Reason Interviews Andy Weir

Friday, October 2nd, 2015

“I want us to have a self-sufficient population somewhere other than Earth,” Andy Weir (The Martian) says, “because 25 years of being a computer programmer has taught me the value of backing things up”:

Comments

  1. Fun fact: the annual budget of the Apollo program, averaged over the period 1962-1972 and adjusted for inflation, is very nearly equal to the current annual budget of NASA.

    It’s not that we don’t put enough monetary resources towards making progress in spaceflight technology, it’s that there is a lack of political advantage to be gained from pushing for anything but a jobs program ladling tasty dollars to as many congressional districts and contractors as possible. There’s also a lack of administrative talent available to make such programs actually work.

  2. Faze says:

    But the dream of Mars colonization is inherently paradoxical: We’re supposed to flee to Mars when some crisis makes Earth uninhabitable. But in order to justify flight to Mars, the only crisis that would justify such flight would be a threat capable of rendering Earth drastically less hospitable to life than the inimical Mars. If the threat promised to render Earth’s climate and atmosphere and lack of water equal to that of Mars, any technology we had to improve Mars could just as well be applied to the environmentally degraded Earth — so why go to the expense of improving Mars when you could simply improve Earth?

  3. You’re quite correct, Faze. The idea of colonizing the planets early on, or of space colonization in general as an escape from imminent or in-progress catastrophe on Earth, is purely dramatic as opposed to realistic.

    If man is to one day live in space, his machines will necessarily precede him en-masse. In mimicry of the process by which biological organisms colonize a new volcanic isle, incidentally rendering it livable by humans, the infrastructure of power generation, life support, and industrial production will all be established before the first human leaves the Earth’s surface. Upon arrival, all our brave colonists will have left to do is tear off the shrink-wrap.

    Underlying all this is an understanding that large-scale human presence in space is very unlikely to occur as a primary, secondary, or possibly even tertiary goal of off-Earth activities. Only if it were to become relatively cheap to redirect a smidgen of preexisting automated/teleoperated industry to the construction of homes for human beings will it occur.

    Of course, there is always the potential for surprise. If someone were to seize the nettle of Orion, for instance, we could be landing office-blocks on the moon in 10 years.

  4. Slovenian Guest says:

    Also: Adam Savage interviews author Andy Weir

    55 min. and Weir doesn’t wear that stupid cap here!

    Plus for all you purist who want to read The Martian as it was originally posted on Weirs homepage, catch chapters 1-14 here and chapters 15-26 here, powered by the Wayback Machine.

  5. Just returned from seeing the film. I judge it excellent, with only a few science-goofs that I thought were knowingly made with an eye to the plot, and were fairly subtle unless you know what to look for (one involves the storm at the beginning).

    So apparently Ridley Scott can still direct a good film, contrary to the evidence of the last decade or so. He just shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the creative process.

  6. Graham says:

    Faze,

    Good point. The ‘lifeboat’ scenario only really makes sense if it is implicit and long term, rather than explicit and short term.

    So, we go to and set up on mars over centuries because it has become [relatively] more feasible and economical than now, worrying now only about some groundwork [mostly robotic, but no reason men can't go in this lifetime as proof of some concepts] for the moment. We set up a branch of our civilization there because that’s what we do and because we have found some advantage in it.

    Long-term, if we have done that, we have a self-sustaining lifeboat in the event of some catastrophe facing earth that exceeds even the capacity required to settle Mars. Or, for that matter, in the event of a catastrophe that merely makes Earth Mars-like, it would be better to have two of them than one.

  7. Slovenian Guest says:

    Adam Savage, astronaut Chris Hadfield and Andy Weir talk The Martian.

    I enjoyed this chat more than the actual movie!

  8. Slovenian Guest says:

    And another: Andy Weir thrills Lab employees.

    I didn’t know he worked at Blizzard on Warcraft 2!

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