Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Sci Fi Forum Potatoes on Mars

A while back I red the book "The Martian" by Andy Weir. I loved it. And in a little over a week the movie will be released. I am waiting to see if they mess it up the way they usually mess up good books when they make them into movies. But a lot of people have been wondering and talking about the science in it. Mostly it looks rather plausible. So just now on Phys.org I found and article about growing potatoes on Mars. The author of the article thinks it seems to be plausible.

Can you grow potatoes on Mars?

Waiting for the movie.

Bill Gill

You know what this means don't you!? Potatoes lead to fries and chips which leads to fat martians!

That's OK, they don't have fish or burgers, so they won't get too fat.

Bill Gill

Well, this afternoon I saw "The Martian". It was the 3D version and it was a pretty good movie. They didn't mangle it too much while converting from a book to a movie. The 3D effects were pretty good. They mostly weren't overdone, not much stuff thrown in the viewers face. The worst part of that was when there was stuff flying around during the storm. That didn't look very realistic.

Other than that they did a pretty good job of converting the book into a movie. They of course had to leave a lot of stuff out, since there just isn't as much room in a 241 minute movie to put it in as there is in the book. But they did hit most of the high spots.

I didn't much care for the rover they had. It didn't look too much like the one described in the book. And when he made his long trek it didn't look as Beverly Hillbillyish as was described in the book. It definitely didn't look as cludged together.

I also didn't care much for the end, when the other astronauts snatched him out of the ascent module. They threw away a huge lot of safety stuff that the commander required in the book when they did it. Commander Lewis was too good a commander to throw out the book the way she did. I reckon they just couldn't stand not throwing a lot of extra dramatic effort into it.

But as I said, overall it was a good show.

Bill Gill

Well I suppose we will find out if potatoes will grow on mars
because there is a man who can see beyond the envelope who wants
to go to mars.

I personally believe that mars will be a future hotbed for agriculture.

there is no actual reason why foods can not be grown on mars.
in fact an incentive would be that agriculture on mars would
slowly replace the cold temperatures on mars caused by the 95% CO2
atmosphere on mars with warmer temperatures that would be the

result of a increase in atmospheric Oxygen caused by agriculture.