![]() And though I sometimes got exhausted by the book’s exhaustiveness, I also know that people read and enjoy books for lots of different reasons. (Weir, a software engineer, famously published the book in installments on his own website, correcting errors as he went along thanks to helpful readers who wrote in when his calculations were off.) As Mark Watney, the novel’s astronaut-botanist hero, solves problem after problem-growing potatoes in Mars soil, transforming his urine into rocket fuel-I came to think of The Martian less as a novel in the traditional sense than as an expertly assembled sequence of causes and effects, actions and reactions, hypotheses and conclusions. Good news for him: The science in The Martian checks out. He cares more about that, perhaps, than about whether the characters in a book feel real or compelling. He’s a reader who cares, truly cares, if the science in his book checks out. Also, it’s possible that some nonscientists will see this movie. That’s just an estimate, of course I didn’t account for the preponderance of scientists and engineers in coastal states where ticket prices tend to be higher. Set that average ticket price at a conservative $12, and that gives us a domestic box office gross of $155,640,000. The average price of a movie ticket in the United States is $8.61, but that average includes children’s prices and 2-D movies it’s safe to say that most scientists and engineers will pay a premium to see The Martian in three glorious dimensions. ![]() Each of those scientists and engineers will see the movie twice. Or let’s be more precise: According to the Congressional Research Service there were 6.2 million scientists and engineers in the United States in 2012, and that workforce is growing at a compound annual rate of 1.5 percent, suggesting that in 2015, that number is about 6.485 million. When Ridley Scott’s exciting and funny film of Andy Weir’s hit novel The Martian comes to theaters this week, it’s going to be wildly popular and make hundreds of millions of dollars.
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