Första problemet med hela filmen och boken:
Are there any glaring scientific inaccuracies in the book or movie?
The biggest one is the sandstorm at the beginning. It’s not realistic at all.
Mars does get 150 km/h winds, but the atmosphere is so thin that the inertia behind the wind is super gentle: it would feel like a slight breeze. It couldn’t knock anything over or cause damage.
I knew this when I wrote it but I decided, screw it—this is more exciting. It’s a man-versus-nature story, and I wanted to make sure nature got the first punch in. There are some things we now know are inaccurate which we didn’t know when I wrote the book.
In the last six years we’ve actually learned a lot about Mars. There’s a lot more water in the soil than we suspected. Every cubic meter of soil contains about 35 litres of water as ice. So all Mark would’ve had to do was take the sand and heat it up to boil the water out. No need to do the dangerous hydrazine reduction.
Another issue that I kind of skirted is the radiation in space. On earth we’re protected by the magnetosphere and the thick atmosphere. But on the surface of Mars there’s a thin atmosphere and no magnetosphere. It would be a very serious dose of radiation for him to be on Mars for 500 days. The kind of dose where you definitely get cancer.
I have two paragraphs in the book where I was just like, everything is shielded somehow. Turns out there’s no such thing as thin light flexible radiation shielding. It takes a centimeter of lead or 10 cm of water or a full meter of rock to protect you from galactic radiation. So I made up a fake material that doesn’t really exist. I actually calculated the orbital trajectories that they needed to take to get from Earth to Mars. That’s a real thing that would work. But the movie changed how long the crew spent on the planet for a funny reason.
In the book they left after sol six, but in the movie they leave after sol 18. Ridley wanted Mark to stir a nice big bucket of shit when he was creating the fertilizer for the crops. Ridley said, after only six days of six people shitting that’s 36 packets. He wanted them to stay longer, so that the bucket of shit could be full.
Säger Andy Weir, bokens författare .
Men om vi tänker i filmvers, var det inte bara en enkel storm. Stormen var alldeles för stark (och oväntad) för uppdraget och utrustningen. De kunde lämna genast men de väntar på Mark och stormen blir för stark för att de inte ska överträffa tipppunkten.