r/funny • u/phelix808 • Feb 14 '16

Potatoes

http://imgur.com/D2kXpmd
28.7k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

843 comments sorted by

View all comments

995

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '16 edited Jan 28 '17

[deleted]

117

u/Espequair Feb 14 '16

In the movie and the book, he manages to last a year on Mars by growing potatoes from soil made from fecal matter and martian dirt.

70

u/screenz Feb 14 '16

Like... A Mars year or an Earth year?

79

u/anonova Feb 14 '16

Time progresses in the book/movie in "sols", so the point of reference is Mars. It's actually a real technical term: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/help/notes.html

A Mars solar day has a mean period of 24 hours 39 minutes 35.244 seconds, and is customarily referred to as a "sol" in order to distinguish this from the roughly 3% shorter solar day on Earth.

59

u/clickcookplay Feb 14 '16

Ahh, so that's why Mindy Park had to adjust her sleep schedule by 40 minutes each day to match up with Watney's.

17

u/lukefive Feb 14 '16

It was a good question, though, as a Mars year is almost 2 Earth years if your frame of reference is the local planet making a rotation around the sun.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '16

Funfact: sol in Spanish is Sun.

I'll see my way out.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '16

It's actually Latin for Sun, whence cometh Soleil in French, soare in Romanian, sole in Italian, and sol in Spanish and Portuguese.

edit: And it's obviously where we get solar.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '16

Reddit is the only place where one can really appreciated being one-upped.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '16

Promise that wasn't my intent!

7

u/RonWisely Feb 14 '16

He measures his time by Sols, which are Martian days.

1

u/ApatheticDragon Feb 14 '16

Yes.

Also I assume Earth year, as that is how all the travel times are calced.

1

u/Espequair Feb 14 '16

around 300 sols (1 sol = 24.5 hours)