The Martian Monologues

An astronaut becomes stranded on Mars after his team assume him dead, and must rely on his ingenuity to find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive and can survive until a potential rescue.

I've been thinking about laws on Mars. There's an international treaty saying that no country can lay claim to anything that's not on Earth. By another treaty if you're not in any country's territory, maritime law aplies. So Mars is international waters. Now, NASA is an American non-military organization, it owns the Hab. But the second I walk outside I'm in international waters. So Here's the cool part. I'm about to leave for the Schiaparelli Crater where I'm going to commandeer the Ares IV lander. Nobody explicitly gave me permission to do this, and they can't until I'm on board the Ares IV. So I'm going to be taking a craft over in international waters without permission, which by definition... makes me a pirate. Mark Watney: Space Pirate.

If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the hab breaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So, yeah... Yeah...

I've got to make a lot more water. The good thing is, I know the recipe: You take hydrogen, you add oxygen, and you burn. Now, I have hundreds of liters of unused hydrazine at the MDV. If I run the hydrazine over an iridium catalyst, it'll separate into N2 and H2. And then if I just direct the hydrogen into a small area and burn it. Luckily, in the history of humanity, nothing bad has ever happened from lighting hydrogen on fire.

Every human being has a basic instinct: to help each other out. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. ~ Mark Watney, The Martian

At some point, everything's gonna go south on you… everything's going to go south and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?

So, yeah, I blew myself up. Best guess, I forgot to account for the excess oxygen that I've been exhaling when I did my calculations because I'm stupid. I'm gonna get back to work here just as soon as my ears stop ringing.

It's a strange feeling. Everywhere I go, I'm the first. Step outside the rover? First guy ever to be there! Climb a hill? First guy to climb that hill! Kick a rock? That rock hadn't moved in a million years! I'm the first guy to drive long-distance on Mars. The first guy to spend more than thirty-one sols on Mars. The first guy to grow crops on Mars. First, first, first!

The other question I get most frequently is. When I was up there stranded by myself, did I think I was gonna die? Yes, absolutely. And that's one you need to know, going in, because it's gonna happen to you. This is space. It does not cooperate.

I know what they're doing. I know exactly what they're doing. They just keep repeating "go faster than any man in the history of space travel", like that's a good thing. Like it'll distract me from how insane their plan is. Yeah, I get to go faster than any man in the history of space travel, because you're launching me in a convertible. Actually it's worse than that, because I won't even be able to control the thing. And by the way, physicists, when describing things like acceleration do not use the word "fast". So they're only doing that in the hopes that I won't raise any objections to this lunacy, because I like the way "fastest man in the history of space travel" sounds. I do like the way it sounds... I mean, I like it a lot.

It's been 48 sols since I planted the potatoes. So now it's time to reap and re-sow. They grew even better than I expected. I now have 400 healthy potato plants. I dug them up being careful to leave their plants alive. The smaller ones I'll reseed, the larger ones are my food supply. All natural, organic, martian-grown potatoes. You don't hear that every day, do you? And by the way, none of this matters at all if I can't figure out a way to make contact with NASA.

Let's do the math. Our surface mission here was supposed to take thirty-one days. For redundancy, they sent enough food to last for sixty-eight days. For six people. So for just me, it'll last three-hundred days. And I figure I can stretch that to four hundred if I ration. So… I've still gotta figure out how to grow three years worth of food. Here. On a planet where nothing grows. Luckily, I'm a botanist.