There’s buzz around the internet about Ridley Scott’s new film coming out later this year (November 25, 2015) called, The Martian. The Martian is based on a book by Andy Weir. It’s about an astronaut who is stranded on Mars after a NASA mission makes a quick evacuation for safety and presumes one of their own as dead. But he’s not. He has 30 days of air/life support and must take drastic measures to survive because the next NASA mission would take 3 years to reach Mars again.
The timing of the film is relevant to news around the Mars One mission and SpaceX with the focus on humans reaching Mars. Although this is another milestone achievement humankind is making to reach our neighbor red planet, it’s also filled with a lot of questions about our status as humans living here on Earth. The current trends in science fiction and science development revolve around singularity, artificial intelligence, space exploration, 3D printing, virtual reality, and transhumanism being at the top of the list (my own opinion and perspective, of course). We must also not forget, we have a planet that is needing our attention. We have people here on Earth that drastically need our attention.
Andy Weir is a fascinating author to look out for. His father is a particle physicist, and Weir is a programmer (He worked on Warcraft 2 for Blizzard) as well as a writer. He is a scifi geek (like most of us).
Here’s a talk Andy Weir gives about the book, courtesy of Google.
The film is directed by Ridley Scott and written by Drew Goddard (screenplay) and book (Andy Weir).
It stars Matt Damon, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Kristen Wiig, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
