Grounded by Alisa Bryce

Author:Alisa Bryce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2022-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

A recipe for soil

In the 2015 movie The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is stranded on Mars. Left behind and believed dead when his crew escape a severe dust storm, Watney seeks refuge in their temporary Mars accommodation. With the food left behind by the crew and some rationing he calculates he can survive for four hundred sols (Martian days). The problem is that even after NASA realises he is alive and starts to mount a rescue mission, it will be an extra thousand sols until it gets there. Watney needs to find ways to generate enough food and water to last until then.

Luckily, he’s a botanist—a helpful start in working out how to grow food on a planet where nothing grows. As he says in the movie: ‘In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.’

Which he does—with actual shit. Using packets of freeze-dried faeces from the other astronauts and some of this own (and stuffing his nose with earplugs to get the job done), Mark mixes the faeces with water and mixes the resulting sludge into the regolith, sprouts a few potatoes that were being saved for Thanksgiving, and begins turning the rock dust into productive soil.

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