Mark Watney drives towards camp over a desert landscape. The orange sand is everywhere, making small hills and valleys. He bobs his head along to the disco music playing. There is radioactive metal strapped into the seat behind him, and there is no one else on the planet. No, not because it’s the apocalypse. He’s on Mars. To be more specific, he’s stranded on Mars. Left by his crewmates who believed he was dead, this NASA botanist has to find a way to survive on Mars for four years.
The movie “The Martian” chronicles the struggles of the fictional Mark Watney and his ultimate rescue. During the four years, Mark has to face the harsh reality of Mars: no water, no fertile soil, and only disco music to listen to. He also faces other challenges. For example, when he first wakes up stranded 141 million miles away from his home and help, he finds a metal rod stuck in his abdomen. After finally making it to the hab, his mission’s temporary home on Mars, and performing surgery on himself, he has to come to grips with his situation. He has to face the fact that another mission won’t arrive until four years, and that until then he will be entirely alone on a planet where nothing grows with only a limited supply of water and food and no way to contact NASA. For all intents and purposes, it seems that he is going to die on Mars. However, not prone to giving up just yet, Mark resolves to try to survive, concluding, “I’m going to have to science the sh*t out of this.”
And he does. Mark uses many clever ideas to keep himself alive, while facing numerous challenges. But it isn’t just his ingenuity that keeps him alive. His humor and his optimistic, realistic, and grateful perspective are crucial to getting him home safe and sound. Mark is in no way immune to despair, and the challenges of Mars test his limits of perseverance. Mark struggles when within two seconds and door malfunction his garden of potatoes, that he managed to create on Mars, is killed by the frigid Mars atmosphere.
However, at other moments, he maintains enough of a positive outlook to make jokes about how, technically, once you cultivate plants on another planet you have colonized it, “take that Neil Armstrong,” he says. It’s as if nothing will stop him from having a sense of humor. And I think, this comes from gratefulness. When he boasted of colonizing the planet or of being the best botanist on the planet, it was because he wasn’t solely focused on what was going wrong. He took the time to appreciate the amazing work he was doing and the cool experiences his hardships provided him with.
His ability to simultaneously recognize his situation, make progress to improve it, and then not be consumed by despair, is what kept him alive. At the end of the movie, Mark says to a classroom of NASA trainees, “I guarantee you that at some point everything’s gonna go south on you, and you’re gonna say this is it, this is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work.” If he had let the very real possibility that he was going to die on Mars stop him from even trying to survive he would’ve died for sure.
I hope that none of you have ever been stranded on Mars, or ever will be. However, there are times in our lives that our stressful, look insurmountable, and feel doomed. Many a times, I have despaired over writing a paper, making a doctor’s appointment, or finding the meaning of life. This is part of the landscape of my Mars, my challenges. Seemingly small and large struggles can sometimes feel hopeless, and often if I believe that, the paper doesn’t get written. And while that’s not a big deal, the bigger issue comes from when every paper stops being written, every doctor’s appointment is never made, and eventually, I stop living. I become passive to my struggles, and let the sometimes frigid present, determine the atmosphere of my future.
We fulfill our own prophecies.
However, it is my hope that I can learn from the Martian and not prophesy that I will fail in the first place. I hope, like him, you and I can address the reality of our situation and hold onto the possibility of the future we desire. We have more influence than we might think over the reality of our future. So, in the end, I hope that if one of us gets stuck on Mars or in a 10 page research paper, we don’t accept that our lives end there, but instead decide to science the sh*t out of it.