Mark Watney quotes

View Quote Hi, I'm Mark Watney and I'm still alive... obviously.

View Quote I'm the first person to be alone on an entire planet.

View Quote If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the hab breaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So, yeah... Yeah...

View Quote In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option: I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this.

View Quote I've got to make a lot more water. The good thing is, I know the recipe: You take hydrogen, you add oxygen, and you burn. Now, I have hundreds of liters of unused hydrazine at the MDV. If I run the hydrazine over an iridium catalyst, it'll separate into N2 and H2. And then if I just direct the hydrogen into a small area and burn it. Luckily, in the history of humanity, nothing bad has ever happened from lighting hydrogen on fire.

View Quote [after trying to make water by burning hydrogen] So... I blew myself up.

View Quote Good news: I may have a solution to my heating problem. Bad news: it involves me digging up the radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Now, if I remember my training correctly, one of the lessons was titled: "Don't dig up the big box of plutonium, Mark." I get it; RTGs are good for spacecraft, but if they rupture around humans... no more humans, which is why we buried it when we arrived. And planted that flag so we would never be stupid enough to accidentally go near it again. But, as long as I don't break it... [trails off, then starts laughing] I almost just said "Everything will be fine," out loud. Look, the point is, I'm not cold anymore.

View Quote I don't want to come off as arrogant here, but I'm the greatest botanist on this planet.

View Quote I've been thinking about laws on Mars. There's an international treaty saying that no country can lay claim to anything that's not on Earth. By another treaty if you're not in any country's territory, maritime law applies. So Mars is international waters. Now, NASA is an American non-military organization, it owns the Hab. But the second I walk outside I'm in international waters. So here's the cool part. I'm about to leave for the Schiaparelli Crater where I'm going to commandeer the Ares IV lander. Nobody explicitly gave me permission to do this, and they can't until I'm on board the Ares IV. So I'm going to be taking a craft over in international waters without permission, which by definition... makes me a pirate. Mark Watney: Space Pirate.

View Quote They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially colonized it. So, technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!

View Quote [after hearing he has to take the top off of the Mars Ascent Vehicle] I know what they're doing. I know exactly what they're doing. They just keep repeating "go faster than any man in the history of space travel", like that's a good thing. Like it'll distract me from how insane their plan is. Yeah, I get to go faster than any man in the history of space travel, because you're launching me in a convertible. Actually it's worse than that, because I won't even be able to control the thing. And by the way, physicists, when describing things like acceleration do not use the word "fast". So they're only doing that in the hopes that I won't raise any objections to this lunacy, because I like the way "fastest man in the history of space travel" sounds. I do like the way it sounds... I mean, I like it a lot. [pauses] I'm not gonna tell them that.

View Quote I admit it's fatally dangerous, but I'd get to fly around like Iron Man.

View Quote At some point, everything's gonna go south on you... everything's going to go south and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem... and you solve the next one... and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?