Science Fact or Fiction? Matt Damon’s life on Mars

One of the most enjoyable parts of being an unapologetic nerd is the satisfaction that can be won by tearing apart bogus science in movies. Whether you are laughing at the impossibility of humans producing more energy than they consume in the Matrix or you are on the level of Neil DeGrasse Tyson who shamed director James Cameron for digitally producing the wrong constellations in the night sky in Titanic, there is a certain sick thrill in pointing out the details that writers and directors overlook (seriously though, why no feathered dinosaurs in Jurassic Park?).

Cynical movie-goers with a nerdy flare may however be disappointed in this regard by the latest science-fiction blockbuster: The Martian. While not every detail of the movie (based on a fantastic book by former computer engineer Andy Weir) is completely based in reality, the story integrates a surprising number of real NASA technologies. From Matt Damon’s emergency potato farm to the vehicle he uses to explore the red planet, NASA is hard at work creating the technology that will be needed to allow humans to survive on another planet.

Habitat

In the book/movie, astronaut Mark Watney survives an accident that leaves him stranded on Mars after his crewmates evacuate. Watney is fortunate to have access to a base of operations known as the Hab. Astronauts today train for long duration space missions using the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Surprisingly, the real life version is a little more comfortable than Hollywood’s take on it. While Watney’s Hab is a single story affair made up of one large room with bunks, the HERA is a two story environment that provides living quarters, workspaces, hygiene modules and a simulated airlock. You’d think that 20 years in the future NASA could spring for the extra walls.

Food and Water

While the book and movie might take things a little further than current science has been able to achieve, we are well on our way to being able to produce both food and water in space. In 2014 astronauts in low-Earth orbit successfully planted the first ever extraterrestrial lettuce crop which they were recently able to harvest and taste. This marks a huge step towards sustaining astronauts for seriously long-term missions to other worlds. In terms of staying hydrated, Watney’s water reclaimer is a good stand-in for the technology already used on the International Space Station (ISS) which collects all the waste water from the day-to-day operations and from the astronauts own bodies, filters it and redistributes it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that astronauts end up making coffee with the water that left their bodies the day before.

Oxygen

In The Martian Mark Watney is lucky to have an “oxygenator” that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and supplies him with a steady stream of oxygen to breath. In real life we aren’t quite at the same level of sustainability, but NASA has managed to come up with a system that works well using a semi-closed loop. Astronauts on the ISS rely on the less cooly named Oxygen Generation System which uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water by running a current through a sample. The oxygen is cycled back into the air while the hydrogen is pumped out into space. The system does, therefore rely on new water to keep it going, a problem that will have to be solved before we start shipping people to Mars.

Near Miss – Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)

One aspect of Mark Watney’s odyssey that features prominently and isn’t quite right is his misadventures with the missions RTG. The RTG is a source of power generation that in the book, movie and in real life uses radioactive plutonium-238 to create energy from heat. Plutonium-238 is ridiculously radioactive and becomes quite hot all on its own. In the movie, this causes problems for Watney as NASA protocol calls for him to bury the system far from the Hab as its radioactivity could fry his DNA. In real life Plutonium-238 is dangerous, but not quite that dangerous. The radiation it gives off wouldn’t be able to penetrate a space suit or even human skin. Actually the thin atmosphere on Mars would make radiation from the Sun a bigger threat to Watney than the RTG, which can generate a little more electricity than it takes to run an incandescent lightbulb.

All in all, The Martian does a better job than most science fiction stories at keeping things real. There are a tonne of other elements from the movie that are true and we just didn’t have the space to share. For a more comprehensive list, check out this article by NASA themselves. If you’ve got NASA giving you props on the technology in the movie you made, you’ve probably done a pretty good job. Even better, Andy Weir managed to take the potentially boring science behind space travel and turn it into an awesome story.

How to Find an Alien Race

To my mind, one of the coolest things that a basic understanding of science allows you to do is stare up at the night sky and imagine that somewhere in that mess of twinkling dots is another life form doing exactly the same thing. However, even mentioning the idea of aliens is enough to make a portion of people snicker and roll their eyes, but when you consider the probabilities at work in the universe the odds are on the side of believers.

One of the key pieces of the argument for the existence of aliens has long been the fabled Drake Equation created by astronomer Francis Drake in 1961 to help encourage investment in SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). The drake equation basically takes the huge number of planets and stars that we think exist and whittles it down to a conservative estimate of the number of alien civilizations. It takes into account six variables: the rate of star formation in the galaxy you are looking at, the fraction of stars that form planets, the number of planets that could support life, the probability that life actually emerges on one of these planets, the probability that intelligent life evolves, the probability that one of these civilizations develops a way to communicate with us and finally the length of time that a civilization like that is likely to exist.

Basically it is a lot of multiplying down that gives an estimate that there are around 12,000 civilizations capable of communication that should exist in our galaxy alone. So how can we find them?

The answer might lie in a combination of the laws of thermodynamics and something called the Kardashev Scale. The latter describes three types of civilizations that can exist at advancing levels of awesomeness. Civilizations are defined by the amount of energy they use and include:

• Type I – Similar to Earth now. Some people have argued that Type I civilizations should be able to make use of all the energy produced by its planet (geothermal, wind, tidal energy, etc.). Based on that definition, humans have a Type 0.7 civilization, possibly reaching 1.0 in the next few centuries. 

• Type II – Civilizations that can use all the energy produced by the star(s) at the heart of their solar system.

• Type III – Civilizations that can use all the energy produced by their galaxy.

While it may be fun to imagine what life would be like at each level, all we really need to focus on right now is that each level uses an insane amount of energy compared to the level before it. The thing about energy is that is produces heat, and heat is something that we can see from very far away.

With that in mind, a group of scientists recently set out the find advanced societies across a section of the universe. Researchers at Penn State recently surveyed 100,000 galaxies using NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) – a very fancy telescope. They looked at the heat signature from each galaxy and compared it to what you would expect if only natural processes were at work. The idea was that if a galaxy is hotter than you expect it to be, it might be because a civilization there is consuming a lot of energy. What they found was kind of scary…

Out of 100,000 galaxies, 50 where in the “hotter than expected” group. That is a very, very low number. Low enough that when they look at those 50 more closely, they could quickly become zero. If each of those galaxies is supposed to have 10,000ish advanced civilizations according to the Drake Equation, why are things so chilly? Either we aren’t looking at things in the right way or there might not be as much company out there as we thought. Maybe it’s just me, but that is a lonely thought.

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to join the “we don’t know what we’re doing” camp. Astronomers at Berkley are already hard at work looking for other signs of intelligent life and many people remain optimistic that we’ll find something… eventually. The other important thing to remember is that there could be life out there, it just might not be advanced enough to turn up the heat on its entire galaxy yet. It is even possible (although extremely unlikely) that humans have the most advanced civilization for light years around. We might eventually become the interstellar bullies we’ve made so many movies about.