• Question: Would everything seen in the "martian" be possible in real life. Including flying like Iron Man and The person surviving on mars for that amount of souls

    Asked by Woodsy to Elie on 4 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Elie Allouis

      Elie Allouis answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      Hi Woodsy,

      The Martian is one of the rare movies where a lot of the facts were checked by the author to a great extent: some of the chemical reaction to create oxygen from hydrazine, some of the hardware in the rovers he is using and so on, so as far as science-fiction movies goes, it is pretty good. Of course there are plenty of Hollywood cliff-hangers and things that are not quite right, but this is also part of the fun. Overall, if you could recreate a small ecosystem, growing you own food, creating your oxygen, and have a good power supply, you could probably survive, but for how long?
      As for Iron Man, I am also a great fan, but unfortunately less based in reality. This is the closest be have ever been to having our own jetpack: http://jetpackaviation.com/. A real-life flying jetpack! This looks great until you realise that it works only for 10 minutes… You cannot cheat with physics…you need fuel to move things. something Iron Man seems to have forgotten…(and no, his own “arc generator” only produces electricity…not really suitable to make Iron Man fly)…
      …but altogether we should not stop trying to make these things…just in case we succeed one day…

      I hope that answer your questions !

      Elie

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