A Real Astronaut on Ridley Scott’s “The Martian”

And so the concept is terraforming, right? That's not going to happen. I think even Elon would tell you that's not going to happen in his lifetime. That's something that generations from now, we can think about. That's hard. So there's some sort of domed civilization? Yeah. Yeah. Live in some kind of pressurized compartment, some kind of pressurized habitat. So it'd be kind of like science fiction. Like what you see in science fiction, things where ships land on planets and people live inside the ships. And you can't go outside unless you wear a suit. Unless you wear a suit, yeah. Wow. But hopefully there'll be plenty of room inside if months this thing grows to be really big. We also have to make sure it's really well protected from radiation, because even once you're on Mars, you have to worry about those GCRs. Yeah. Didn't he have an idea to nuke the caps? Yeah. Like nuke the solar polar caps? Yeah. It's not like anybody's really sitting around drawing up plans for that. That was kind of like, if we had to do it, how could we do it? That's one thing that came off the top of his head. And that was to raise the temperature or to change the atmosphere? That's to melt the caps and then eject a lot of gas into the atmosphere and beef up the Martian atmosphere. What a weird roll of the dice that would be. I don't think we're going to be trying that, ain't I? And then what is the concept? Like in terms of terraforming, what kind of window of time would it take to turn that into a livable environment? That, you're starting to really extrapolate that pretty far, and it'd be pretty hard for me to give you a timeline. So there's like giant leaps of technology that have to take place? That's a big one. But as a proof of concept, it's sort of, I mean, there is a theory, right? That you can alter the atmosphere. I mean Mars has got enough gravity that if you could put enough gas into the atmosphere, it would stick around. Kind of like, you know, it's got, it's possible. You're not going to get to one atmosphere pressure, like 14.7 PSI, like we enjoy here, but it might be enough. Now, and their gravity is what percentage of Earth's? It's about a third. Third. Wow. So you would definitely experience a lot of the same issues that you have if you go to the space station. So if you wanted to go from Mars back to Earth, there would definitely be some sort of an adjustment period. Yeah, the really interesting thing is like we know, we have a lot of data. We know what happens in zero G, because we have a lot of us have been up to the space station and Skylab and Mir and all that. And we have tons of data at one G because all of us every day live in one G. We don't really have any data in between. So the question is, is a half a G half as good or maybe it's like 80% is good. Right. And so is it linear or is it nonlinear? We don't know. And that's why if we send people and we live on the moon or we go to Mars and we live on Mars and we have data like on the moon, it's about a sixth of the Earth's gravity. So we'll get points in between and then we can figure out if this thing is there's a lot of stuff that happens to you that may be completely solved with even just the smallest of energy. Hmm. But we don't know. Well, that's interesting, right? We don't know. Yeah, because zero G is an issue. We don't know how much of an issue one third G is. Now, what about food? Like, what are they going to do with food on Mars? Are they going to have to fly all the ingredients out, everything out? Once you start talking about missions that are that long, carrying all your food with you, bringing it all becomes mass prohibitive. You know, you just got to take so much and that just means you need that much bigger of a rocket and it just after a while it gets, you know, to the point where it doesn't work. What's all the food for the rest of your life, essentially? Yeah. So we're probably, if we're talking about like living for a long time on Mars or even deep space missions, we got to grow food. So probably plants, hydroponically. Like the Matt Damon movie. Yeah. Yeah. How realistic was that? You know, that movie was really pretty good. Pretty good movie. Yeah, there was, I met the author, the guy that wrote Andy Weir, the guy that wrote the book, and I told him that I really didn't like his book. You told him that. Yeah. And he's like, he's like, why was it because like, there's not really enough dynamic pressure in a Martian windstorm to knock the antenna off the roof? I'm like, nah, that's fine with that. He's like, well, it's because we didn't have enough redundancy in the comm system and that's not really realistic. I'm like, nah, nah. He goes, well, why didn't you like it? I'm like, well, listen, I have a long day of work at SpaceX. I come home. I open up the book before I go to bed and I'm reading this, like, okay, I got 62 souls and I got to cover 3000 kilometers and I've got 52 moles of nitrogen, hydroxide, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, it's like I'm still at work. I'm like, I don't want that. I want to like, I want to, some escapism. I want to like go home and read a romance novel or something. Well, that's not his fault though. No. Well, so you just busted his balls. Yeah. That's, it's interesting though that he got it close. Yeah. Yeah. He did a great job. That's all a true. I mean, for some, does he have a background in that? Yeah, I think he does engineer or something. Okay. That makes more sense. Yeah. Yeah. But what that movie was terrifying. Like the idea that you can get stuck up. Yeah. The only part of the movie, which I don't think was in a book that was not realistic at all was when he cuts his glove and does the Iron Man thing. Oh, he's like flying back to the spaceship. You can't really control it that you'd be spin out of control if you try this. You'd also need a big hole to really get enough propulsion and then your suit would deflate. I mean, it's just, that's just not going to work.