a nerd. Yeah.
[00:51:23] It’s so good. I can very much empathize with this, considering that when I started dating Lacey, she introduced me to her weekly Dungeons and Dragons group. And yeah, you’re pretty hot, but you’re a big nerd.
[00:51:35] So, you know, I just want to rage barbarians forever, my friends. Yeah.
[00:51:43] So we come back to Earth. They’re talking about the new probe. How do we get food? And there’s no landing system is one of the first things they drop which holy crap, this thing’s going to hit the ground going three hundred meters per second for the Americans out there, a meter is roughly a yard. So if you imagine three hundred meters, imagine three football fields every second. That thing is moving the same fast and they’re just going to slam it into the ground and be like, go eat it.
[00:52:12] Yeah, find the food in there. Yeah, hopefully it hasn’t disintegrated. I mean, they’re going to work to make sure it doesn’t, but. Right. OK, I just have to point this out. I’m not in love. I’ve never been in love with the use of the term ghetto. Yeah. It’s just I’m pretty anti that. Um, and I could have gone to the source and found a couple of other words that could have been used, but I didn’t. There’s a thesaurus out there. Could have been used. That’s all I’ve got to say about it.
[00:52:45] There is a you know, I feel like I say this multiple times every episode, but I really appreciate the limits that Andy Weir puts on genius, that even in a world of super geniuses, a world that is competence porn, this is a world in which, as Rich Pournelle says, you can’t make a Mars probe in a month like, no, there’s just not a thing like even the super genius Rich Bernell is like, no, that’s what this is about. This is not how this is going to work. And it just keeps it grounded, you know, it keeps it to where he’s not. Tony Stark, you’re not just going to, like, whip this thing out in a weekend. No, it takes longer than a month to make a Mars probe. And, you know, it’s one of those things that I feel like a lot of people, even in the real world, would be sitting there going, why? Like, you just pack it. It’s like a you know, it’s like a box. You just put a bunch of food in there and you launch it. It take an afternoon. But it’s not this stuff is hard. It’s complicated. It takes a lot of work. And that’s just not a thing. Even in this universe,
[00:53:48] if I had told him beforehand, I would have made Alex read the conversation between Venkat and and Rich. We would have yeah, we would have done a little voice acting. Yeah, I, I won’t do that today purely because I didn’t give him a heads up that that’s what I wanted to do. Yeah but you guys, if you can find it I recommend. Going and reading it again, we’re in Chapter 16, and it’s when Rick comes in to vent Katz office with his idea and it is just a French kiss. So delightful, so delightful. Again, I love him. I love him.
[00:54:37] Next up, we have Mark’s note to Vogul, which again is hilarious, accusing him of being a supervillain. You’ve got a base on Mars. You’ve got a German accent. Like it’s just so there’s.
[00:54:48] You bought me a beer for breakfast?
[00:54:50] Yeah. There’s a special place in my heart for humor that is based on being just flat out confrontational. And, you know, if there’s anybody who knows about that. It’s obviously Jacob. Because he’s terrible.
[00:55:07] That’s all. So Annie is not a nerd,
[00:55:13] I know what the heck I mean, like I liked you so much you haven’t even seen Lord of the Rings.
[00:55:17] Come. Listen, I love her despite this. I love that she’s the only person in the room that is like, what is this Elrond thing? Like, what the heck? And I say,
[00:55:27] why does Elrond mean secret meeting? Yeah.
[00:55:30] And I was dying because obviously I know what this is. And I, I love Lord of the Rings. And Annie is not a nerd. Yeah, I am. And I love her like there’s
[00:55:42] something written in my notes. Annie hasn’t seen Lord of the Rings because she’s lame.
[00:55:47] Yeah, I mean, OK, but rude, like, true, but rude, you know, talk about confrontational,
[00:55:55] she can take it. She’s tough as nails. She is,
[00:55:58] uh, but I she does move back to the top of my list of favorites immediately after this. Teddy decides, yes, so the whole thing is they they brought in select people to decide, OK, are we going to do this Rich Pernell maneuver and get the Hermès crew involved or are we going to do this, um, backup iris mission? OK, and. Teddy decides he’s going to be a chickenshit coward, Bozek, and
[00:56:39] and it’s just not having any of it. And Mitch calls him out as a coward and
[00:56:43] storms storms out and it’s beautiful. And then but I was hoping.
[00:56:47] But it’s yeah, it’s kind of expected because Mitch has been pushing for this the whole time. And so you sort of allow yourself to fall into this belief that really it’s just Mitch that’s pushing for this. And then Annie pulls one out of left
[00:56:58] field and it’s beautiful. Yeah, I just. I love how forceful she is, I love how like. You can just you can just kind of feel the rage pull thing off of her, you know, you felt it like it was just wafting off of Mitch. But Annie, she’s she’s also a little barbarian. Yes. And I love her. Awesome.
[00:57:21] So I also have I don’t know why, but it always tickles me when women tell men if you had any balls, you would do this. It’s just it always lands for me. It’s just it’s I that line isn’t in the movie. But I can just picture Kristen Wiig telling Jeff Daniels if you had any balls, you just like. Yes.
[00:57:45] That that works. Exactly. And, um, so anyway, she tops my list again, just because she’s red.
[00:57:51] You know, one of the things that I again, if I ever meet Andy Weir, I would love to sort of talk to him about is I wonder how revolutionary an idea it is to have the Hermès go back like it’s presented as like this incredible course that Rich Pournelle has calculated and all this stuff. But, you know, we’ve all seen Apollo 13. We all know about slingshot ing around and coming back faster, like I wonder. So some of the backstory for The Martian Andy Weir worked, I think, at NASA or at JPL for years. He’s he’s done all the math. He actually programed a simulator, a physics simulator and calculated the course of the Hermes. The you can actually look up videos of the Hermès flight flight plan and how long it took to get to Mars, how long it took to get back. You can actually see its course through the solar system. And so I I wonder how hard it was to find a course that got them back to Mars, because on the one hand, it seems really, you know, complicated. But on the other hand, it’s like. Can you get there, cool, do it, you know, so it’s I’d be curious to know,
[00:59:00] yeah, there’s this moment in there that I just wanted to shout at Mark to lay off the disco hate. And it’s the happiest. It’s literally the happiest music on Earth. And I am new to love of disco. And that’s purely because learning about the history of disco. So someone just needs to teach Mark a little bit. You know, go, I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. Go listen to the you’re wrong about episode about this disco, because it’s just he’s just. He’s just as wrong about as the whitest person. He’s just too white to understand this, obviously.
[00:59:42] By the way, we’re we’re in Mark’s note to Commander Lewis right now, but we did skip over the very sweet note to back, which I don’t know how a romantic subplot got injected into the Martian. This is such a out of left field thing, but I really appreciate that Beck is in love with Johannsson. And Mark’s like, you got to tell her man. Like, that’s
[01:00:03] got to wait, but you have to tell her.
[01:00:05] Yeah, that’s how did we get romance into this.
[01:00:09] Incredible. I love that. OK, so here now we’re at the vocal. Got the email from Mitch
[01:00:16] that which, by the way, is there anything that Andy Weir doesn’t know? This whole discovery hinges on the nuances of German grammar, like who is Andy Weir and and who built him?
[01:00:28] Um, so I guess this part of the book becomes so stressful, but it’s like a fun stressful for. Yeah. Uh, and I was I was actually at the office reading this and I was so bummed because I was wishing that I was at home curled up with my with my London fog tea and my chocolate and just like trying not to hurry through this portion of the chapter because this chapter is so beautiful that matches like, screw all of you. I’m going to I’m going to tell Commander Lewis this way, that there is an option. Well, and gets to choose.
[01:01:06] And that speech, the the we die speech. If this happens, we die. If this happens, we die. If this happens, we die like it’s very good at setting the stakes for the rest of the story.
[01:01:17] And she brings up the fact that there’s mutiny. You were so used to mutiny stories actually being about men and he or she is a a military woman who is talking about are we going to do this or not? And there’s something that I found really like I don’t know if any of the other ladies found it this way, but I, I really appreciated it because, um, you know, rebellion is not one sided. It’s not it’s not one gender. It’s right. You know, and I felt like it was very true to her character. It was very well written. She talks about the consequences. And then she lets everybody leave and as they’re filing out, we’re seeing, she tells us essentially that they’re back to them, they’re on their old selves, they’re being their authentic selves. And they’re it’s like authentic mutiny is on the table. And I’m so excited.
[01:02:17] Well, and it’s it also injects some of the gravitas back into mutiny. You know, oftentimes in movies, mutiny is just the thing that you do when things get tough. But like, no, this is bad. Mutiny is intense and you need to take some time to think about it. Yeah.
[01:02:31] You have twenty four hours.
[01:02:32] I love I love how individualized their responses are to Martinez. Sort of plays it off as a joke. Hellyeah I’m in. Whereas Johannsson it’s all about trusting Commander Lewis and Voegele is very practical about it. I’ve already had enough space like. Yeah, very individualized responses. There is a quote. I’m down to my last three notes here, but I did want to make a note of Eagly. The listeners may notice a line. Rich Pournelle is a steely eyed Misael man is the code that the Aries team sends back to Earth to indicate that they’re following the Rituparno maneuver. That phrase gets used in Apollo 13. You are a steely eyed missile man. And I just assumed that was an Apollo 13 reference. But it turns out I looked it up. It’s actually a thing that people say at NASA. It’s a it’s a NASA compliment and nobody’s entirely sure where it is from. But the common belief is that it goes back to flight controller John Aaron due to his resolution of an electrical system failure during the launch of Apollo twelve in nineteen sixty nine that somebody called in a steely eyed missile man. And ever since then, it’s been a phrase that gets used at NASA.
[01:03:42] That’s awesome. I love that nice little tidbit of history. Right.
[01:03:46] Of course, you know, scientific accuracy. Let’s get some historical accuracy in here. Do I love how smug Mitch is when when Teddy calls him in and is like, you know, you leaked the thing and Mitch is like, I don’t know, somebody did in there, like, so not trying to hide it.
[01:04:04] Yeah, it is like you’re not Annie is just going to tell tell the public that you decided that. Yeah. This is what NASA’s going to do. Right. Oh, well, then you can’t charge any of them with mutiny and
[01:04:15] just absolute salute checker.
[01:04:17] We’re all off the hook. So and then Teddy’s like, I will find out if I figured out how to point this at you, I will fire you. Yes. And Mitch is like Mitch ever.
[01:04:30] Mitch has one of the greatest mic drop lines of all time, which is if I wasn’t willing to risk to take risks to save lives. Well, I guess I’d be you. Oh, man,
[01:04:47] like eat shit, man. Yeah, so good.
[01:04:50] It’s actually, you know, it’s interesting because in the movie, Mitch is played by Sean Bean and it’s interesting. It’s the meekest that I’ve ever seen Sean Bean play a character. He’s he’s always kind of like sullen and kind of in drawn. And it’s not the character that Sean B. normally plays. And it’s actually Mitch in the book is a little bit tougher than Mitch in the movie, and I appreciate that. But, man, that that walk away line is just perfection.
[01:05:18] I don’t know if we’re all seeing the same thing, but I, I need everybody to read, reread emon economists’ uh, little hurt her chiming in that Lewis’s mode is her dead character’s mode. And now I need to know the whole story.
[01:05:36] Yeah. We’re going to need backstory on your dad. Yeah.
[01:05:38] So if you could just like write it out maybe as like a little essay or something. I want
[01:05:45] you to know we mirror all these episodes to YouTube, so why don’t you write it up and post it as a YouTube comment so that people can come back later and read it
[01:05:53] so I can read it. Yeah.
[01:05:55] This is mostly just for this. This is from I want I’m
[01:05:58] and I don’t care about anybody.
[01:06:00] I care about humans other than myself.
[01:06:02] I don’t. So no, I wish that were true. That’s how it here first folks, I shut up. I want it, I want to read it. I will voice over it when I’m not congested. Um. All right. So that is this week. Yeah. No that’s it for you. Oh. What do you got. I just want to say last thing is. Again, we’re in Chapter 16, even if you’re not following along in the book, and so anybody following along the book just curious. I want to know I want you to go and read the last page, page and a half of this chapter, because I think it’s holy and marvelous and I just feel like you will do your best if you’ve been following along with us. And even if it’s not with the book, you’ll still know exactly where we are and it’s worth it. So absolutely right it guys.
[01:07:02] Yeah. So that’s it for us this week. Be sure to chime in and follow us on Twitter so that you can see these being broadcast live. Be sure to subscribe and hit the bell on YouTube. We also have a patreon page patreon.com-edgeworksenetertainment so that you can join in and get some excellent benefits and special content. We are all over the place on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Reddit. So sign in and let us know what you think and follow along the.
Alexander Winn and Lacey Hannan are back again to discuss chapters 11 – 13 of Andy Weir’s The Martian! The L in LCD stands for liquid, Kristin Wiig is the best depiction of what a PR manager is like (editor’s note: it’s true), and that fabric stuff is OMINOUS AS HELL (apparently).
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕪𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕚𝕤 is a live talk show that aims to find the relationship between science and fiction in pop culture. We’ll discuss a book, movie, or show each week that’s science-focused and talk about just how realistic it is, where reality is cooler than fiction, and exactly where certain liberties were taken.
Alex [00:00:04] Hey, folks, welcome back to The Synthesis, yes it was. I’m Alexander Winn and this very loud person is his wife, Lacey Hannan.
Lacey [00:00:16] Yes. Who is going to throw a book at him today.
Alex [00:00:20] And we are so glad to be back. We had some technical difficulties last week and before that was the holiday.
Alex [00:00:28] And we’re just so happy to be back with all of our beloved fans and great, super, super duper sorry that it’s been so long. Seriously, you guys, thank you for your patience. Appreciate you. Just felt like I need to put that out there.
Alex [00:00:44] Yep. So we are picking up where we left off. We are doing our read through of The Martian by Andy Weir. We are currently doing chapters 11, 12 and 13. And yeah, picking back up. We are in within the story.
Alex [00:01:01] We are on Soul 97 and souls are Martian days. So probably about a hundred and two days, something like that, into the adventure. Mark Watney has been getting the Pathfinder up and running in the hopes of using it to contact Earth. And he doesn’t know it. But the people back on Earth have picked up on what he’s doing and they’re working on it, too.
Lacey [00:01:26] And so far, we’ve had them switching back and forth between chapters and chapter. Well, Chapter 11 is the first time that we have Mark’s point of view and the earthlings point of view.
Alex [00:01:39] Yeah, it’s it’s intercutting for the first time. And that is not the only format change that we’re going to have this episode. Things are shaken up. He does a lot of fun stuff. This we are this weird guy. He’s a very weird guy. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we start out Chapter 11 and we are back on Earth and we’re huddled up with the NASA and JPL folks trying to get Pathfinder to connect or trying to connect to Pathfinder on Mars. And we just have to start out with with Tim being a jackass because he’s like one of my favorite, right?
Lacey [00:02:19] Yes. Because hit like him expressing like, OK, this is this is about we’re going to talk about time lag here. And he goes through all of it. And then the response is, hey, Venkaiah is. Yeah. Got like a degree in physics man. He knows how to do this. And Tim’s responses, you can never tell with managers.
Lacey [00:02:38] And I’m just like sitting here going, this is a good indication that in real life people get promoted past their ability all the time and their subordinates have to deal with bullshit a lot.
Alex [00:02:50] And it’s also, I thought, a great way of conveying exposition, because that’s the kind of thing that you can’t actually count on the audience to necessarily know. Yeah. And so you need somebody to say it. And it’s always tricky. You know, if if anybody out there is a screenwriter or or a novel writer, you know, conveying that kind of information without it being clunky is always hard.
Alex [00:03:11] And, you know, you watch TV, you watch movies. There are plenty of times where people do exposition really badly. And I really like this sort of elegant solution, which is you have a douchebag conveyance like he’s got he’s going to spag those kind of a douche bag.
Alex [00:03:26] I mean, that that is a perfect example of it. But he’s kind of a jackass.
Lacey [00:03:30] I mean, he’s a jackass, but that’s different from their their degree, their degrees here.
Alex [00:03:35] But I just I love that. Like, if you need to if you need to risk talking down to the audience, the way you do it is you just lean into it and you just talk down to people. You just have a character who’s willing to talk down to people.
Lacey [00:03:47] And yeah, I feel like this is a good, honest snipe and I just appreciated that a lot. I also appreciate that Venkaiah is not a manager who is promoted past his ability. Yeah, I mean, obviously he’s highly capable as as we have touched on multiple times.
Alex [00:04:04] This book is very much competence porn. This is all about the experts doing expert things. And I guess Tim just doesn’t believe that he he he still needs to be convinced.
Alex [00:04:15] Yes. So we hang out with them for a little bit. And then, like Lacy said, we jump back to Mark Watney on Mars pretty quickly. Yes. And this was one of those moments. There are few moments in this book that the the relief is just palpable. It’s so he wakes up and Pathfinder is pointed at Earth. And as he says, Pathfinder has no way of knowing where Earth is. So the only way that it could pick Earth’s location out in the sky is if it had connected to Earth.
Alex [00:04:48] And he’s got a line back to Earth. And just the way it’s described and, you know, I’m doing Lacey’s reading the physical book. I’m doing the audio book narrated by well, narrated by Wil Wheaton. And just the delivery and everything is so. Like, I jumped in to Chapter 11, I had not been reading through to here, I just started Chapter 11 and I was already just like, oh, so palpable.
Lacey [00:05:13] I, I loved that. He cried. Yeah, I mean, and it makes it obviously makes total sense, but. Like the crying and then the immediate, like, I would like to delete things that I’ve written. I don’t go there and delete. Yeah, but is writing that he’s crying, it means that he’s not embarrassed about the crying. And I feel like he’s a man secure in his in his emotional masculinity. And I love it. And to me that is that is Andy weir taking time to write the future he wants to see and I say all creators out there take note because that’s what we should be doing. Yes. And but anyway, I just I love that, you know, it’s just such a human thing. He’s got this big emotional thing and then he’s also got logic going. Oh, I wrote a couple of things that I thought nobody would read until I died. Yeah, exactly. So it was it was nice. Yeah.
Alex [00:06:11] And then at that at that point, we cut back to Earth again and we’re you know, we’re jumping back and forth pretty quick and we are in a press conference. And so one of the things that I thought was interesting is there’s a fairly lengthy section here in the press conference where, again, it’s a very elegant way of doing exposition because one of the experts is just being interviewed. What does this mean? What are we going to be able to do? How is this going to change things? You know, this whole story for 10 chapters has been about someone alone. And then we also had these characters over here who are trying to get to the guy who is alone. And so we are totally changing the rules of this engagement. Like this is a totally different kind of story. Now, it’s not somebody who’s alone. It’s somebody who can talk to Earth. And so we just sort of step through that in the press conference. What is this going to mean for the story going forward, just to sort of set the tone?
Lacey [00:07:03] See, now, I didn’t write anything about this because I jump straight back to the Tim. I mean, I read this part. Yes. Don’t don’t get me wrong. But Tim Tim is my.
Alex [00:07:13] Oh, yeah. I’ve got a note here. The very next line on my notes is waiting for the waiting for the panorama.
Lacey [00:07:19] Tim is a douche and that’s fun is so you got it. You got to find a better word because to me it’s him being a smart ass.
Alex [00:07:29] Yeah. I like him and I want to keep him for this reason alone. It’s dry and I love good dry humor.
Lacey [00:07:35] But, you know, I think he’s talking to Venkat and. When it comes up and says, you know anything to him because they’re waiting to get a response and Tim says totally, but we’re staying at this black screen because it’s way more interesting than pictures from Mars.
Lacey [00:07:53] And I feel like if you’re an NCIS fan, that’s where he would get swatted in the back of the head, or if your grandpa does that. Um, this is where this is where Tim would get swatted. And anyway, I just. I enjoyed that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex [00:08:10] So one of the things that, you know, we’ve talked over and over throughout The Martian about things that are sort of fun challenges, things that are oh, that’s a that’s a fun kind of world to play. And a little bit how do you make water? How do you grow food, you know, these sorts of things.
Alex [00:08:24] And for me, communicating through the camera falls into that category like you’ve got a camera. It can rotate 360 degrees. They can obviously see you. So one way of communication is taken care of, but how do you get a message back?
Alex [00:08:39] The camera turns, that’s all go.
Alex [00:08:43] And it’s fun to watch him sort of walk through. Well, I could put little letters around, but then that would be a lot of letters. So, you know, and sort of playing with all these different ways of doing it before he finally settles on the one that he does.
Lacey [00:08:56] I personally am right before that. Like, you know, he’s he asks them a question about like, can they. Are you reading or are you reading me, you know, and they can point at yes or no and he’s very excited about the yes because this is the most exciting yes. Since prom night. And I about lost my mind when I read that. First of all, so funny. Second of all, I was like, yes, get some makhaya nerd like a part of me. That’s like, yes, yes, I want the nerds to get. This guy is a charming, nerdy guy making it work. And then of course, I want to know, did you get some money from me? Uh, I did not actually. Neither did I. I mean, I was I was pretty devout at the time, guys, so that wasn’t going to have to be fair.
Alex [00:09:42] I didn’t actually go to prom with my girlfriend. I went to prom with a friend of mine who had no date. And I was like, well, that cannot stand. So so you so I went with my friend and that’s very sweet. Yeah. So it wasn’t really it wasn’t something that I was hoping for, but yeah, I just, it just I like it.
Lacey [00:10:02] And then when the nerds get there. Yeah. Not theirs, it’s not theirs.
Lacey [00:10:07] Whatever, I just, I want all nerds to have a little something. Yeah. Yeah. OK, great. Very good of you.
Alex [00:10:16] So yeah. You know, so what Mark does, he’s got this camera that can rotate and spaceplane this because I don’t know what this table is. OK, so the you know, the initial thought obviously he’s got a he’s got a camera that can rotate. So the first thing he does is he sets up yes and no. That’s cool. But that doesn’t really allow communication just allows you to respond to questions. So he’s got to have some way for them to convey complex information. So his first thought is I could put letters all the way around. But, you know, there are twenty six letters in the English alphabet and you also probably going to need ten numbers. 039 And then you might need a question mark, like there’s kind of a lot of stuff that you would need and at a certain point you would have so many things around the circle that each one has such a narrow degree of arc that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell. Is that camera pointed at the M or the N? You know, so he’s he’s gone. How can I get this in a way that has fewer options basically around the circle? And what he settles on is ASCII. Now, Askey is a way for computers to store text, basically, so, you know, computers work on ones and zeros and so what they have is a system where hexadecimal. So I’m suddenly sort of backtracking through all the weird math nerd stuff that I’m going to have to give to describe this. All right. So a base 16, no system so hexadecimal are a way of storing 16.
Alex [00:11:53] Digits at a time, so, you know, normally we use 10 digits in numbers, so we go 039, this is hexadecimal use 039 and then ABCDE, AEF, OK, and so with pairs of these characters, you can store other information. So Hex Colors is a way of doing colors if you do webdesign, that sort of thing. But what he’s using it for is an alphabet table. Right. So each letter of the alphabet has a different hex code.
Alex [00:12:23] So for example, a might be zero zero and B zero one and then C is zero two.
Lacey [00:12:29] So he’s essentially cutting down the symbols he has by like 10.
Alex [00:12:36] Well, no, because an ASCII table doesn’t just include letters. It also includes numbers. It also includes symbols like he probably has emojis as an option that they could send him. That is all laid out in this ASCII table, depending on what kind of like depending on how it’s formatted.
Alex [00:12:53] But the idea is that he can now have every letter of the alphabet, all the numbers, punctuation marks, whatever he needs that they can send him. All he has to do is go through and he’ll see the camera turns like a six eight four zero two. And so these pairs, he can then take compare to the table and he can see O zero two is the letter C and then. Right.
Lacey [00:13:20] But that’s what I’m saying is instead of having you have 16 symbols instead of your normal. Yes.
[00:13:27] 16 symbols plus. Plus it’s all that was a question card.
Alex [00:13:30] Yeah. OK, so he will scratch them into the sand as he is watching the camera turn around and then he can take this undecipherable gibberish and go compare it to the ASCII table and turn it into letters and a message. Right. Yeah.
Lacey [00:13:49] Yeah, OK, I get it, it’s just real boring, so I’m glad that they didn’t go into it too much because I thought it was awesome and fascinating. I was I was actually way more interested in Cannes and how the Pathfinder was going to how they were going to actually communicate back and forth. Yeah, I like to the OK, the Pathfinder can talk to Earth, A.J. Journal, but this journal isn’t working. So how do we do this? And then getting the rover to have to work with the HAB instead. And I just I found like I found that all a lot more interesting than the ASCII table. Yeah. And I wanted to move on, which I did.
Alex [00:14:27] I did notice another thing that we’ve mentioned before. I really like the fact that, you know, Mark is clearly a genius in sort of the McGyver sense. But I really like the fact that he’s not always the one with every solution. And in this particular case, it was actually johannsson that had the ASCII table. Johannsson is the the computer specialists. She’s the software nerd on the team. And so she was the one who had this vital tool. He didn’t know it. He just he didn’t know it. But he he came up with the solution. He had the idea. Yes. But she was the one with the information that allowed him to do it. And I just I appreciate that even though the the crew of Aries three aren’t here, that they’re still contributing. You know, he’s still you still get the sense that it wasn’t sort of a one man mission to Mars. They were a whole bunch of really competent people here. And now he just has their stuff. But it still helps.
Alex [00:15:20] Yes, I have to say so.
Lacey [00:15:24] Going back to Earth. Yeah, yeah. Jack annoys the shit out of me. He’s the one who comes in and starts talking to Venkaiah and Ben. It’s like, dude, like I don’t care about all of these extra things and I’m just sitting here going, thank you, thank you, thank you. Be concise, get to the point and then get out. And there are nobody cares about this extra stuff. We’re trying to get Mark home and we don’t have to you know, you can’t act like you’re in an emergency for the next however many years he’s going to be there. But get to the point, we are actually on a mission right now. So I. I love Tim and I hate Jack.
Alex [00:16:04] Fair enough. So, yeah. And but his idea is brilliant, which is the software patch that will allow them to I mean, sure, you can be brilliant and still be hated.
Alex [00:16:18] All right, we’re going to be tiptoeing around Laci a little bit tonight.
Lacey [00:16:24] You don’t have to tiptoe around me. Just don’t be like Jack, be concise. Get to the point. You say that like it’s something I. He’s terrible, you guys. This is probably why I can’t handle it. And anybody else I like, I maxed out with me. Yeah. I just I’ve learned to have all sorts of patience with his.
Lacey [00:16:42] Talking and then, wow, I mean, everybody else, I’m like, OK, no, no, no, you get to the end. We will see. The way you feel about me is the way I feel about Jay Grape.
[00:16:54] Hey, you’re ridiculous.
Lacey [00:16:57] OK, so the other person I love is Annie is Annie.
Alex [00:17:02] Annie because they’re because they’re going to meet in the middle. They’re going to meet one of the greatest lines in this book. She’s talking about how some people are crawling up her ass and some people are looking at her throat and they’re going to meet in the middle Venkat.
[00:17:16] And that’s fantastic. I just I love her so much. The profanity, the power, the. She’s just she’s my kind of gal.
Alex [00:17:27] We’re going to get to the movie after we finished our read through. And so I’ve been trying to keep the movie references down. But that being said, Kristen Wiig was the absolute perfect casting, which is funny because I don’t remember it.
Lacey [00:17:38] I don’t remember her. I probably will once I start watching it. This is this is an ongoing thing, though. You guys like this is not putting anybody down. I do not remember books and movies after I’ve seen them.
Lacey [00:17:50] I just they kind of. Disappear because I think I read too fast. Yeah, or something, I don’t know, but I just don’t I don’t retain it. It’s not because of anybody’s performance socks or anything like that. Kristen Wiig is great. Yeah, OK. I, I, I have noticed.
Lacey [00:18:08] So this is this is true for me and all signs things. I don’t retain a lot of it. Like I’ll learn what it is and then I’m like, oh that makes sense. And then I just don’t keep it in my brain. You sort of verify but don’t store it. Yes. Well L in LCD stands for Liquid and I will absolutely retain that for the rest of my life. That is because he ruined the laptop because he. Yes. And his zero out of 10 consumer review had I was cackling. I just I appreciated that.
Alex [00:18:39] Yes, I, I really appreciated there’s a line that was one of those things. You know, there’s there’s a special category of knowledge, which is the stuff that you sort of knew but didn’t properly appreciate. You hadn’t actually stopped to think about it even though it was already in there. I really love that point that they make where they’re discussing whether or not to tell the rest of the Hermès crew about whether Mark is alive.
Alex [00:19:02] And the point that gets made is, you know, nobody’s focusing on it, but they’re actually in more danger than he is right now. You know, he’s stranded on Mars, but at least he’s on a planet there in space. And that’s scary. And that’s the argument that is made from not telling them yet. And that’s an interesting argument like that.
Lacey [00:19:22] I buy it, though, because he’s in. Ahab that could somehow get destroyed or like he’s doing everything on his own, he can’t last forever, whereas these people are in in yeah, he’s he’s definitely in more long term danger in terms of like, will this have survive until his four gets here and that sort of stuff. But in terms of the day to day basis is harder. Died more times than any of them have.
Lacey [00:19:57] I just like emotionally, I get where the argument part of the argument is, hey, this will put them in danger because their emotional state will get in the way of their work. And that is dangerous. Right. And I get that. But simultaneously, like.
Lacey [00:20:16] You don’t buy it. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it. And I and I guess it kind of. I get the I get that the argument is there, I just don’t I just don’t buy it I.
Alex [00:20:29] That being said, I think another person who doesn’t buy that is Mark Watney. And I love how much he won’t shut up about absolving his team. Yeah. That’s like a really it’s one of those things that sort of the writer didn’t need to do. Say it once. It’s not the crew’s fault. You’ve established that you can move on, but. This is a portent. It’s important to mark that no, seriously, it’s not their fault, and really driving that point home is is great and it takes us into Chapter 12.
Lacey [00:21:02] Well, we are. We are not done with Chapter 11 because we’re not done. Because why don’t you take us through the rest of Chapter 11?
Lacey [00:21:09] It’s it’s just this portion where he has like he he does this long message, right. That he’s sending back. And I’m not going to find it. But he’s already been told to watch his language because the world is reading what he’s writing. And at the end, the morning has been made. And how does he end this message?
Lacey [00:21:33] Look, a pair of boobs and then he does what does open parentheses, period, CAPPOTELLI Period, close parentheses. And I was just like, oh, you’re such a high schooler.
[00:21:44] But that’s funny. It’s so funny. That is that’s like it’s like, what are you going to do? He’s on Mars. Like, you’re going to come fire me, you know, you’re going to leave me here.
Lacey [00:21:55] So anyway, it’s just again, Andy Weir is so good at at bringing this character to life and keeping the humor alive for the sake of the audience. He could have taken this to such a dark place and reasonably, but he chose not to like and it’s more fun, not just reasonably, but that’s sort of like the the right way to do it.
Alex [00:22:18] And you’ve got a guy stranded on Mars. The way you do that, right, is to raise the stakes. You make it dramatic, you make it scary. And he went completely the other way. And it works.
Lacey [00:22:29] It does total death. I it’s it’s not following in falling into the stereotype. And I think that’s part of why this is such a standout story. All right.
Alex [00:22:40] Now, so in Chapter twelve, he’s absolving his crewmates, which takes us into Chapter 12, Chapter 12 again, shakes up the formula of this book, which is a lot of fun because all of a sudden it’s a flashback and it’s not a it’s not Mark Watney giving a dialog. It’s actually sort of a fictional third person narrative featuring Mark Watney. We flashback to the Aries three mission and the whole team is there on the ground. And we finally get to meet the Aries crew. And this is something that I had kind of forgotten because I you know, I’ve seen the movie. I’ve read the books before. It wasn’t really in the forefront of my mind that we hadn’t actually met them yet.
Lacey [00:23:20] Yeah, we think I was like, why are we doing this? Because in my head, I do have most of the crew members in my head as stand ins for these for these characters that we’ve like that we’ve heard about. Yeah. And so I I guess. I got really bored in this chapter because I was like, I already know all of this, so I don’t have very I have a couple of things. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Alex [00:23:46] I thought it was cool to go back to sort of plan A.. You know, to see how was this mission supposed to go and collect any rock samples. And they’re doing all this stuff. It was great to see their banter. Some of the some of the lines that get tossed back and forth between different characters are great and again, are perfectly captured in the film. And, yeah, it’s just it’s cool to see how this went down. Now, to be fair, The Synthesis is a show where we talk about scientific accuracy. And so it is necessary to bring it back around to Chapter one and talk about how this storm is impossible. This is the one thing in this story which is very grounded in real science. This is one thing that anywhere gave himself permission to just make it wrong.
Alex [00:24:29] Just go with it. Mars’s atmosphere is about half of a percent as thick as Earth’s atmosphere. You could get hurricane speed winds and you would not be able to feel it through your spacesuit like it might kick up some dust. There’s no air on Mars.
Alex [00:24:48] And so the like the kind of wind that they are experiencing is the kind of wind that would you would need to set off a nuclear bomb to get that kind of wind. It’s not realistic. That being said, it is dramatic. And I thought this chapter did a really good job of portraying a crisis. This is a scary situation and it’s a bunch of people who are very professional and very well-trained and very good at not freaking out. Yes, it’s scary.
Alex [00:25:18] And that really comes across. Nobody loses their cool. Nobody freaks out the way you would and, you know, some zombie movie. But you can tell the way people are handling things, the way they’re moving quickly.
Alex [00:25:30] And it’s this is high drama. Yes. Yeah. I will say that once.
Lacey [00:25:38] Mark Watney is out of the picture and we’re just following the rest of the crew actually super struggle with Commander Lewis really, and I’ll be interested to hear your take on it.
Lacey [00:25:48] But she took so much time looking for Mark that she put everybody else’s life lives in danger. And I struggled with that because her job is to get as many people off that planet as possible. And I recognize that when you become a family, you don’t want to leave anybody behind. But with information she had and and you know that the rest of your team is going to have a hard time following your orders to leave you behind, you are putting them all at risk of dying there because they don’t want to follow the commands because you are taking too long. And they keep telling her, like, you have to come back. The you know, it’s going to fall over. What is it called? The map. The map is going to it’s going to tip over and then they’re all screwed.
Alex [00:26:40] The idea is the map of you can picture it like a building or a tower and the wind is pushing it so that it’s starting to tilt. And they’ve calculated that if it goes past a 12 percent tilt, that’s the tipping point where it’ll just fall over another all stranded on Mars. So the risk is we have to get it before it starts tilting past 12 percent and it’s getting closer and closer and closer. And in fact, it actually goes past 12 percent and they have to use the thrusters to push it back up.
Alex [00:27:06] Right, right. And and and so to me, I feel like part of the commander’s job is to do a risk assessment.
Lacey [00:27:16] And so it was her job to not let the temptation of not following her orders happen at all. Yeah, and I know that means she spends less time looking for Mark, and that’s awful. But what would have been more awful is what would have happened if that if the map had fallen over. And so I really, really struggled with her decision.
Alex [00:27:39] You know, I I thought that that was human. Like, I thought that I thought it was believable because, you know, he gets knocked away. She doesn’t know if he’s dead. Like there’s a bio monitor reading that read zero. But, you know, there could still you could still resuscitate him, like there’s still hope. And she’s, you know, her. You said her job was to get as many people off of that planet as she could. Really her job was to get everyone off that planet and say that there’s a point at which you triage. But I thought that it was believable. And I do think she waited too long. Like if I was her boss when she got back to Earth, I would have been like you. That was not what you were supposed to do. But I thought it was very believable as a as a commander not wanting to leave someone behind.
Lacey [00:28:24] And I get that. I think I think it was very human, but I think that the. That the risk assessment of he he could be resuscitated versus how many people are going to die just by the massive falling over to me, there is a balance there that she did the math wrong. Yes. And I, I just I super struggled with it, especially because the team is struggling with it.
Lacey [00:28:54] And, you know, the yeah.
Alex [00:28:59] There’s a little bit of infighting between a couple of people on how we should handle this situation and should we even follow our order and.
Lacey [00:29:05] Exactly.
Lacey [00:29:06] And so anyway, I guess it’s totally it is worth mentioning that Beck is on your side. There is somebody on the crew who’s like, commander, you need to get in here. This is not how you should be handling the situation. And so it’s like it’s not you know, that’s that’s Commander Lewis’s mistake, not Andy Weir’s mistake.
Lacey [00:29:22] Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s and there’s a certain amount of OK, you’re you’re playing the hero. You said leave. She said to leave her behind, except for nobody wants to lose two people. Right. Because then somebody else is having to pull the trigger on that decision. And it’s your job as commander to be making the decisions that keep as many people alive as possible. So you’re kind of passing off this responsibility that I I struggled with it again, good writing, human choice, but I really struggled with I will say there’s a great moment that, you know, it’s one of those things that, like, if it hadn’t been there, it would have been fine.
Alex [00:29:58] But the fact that it is there is so great, which is that Mark Watney, who has not yet been stranded on Mars and has not yet had to learn how to make water and grow crops and all this kind of stuff, even during the storm, he’s suggesting solutions. He’s coming up with. He’s like, well, we could we could use the the cables to pull the MAV back up. Right. We could we could brace the MAV against MAV, against the wind. We could he’s coming up with all this stuff and his teammates, like, OK, man, like, you know, whatever. And they kind of move on. But it’s this little bit of sort of retro foreshadowing the character that we know well.
Lacey [00:30:30] And it also shows how he responds to stress. Yeah. His exact his reaction is not emotional. It’s very logical. And Problem-Solving. Yes. As a yeah. And some and I and I’ve watched that happen. I’ve done it before. I’ve seen other people do that. So again, it’s, you know, anywhere is just I guess one of my favorite writers and I think I didn’t notice that. Right.
Alex [00:30:53] Yes, there is. You know, we’ve talked a couple of times on the set. This is so far about sort of the alternate universes of the Martian, different ways that this could have gone and one of those alternate universes. That is very interesting. I’m sure there’s like some fan fiction out there that somebody has tackled. This premise is what would have happened if Mark Watney and Commander Lewis were stranded on Mars. The map takes off. They follow her orders, the map takes off, she goes back to the hab mark wakes up.
Lacey [00:31:22] I’d like to see him to the map. OK, see, I’m not particularly Fanfan. Yeah, I’m not particularly into fan fiction, but I would almost be interested in seeing someone do that because, you know, the potatoes aren’t going to last as long. Exactly. Things might go smoother, know just like what works and what doesn’t.
Alex [00:31:38] Having two hands on some of these problems might really help having somebody to bounce ideas off of. But at the same time, yeah, the food won’t last as long, you know. So, you know, when the airlock blew up, one of them probably would have died. Yeah, absolutely. Although I guess we haven’t gotten there yet. Oh, don’t don’t spoil. Sorry. I mean, it’ll be this episode, you know.
[00:31:59] OK, hold on. First of all, I want to say that I’m really into Eiman economist because we have the same person. Well, I mean, we’re on the same page. First of all, the not remembering the books and movies and whatever, like. Thank you. And also, you know, just it does I think that I think you make a great point about how it seems like he almost wants to be there more than anybody else. Everybody else is like, oh, crap, we’re going to die.
Lacey [00:32:28] And he’s like, let’s stay. Let’s make this work. It’s OK. So I thought that is that’s a really good point. Yeah, I hadn’t noticed. Excellent observation.
Alex [00:32:36] Yeah. So Commander Lewis does in fact come back into the have they take off. Everybody’s real sad obviously and then gentle sobbing. Yeah. It’s such a good job.
Alex [00:32:48] Like these are characters that we don’t even barely know. But he does such a good job with these little moments that tell you who they are. You know, Johannsson I think we’ve already established that Johannsson is hot. The Johannsson is like way prettier than your average is.
Lacey [00:33:03] Actually Hansen played by Kate Mara. Yeah, OK.
Alex [00:33:07] We’ve established that she’s particularly good looking. She’s she’s the only one who’s sobbing. But at the same time, like Beck is clearly a little more practical. He’s the one who was saying, Commander, you have to come in like, you know, my friend just died. And he’s the first one who’s willing to say that Mark is dead. Yeah. And, you know, they’re just these little nuggets that sort of give you a taste of who these different characters are. Yeah. So we flash forward now back to the present day and they’re finally telling them we’ve it’s this great moment where we keep when are we going to tell? When are we going to tell them? When are we going to tell them? And then we meet them. We see them.
Alex [00:33:43] We see how it happened. Now we’re going to tell them it’s great timing. I left I left him behind just like that’s when I just broke for Johanes or for Lewis because I was just like.
Lacey [00:34:00] You worked so hard, put and put everybody else at risk, and this is, you know, your worst fear wasn’t wrong.
Alex [00:34:10] Exactly was alive. He wasn’t dead. You left him behind.
Lacey [00:34:15] And it just there’s let’s everybody else, everybody else off the hook, too, because she’s like, you didn’t do it. You were following orders. I left him behind.
Alex [00:34:23] Yeah. And that is, you know, they they tell writers that, you know, every character is the star of their own story. And, you know, one of the marks of a good writer is that you can look at secondary characters and be like, oh, this story could have been about you. You know, it’s not this isn’t just James Bond where all the other characters in the movie are just sort of cardboard cutouts for him to play against. You know, when you look at a really good story, every character has their own desires and their own sort of struggles and that sort of thing. And that, to me, really jumped out as Commander Lewis is the star of her own story. There is a Commander Lewis movie happening in the background of The Martian, and she has a really powerful redemption arc because everybody is celebrating. And then she’s over here with her own motivations and just a writer who is capable of setting up a scene like that where everybody’s on the same page and then you realize that one of them isn’t there, having their own personalized response instead of the sort of group response.
Lacey [00:35:25] And what’s so beautiful about that is, is really we are all the stars of our own show. Like, that’s just kind of how we tend to live our lives. Yeah. And that doesn’t mean that we’re all egocentric or whatever. That’s just it’s hard to imagine everybody else’s motivations. And your reality is different than the person next to you, their reality. So I love that that is built into this story.
Alex [00:35:51] Yeah. Yeah. It’s just it’s so great she’s she’s responding the way she would. Yep. And that’s Chapter 12. So you found that boring?
Alex [00:36:02] I found that incredibly chaotic. I,.
Lacey [00:36:04] I did this start with purely because I mean I think I kind of wasn’t having it the night that I read these because I was real bored with part of Chapter 13. Yeah, that doesn’t stay true for very long. But I think it’s because it is the part of the movie that I remember is is the beginning is how it happened that he’s there. Yeah.
Alex [00:36:28] I as a bit of a synthesis back story, while Lacey was reading Chapter 13, I walked in, I was like, hey, how are you doing?
Alex [00:36:36] And she looks up from her book and she looks at me and goes.
Alex [00:36:41] I’m reading about fabric, and then she just went back to her book and I was like, OK.
Lacey [00:36:50] And then he got all, but he got a little excited about it. And I was like, because that fabric stuff is ominous as hell.
Alex [00:36:55] OK, so get their Chapter 13 again. The first note I have is ominous backstory. We start with the hab canvas was produced at a facility.
Lacey [00:37:08] What we do is that the first thing I think it is wrong, it’s the first thing I noted.
Lacey [00:37:13] OK, well, I noted about Mark getting pissy.
Lacey [00:37:18] OK, listen, listen. He’s in communication with Earth and he’s been he’s been desperately trying to do for four months.
Lacey [00:37:27] Exactly.
Lacey [00:37:28] And it’s just so human to get so annoyed with them so fast. I mean, he he calls them dipshits. And I cackled. I was out loud just yet cackling because it is so human to get just to do that 180. And I love it. I love that. It’s not like overly you know, it’s not too sentimental. It’s not like like they’re annoying me. But, you know, I’m glad that I get to even talk to them. No, he’s like he a different way. Yeah. I am the best botanist on this planet. Yeah. Like I don’t need you I don’t need you to tell me that I’m doing it right. Yeah. I fucking know.
Alex [00:38:08] I feel like this is one of those things that that is very plausible coming from an astronaut. You know, like not not everybody could make it through an astronaut program. I feel like astronaut programs like the they select for the kind of people who don’t want to be micromanaged, who are a little bit Hot Shots, are very confident in their own abilities. And so I like the I have a feeling that any astronaut who read this book would have been like, yes, that they check in to see when you go to the bathroom, go away, you know, leave me alone.
Lacey [00:38:41] Yeah, yeah.
Alex [00:38:43] But I’m ominous back story setting up something about the hab canvas. Weird. Like where was it manufactured and how was it manufactured and when was it inspected? And then we just intercut back to March and then we just got back to Mars. And hey Michael, what? He’s doing his thing. And we go around for a little while and then it comes back. The Hab canvas was loaded into the rocket and did it.
Lacey [00:39:03] It this is like this is where my mother would be like blah blah, blah, quote unquote. Yeah.
Alex [00:39:10] Um, she said to me this this recalls an old onion video that was released like ten years ago, which is Nation Panic’s as ominous music heard across the world.
Alex [00:39:24] It’s just about weird creepy music coming from nowhere and everybody freaking out because they feel like something’s coming. That’s how I feel about this. Like, why are you talking about the hab canvas, this incredibly important thing that is vital to our hero survival? Why are you drawing our attention to it repeatedly? You keep coming back to it. What is going on?
Lacey [00:39:45] The onion are probably tense. Kind of makes me think of stranger than fiction. Isn’t that the one where Will Ferrell is? Yes. Yes. His life starts being narrated. Yeah. By Emma Thompson.
Alex [00:39:55] He’s a character in a book and he can hear the narrator. Yeah, so he did. So he’s growing his crops. And there is a particularly funny mention that you will know if you ever saw a trailer for The Martian because it was in like all the trailers, which is that when you grow crops in a place, technically, you have colonized it. And so Mark Watney gets to be the guy who colonized Mars. Yes, which is interesting because that’s not the definition of like. Yeah, I wonder where that comes from, where that definition comes from. Because a colony, you know, one of the things that we sort of worked through a little bit in Terra Genesis is the word colony and colonies, because not only does it have a pretty sordid history in terms of the age of colonization and very sort. It has. Yeah, like what all that meant. But also it’s a specific legal term. You know, a colony is a thing that has a specific relationship to the mother country. And you, you know, not everything is a colony. And so that’s one of the things we wrestled with in Terra Genesis is, you know, the whole point of Terra Genesis is declaring independence, at which point you are no longer a colony.
[00:41:09] But even if it’s a mining outpost, doesn’t it have something to do with like with they’re already like being people there oftentimes.
Alex [00:41:16] Yeah. A colony is like a it’s I forget the technical definition, but it’s like it’s a group of people who are away from their mother country who don’t have any legal control over their own sort of well-being. So, for example, California is not a colony of the United States because California participates in the government of the United States. But, you know, there there’s sort of a point by point thing of what is a colony. And so I’m surprised that Andy Weir, who I trust, like presumably he put this in there because he found some definition, but I’ve never seen a definition that has to do with growing crops.
Lacey [00:41:51] So, yeah, well, and so I think I mean, I think the scientific community has come up with different words because because to go out onto other planets does, like you said, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re of colonizing it. So I think they’ve come up with I think they just you settled generally, which is kind of boring, if you ask me.
Alex [00:42:12] There are a few terms. Bill Nye and the Planetary Society likes to use subtle. I’m actually not that big a fan of settled because first off, it’s boring to settle literally means like to stop doing stuff.
Lacey [00:42:25] It feels very small just based on the way that we’ve kind of used it historically.
Alex [00:42:29] Yeah, a settlement is like you wouldn’t you wouldn’t say a settlement on Mars of one million people. Yes, it is only like a few dozen people.
Alex [00:42:37] But and then the other thing for me, and this is sort of a nit picky point, but I feel like it’s it will be important in the adoption of the term is it’s kind of ambiguous in certain ways. Settlement is the act of doing it, the settlement of Mars. But then a settlement is also the place. So if you talk about the settlement of Mars, are you talk about the act of colonizing it or are you talking about the colony on Mars, the settlement of Mars? So it’s you know, it just sort of it’s kind of hard to use, really, which is why in Terra Genesis, we ended up reviving a word that is very old and doesn’t really get used very much. But I think it’s sort of the best word. And I would very much like it if everybody would help spread it, because I would like to make an impact on the zeitgeist, which is harmonize to harmonize a place it is to bring humans to a place, to make a place suitable for humans. And in addition to just being right, that is a better description of what we are doing in space.
Alex [00:43:39] Wherever we go, we’re going to be bringing people. So whatever the legal definition of how that relates back to Earth is, you’re bringing people, you’re harmonizing it.
Lacey [00:43:47] What are the different forms that you use?
Alex [00:43:49] Which is the other thing that I really like about it is it’s very parallel to colonize, harmonize and colonize. You can have humanists just like colonists. You can have harmony just like a colony. It sort of fits the same kind of linguistic niche as colony. But it’s a better definition.
Lacey [00:44:09] It’s kind of definition and doesn’t have the the baggage.
Alex [00:44:13] Yeah, it does have the weight of history. You know, a lot of people, you know, if you go to a lot of places, but just to pick one, for example, India has a huge problem with the word colony because they were a colony.
Alex [00:44:23] And that’s a bad thing. They don’t want to be a colony. And so when you look at science fiction, worlds like The Expanse, if you went to Mars in the Expanse colony, would be a very dirty word because they had to declare independence from Earth. They are not a colony. And so if you talk about colonizing Mars, I have a feeling those Martians would have a strong objection.
Lacey [00:44:44] Yeah, so and people have often had that objection, you know, for for their various histories of their their ancestors and whatnot. So if I think back to the ancient Greek colonies. Right. Sort of never good to be a colony. Yeah. And to be colonized. So I think I think that there needs to be a better word. Yeah. I don’t know what he’d be the first. What’s the word. Instead of being the first colonists reharmonized monarch but the first commonest of Mars. Oh I like that c I like that better. Right.
Alex [00:45:15] OK, it just said, you know, the other thing is a lot of people like the word colonize, like they grew up with a sci fi, like we’re going to colonize Mars. I like the word colonize, but it’s again, it’s got bad history and it’s not legally right and so harmonized. Done so easy. Yeah, I harmonized Mars sold so spread the word harmonize. That’s the one. That’s the one we should be using. Yes. Let’s go with that. Next up, there’s a great little moment that made me laugh, even though it’s not actually that funny. But just like come on man, which is he talked about how he established a secondary communication system with NASA of placing rocks on the ground for Morse code because using rocks to do dots and dashes is a lot easier than using rocks to actually make like big old English letters. And he says hopefully it won’t come up. And I’m just sitting here going, Dude, have you been paying attention? It’s absolutely going to come up. This is again for the writers out there. This is something called Chekhov’s Gun, which is a principle in writing, which is that if you introduce something, you have to pay it off. If you introduce a gun in Act one, the gun has to go off by Act three. And so when Mark Watney says, hey, I’ve got this other system for communicating with NASA, just in case the Pathfinder breaks, hope I won’t have to use it.
Alex [00:46:34] That is absolutely Chekhov’s gun.
Alex [00:46:35] You’re going to have to use it, man, if you like. You jinxed it.
Lacey [00:46:41] Yeah, I felt like a lot of this chapter early on at least, is just getting everyone in contact and on the same page. So it’s like Lewis to want Watney to Lewis, NASA acknowledging that it is that it has more time to deal with things than expected because he has crops like it’s just it gets a bit boring. But I did find that the that the fabric interludes were bizarrely interesting because the rest of it was boring. And I kind of got mad about it cause the interludes are weird, but very specific. They’re very specific. I didn’t read as ominous for you. Well, of course. But like.
Lacey [00:47:26] Listen, there just I had some questions by the end of it that I was like, OK, so we’re going to jump a little bit ahead just because it’s all about the fabric. Why, why, why? Why would you put it on a plane specifically just like this and store it just like this? And then you’re going to take the plane up even higher than you normally would because you want it to have, you know, the the smoothest flight possible.
Lacey [00:47:52] And then you’re going to take it through there, getting through multiple atmospheres. And it’s not smooth at all. Like, it’s it’s totally I think it’s just minimizing risk.
Alex [00:48:04] It’s going to have to go through those two atmospheres anyway. So let’s minimize whatever we can, you know.
Alex [00:48:12] Lacey’s not having it. I’m not having it, I don’t this is going to be the closest she’s not having. That’s our new tagline. I don’t buy it. I think that’s what it is.
Alex [00:48:21] There was a moment that I really enjoyed which or rather I would have enjoyed. He didn’t go there, but I feel like it was interesting. It would have been interesting if he had, which is he talks about how he’s got potatoes now.
Alex [00:48:34] He’s growing potatoes. He has food that he has grown himself and not just potatoes for replanting. He actually has now potatoes for eating. And he talks about how am I going to store them because, you know, I’m not going to need him for a while and I don’t want them to rot. And the answer is, you just throw him outside because Mars is going to suck all the water out of them instantly.
Alex [00:48:54] And the whole planet is one giant freezer. So you just throw them out the door and that’s where he keeps his potatoes, presumably just in like a big pile out by the airlock so that he’s going to have dried potatoes. So he’s going to yeah, it’s going to be dry, but they’re going to be preserved. They’re not going to rot, which is great, but very dusty. Like we’ve already established this. This is a world where he has to go out every couple of days and blow dust off of the the solar panels. And he don’t want to eat that dust and you don’t want to eat that dust. And so you have to wash that, by the way, radioactive dust. And so, yeah, I’m kind of surprised that any weird didn’t go into, like, you’re eating, OK, you’ve got potatoes, but they’re covered in red Martian dust. Like he doesn’t I don’t think he has like a faucet, like a kitchen sink. But, you know, like I wish they had gone into that. That’s the kind of thing that he does go into a lot in this.
Lacey [00:49:44] Yeah. So then you notice that it’s missing some of that detail. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Lacey [00:49:49] I just want to say one more listen, just one more thing about that, that fabric thing with the with the plane and the and the atmospheres and all of this stuff. OK, see, this is why it doesn’t make sense to me because it’s like it’s like you’re giving a baby a bath and you’re gently sudsing it. Right. Just imagine this and then you throw the baby out the window with the bath water like it doesn’t make sense. Why would you treat it like this perfect, precious little baby and then just throw it out the window because they didn’t throw it out the window?
Lacey [00:50:23] This was this.
Alex [00:50:24] They did they did everything they could to protect it, recognizing that they can’t do everything, recognizing that it’s going to turn into a teenager someday.
Alex [00:50:33] That’s some weird hot canvas, but OK, I’m just saying it just it seems bizarre to be so over the course of the episodes that we’ve been reading The Martian, we’ve established a number of things that Mark Watney is Mark Watney is a genius. Mark Watney is very upbeat. Mark Watney is the greatest botanist on Mars. But now in Chapter 13, we have definitively established one thing that Mark Watney is not, and that is the urinating champion of all time.
Alex [00:51:04] And that made me laugh so hard, I know I’m not the urinating champion of all time, he’s talking about water usage and how much water is getting sucked up by the water reclaimer. And he says, no, I’m not the urinating champion of all time. And I got flashed into my head like an Olympic stadium, urinating competition. And a whole thing sort of flashed through my mind in an instant. And it was thoroughly hilarious.
Lacey [00:51:31] I so I and I don’t even remember it. So I’m I am more taken by his expletives. So. Yeah, because again, your girl loves expletives. Yes. Yes, she fucking does. Huh.
Alex [00:51:47] So coming back around to the dust on the potatoes and that kind of little nitty gritty thing, he actually does do one thing which I really appreciated, which is maintenance on the water reclaimer. Turns out that the efficiency has been dropping and he wants to repair it. And NASA’s like, no, you’re going to kill yourself. And so he does it anyway.
Lacey [00:52:05] Yeah, just to be ornery, I think I think what’s interesting is in this chapter, we get Mark’s new perspective on what is life threatening and what is not. And that is a fact that’s it’s fascinating that we’re managed to anticipate that psychological change, because when you are in the used to it. Yeah. If you are going to be in a long term, high risk situation, your idea of what is worth being concerned about is going to change. Absolutely. And so I just I think I might be in love with Andy Weir’s brain. And so I need to check in with him and see if he’ll be my plan B.
Alex [00:52:55] All right. Well, you heard it here first. My wife is leaving me for Andy Weir.
Lacey [00:53:00] No, not not not really. Just just if it’s an option, if you have to in the future. Yeah.
Alex [00:53:09] So throughout Chapter 13, we’ve been establishing hab canvas where it was produced, where it was inspected, how it was shipped to Mars, how it was thrown out with a baby and grew up into a teenager.
Alex [00:53:20] And now at the end of the chapter. We see why.
Lacey [00:53:25] OK, but you hold in, OK, go ahead, we can jump back. Do your thing.
Alex [00:53:31] That was that was my big sting, OK, commercial break, we’re going to come back now, we’re going to do your your stuff and then we’ll get to the payoff later. Oh, OK.
Lacey [00:53:39] I just it’s about the water reclaimer, OK? It’s all of that stuff because he says that he talks about why he’s being adversarial and that, you know, and what NASA looks for and astronauts, kind of like you said before, is independence. And if he was afraid of touching everything or literally anything, he wouldn’t be alive. So I love that he wouldn’t go against his orders from Lewis, but he will absolutely flout the requests of NASA bureaucrats. And I just I want to be like, Mark, when I grow up and have that sort of confidence to just be like, no, I’m no, I’m not going I’m not going to wait on you. You’re doing it stupid because you don’t understand what is life threatening and what is not because you’re not here. And, you know, he’s the expert. So, I mean, not on waterer claimers, obviously, but, you know, the water reclaimer story is another great moment of we’re going, OK, what would go wrong? And let’s go through the details of it. OK, we’re going to take it. And he’s going to mark every single piece. And he’s doing he knows it’s probably a clog. It is mineral water. OK, that’s smart. Like, it’s that is such a normal thing. Yeah. And I, I loved going through the detail of that. I loved the emotional reaction he has to NASA and the screw you guys. I’m going to do what I want and I don’t know, just, um. I like that NASA called them a dick. Yeah, that’s maybe one of my favorite things, because probably not all of NASA’s messages are being read and so they can do that.
Lacey [00:55:30] So anyway, onto the fabric.
Alex [00:55:33] Yes. So it’s worth revisiting here. The hab in the world of the Martian is not the way it’s often pictured in a lot of science fiction stories. Oftentimes, haboobs on Mars are depicted as buildings. They’re sort of built off of the same model as the International Space Station. They’ve got the white walls and sort of steel beams wrapping around, you know, often some kind of cylindrical kind of thing with a little hatch doorway sticking out.
Alex [00:56:02] And that’s not what we have here over and over and over. We are reminded that the hab is basically a tent. The Hab is made of canvas. It’s something that ripples during the storm. It’s not a rigid structure.
Lacey [00:56:15] Thus he is in more danger than the rest of the crew.
Alex [00:56:20] So the hab is something that can, for example, deflate. And we’ve been following this hab canvas throughout its life cycle. And now Mark Watney steps into the airlock and pressurizes it and it explodes. And the way it is described was so just like breathtaking in sort of the literal sense and just this like kind of like, oh my God, it just becomes a cannon, the whole thing.
Alex [00:56:55] You can just picture the cylinder sticking off of a sort of Half Dome tent and all of a sudden it just becomes a cannon. And the full force of the atmosphere in this building launches the cylinder and he’s inside. Just as it rolls across, the landscape finally comes to a stop.
Alex [00:57:14] And he’s just like, are you fucking kidding me? Just when everything was starting, he was starting to get a handle on it and the whole hab explodes. And that’s where we end.
Lacey [00:57:26] And Chapter 13, that’s when I was like, oh, remember when I said the fabric was marginally interesting because the rest of the chapter is really effing boring? Well, a way to prove me wrong.
Lacey [00:57:36] Wier, you jerk. Seriously, so much for being my plan B.
Alex [00:57:42] Sorry, Andy. She’s breaking up.
Lacey [00:57:45] I just do 180s left and right. I don’t want to be with me. So that is it for this episode of The Synthesis.
Alex [00:57:52] Next week we’re going to be picking up with the next three or four chapters of The Martian and taking it from here, seeing how do you what do you do when you’re hab blows up on Mars?
Lacey [00:58:04] What do you do when you’re Mark and not everybody else? Yeah, because that those are two different answers, probably.
Alex [00:58:11] I mean, we all know that, for example, Jacob would probably just die as he should. Oh, my good. I mean, we can I hope at least you’re a jerk.
Lacey [00:58:21] I have.
Alex [00:58:23] Listen, there’s only room for one jerk in this relationship, and it is absolutely Jacob. I was going to say it was Tim. But whatever Tim and Jacob, you know, Tim probably is Jacob. Like, this just seems like the kind of like that’s probably. Yeah, dumb. All right. So that’s it for this episode of The Synthesis.
Alex [00:58:43] Tune in next week. We’re going to be here on Thursday, as usual, and we really mirroring it to YouTube. So if you’re watching us there, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell. So you’re notified about new episodes? Yes. Last thing worth mentioning is Imageworks Entertainment has a new show on YouTube, so be sure to check it out. It’s called Slice of Science. It’s a one to two minute series of just cool little facts about space and science that you may not have known about. Animated with some really cool animations by Tarnya, who works here at edX Works Entertainment.
Lacey [00:59:14] And she’s so excited that they’re out. Yes, because she’s been working on this on these for ages, ages. And so we’re super proud of her two episodes out.
Alex [00:59:24] And they are, I think, the most popular videos that we have released on YouTube so far.
Alex [00:59:28] So definitely not nearly as popular as Tony. Heartbreaking. So check out slice of science knife falls on YouTube. Subscribe and hit the bell and tune in next week.
Getting to know the technological titans of TerraGenesis
The Far-Future Institute is the newest faction on the terraforming scene after their founder, Keahi Malae, gathered some of the best and brightest across the solar system. An institution devoted to innovation and technology, the Far-Future Institute has taken it upon themselves to develop inventions and processes that foster solutions to humanity’s longest problems, pushing the boundaries of our limitations and propelling our kind into a future far greater than previously imagined. This is the promise of the Far-Future Institute, and its scholars work tirelessly together to deliver upon it.
Giving it the old college try
Thanks to Keahi Malae’s efforts, the Far-Future Institute has attracted some of the greatest minds humanity has ever seen. They come from the prestigious universities on Earth but also the dusty corners of Mercury, Mars, and beyond. Malae understood that the best and brightest among us would certainly possess multiple degrees from esteemed organizations but also practical knowledge learned from years of experience. Despite their varying backgrounds and methods of collecting their cutting-edge knowledge, these diverse minds all have two things in common: they’re dedicated to problem-solving with an unbiased mind and consider all angles before reaching a conclusion, knowing their decisions may have impacts for millennia to come.
Thought politics
The Far-Future Institute maintains a neutral stance when it comes to aligning with other factions in an effort to remain impartial. Their goal is singular: further humanity’s knowledge in every possible field, from quantum physics to organizational psychology. Politics only serve as a speed bump to progress, although the general consensus is that certain factions are more useful than others in any given situation. Where they recognize the Daughters of Gaia for their strengths in bio-engineering, they also credit the Sons of Hephaestus for their engineering prowess. And while they see the potential for access to untold data and information hidden behind the bureaucratic red tape of the UNSA, they understand the importance of critically-needed funds to be secured from taking on projects from the Horizon Corporation. Striking a peaceful balance between the existing factions that have already secured their places amongst the stars has allowed the Far-Future Institute to quickly become a force to be reckoned with.
Sterile science
Striving to maintain an impartial, unbiased view at all times is an identifying feature of the meritocracy that is the Far-Future Institute, with detractors arguing that it’s extreme to the point of detriment. In the pursuit of knowledge, the Far-Future Institute has been known to consistently choose the path that results in the most knowledge acquired with a secondary attempt to carve out ethics behind the applications their findings present. In other words, they always ask themselves “if they could,” but only as an afterthought ask “if they should.” Additionally, the path that results in the greatest good long-term is considered to be the only solution, even if it means consequences in the short-term. The organization has been known to displace entire towns for the sake of experiments that, while the resulting science lead to limitless possibilities in terraforming, created an unnecessary refugee situation that the UNSA ultimately had to clean up. Where they see themselves as unbiased, others see them as cold and unfeeling. All in the name of progress, it seems!
If knowledge is what you seek and you possess an open mind with no prior alignments, the Far-Future Institute may be the faction for you. Abandon all bias ye who enter here – choose technology and the Far-Future Institute for your terraforming efforts!
At Edgeworks Entertainment, we are grateful to have the opportunity to offer our team members the ability to work from home during this important time of social distancing. We are so thankful for the support of TerraGenesis and the community that has come with it.
Working on TerraGenesis
We’ll be creating new features and busting bugs from the comforts of our homes, as we understand how important video games can be right now. We want to make sure our players don’t experience any interruptions while practicing social distancing. Our small team is still working hard to ensure our players are taken care of in a timely fashion – we thank you for your patience during this time.
We are also committed to doing what we can to assist in the fight against COVID-19; as such, we are participating in Stanford University’s Folding@home program, a “distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics.” We’re joining thousands of volunteers around the world by using our computers to simulate the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt for new therapeutic opportunities.
If you’d like to participate, please check out the Folding@home’s about page for more information. You’re also welcome to join under our team. When signing up, please search for TeamTerraGenesis (team 49287349) to begin folding with us.
As always, dear terraformers, we thank you so much for your dedication and support. Please be safe, play games, and terraform responsibly!
