Book 21: The Martian
Andy Wier likes space and astrophysics as much as I like quantum physics and math, but he’s done something much more impressive with his hobby. He has taken a collection of potential boring factoids about space (how much water does a cubic metre of soil need to be viable, how many litres of oxygen does a person need to breath per day, how many 2 square-metre solar panels does it take to recharge a couple of 9,000 watt-hour batteries in 13 hours of available light)* and turned them into a compelling, one-man story of survival on Mars. And what’s more, anecdotally speaking, he has made readers wish (WISH!) they understood the math better.
Resisting the temptation to launch into a lengthy article about what’s wrong with the way we teach math to children, I’ll just say maybe all we need are more books like this. Where survival isn’t about blowing stuff up but about how to “science the shit” out of a bad situation by using the things at your disposal in ingenious ways. Maybe kids would care more about learning to add and divide if the context is about being an astronaut who has to survive on a hostile planet by calculating your food reserves down to the calorie.
But beyond the thrill (for me) of the abundance of math and science, my absolute favourite part, without a doubt, was Mark Watney’s quest to recover Pathfinder and the little Sojourner rover. I remember the excitement of the Pathfinder landing on Mars in 1997. Sojourner, it’s cargo, was the first Mars rover and it sent back to earth the very first pictures taken from the planet’s surface. It was small, only about 1.5 x 2 feet, which I thought was so amazing that I drew a to-scale sketch of it on my white-board at work and made all my coworkers come by to admire it (the rover, not the sketch). The idea that someone could travel to Mars in the future and recover the rover for real makes me happy beyond words. And that’s how this book made me feel.
Rating: Buy it!! Own a copy and give it to your kids to read.
*answers: 40 litres, 588 litres, 14 panels
