Outlasting Time in The Martian

There’s this thing time does.  It wins.  It has existed in the universe long before us (maybe forever, but that, of course, is up for debate, and to be decided by minds much bigger than my own) and will be here long after.  It is mankind’s most elemental enemy.

There used to be a show on the History Channel called Life After People.  Its premise was not to show how humans will inevitably disappear, but rather to depict the world after we leave it.  What happens to all the things that we built?  What vestiges of civilizations remain?  The answer: not much.  Despite all we have done in the eternal attempt to claim immortality, mere hints at what humanity once was, the Wall Street Bull the only sign that New York City ever existed, the top of the Pyramids of Giza peeking out of a sea of sand, the Washington Monument slowing being swallowed by the sea, are all that remain.  I used to watch shows like that all the time, the ones that show you just how insignificant and fragile we truly are.  Nature, with its reclamation of space, appears to win, but really all the hard work belongs to time.  It is time that wins in the end.

When I was a little girl I used to play a game with myself.  I would pick a mark – a sign, a crack in the sidewalk, anything – and I would do hold my breath until I made it there.  Sometimes I made it, more often than not I didn’t, and if I ran out of breath before I met my mark I would “die”.  If I lived, I would always push myself to go a little bit farther: how much longer can I go?  I played these little competitions with time because if I could just find a way to outlast, if I could just hold on a little longer I would win.  But when you’re holding your breath seconds turn into hours and moments are measured in heartbeats.  But, of course, Time was an almighty law of nature, and I was merely a child playing with it.

In Andy Weir’s The Martian, the narrative is as much a conflict of Man vs. Time as it is Man vs. Nature.  In the novel, Weir portrays time as something that his protagonist has to beat.  Stranded with limited resources, time is an enemy that Mark has to outsmart in order to survive.  Strangely, it’s not time running out that Mark is afraid of, it’s having too much of it.  He has to beat the clock by shrinking it. For NASA, the story is the familiar one of a race against the clock, but, for Mark, it’s the opposite – it’s how to outlast it.

Everything in the novel relies on time: communication, satellite imagery, supplies, and especially travel.  Time is a brutal obstacle, but it is also a commodity.  As with money or fuel, every rescue plan is prioritized by its use of time, both in regards to Mark’s survival and to time lost with loved ones on Earth. With distances covering billions of miles, and travel taking months, or even years, to complete, the characters are forced to play this strange long game – and the margins of error are wide.