LIFE ON MARS
What price do we place on a human life when we are forced to do so?

Saving Matt Damon is an expensive business. The number of films in which his character has to be rescued from mortal danger is lengthening (Saving Private Ryan, Green Zone, Elysium to name only three) and the total cost has been estimated by someone with too much time on their hands as nearly a trillion pounds. The biggest outlay may just be in his latest film The Martian where he is left for dead on the red planet when a fierce storm curtails a manned mission.

 

Science fiction is a marmite genre - either loved or hated - but the screenplay does its best to engage a wider audience. The dialogue is witty and intelligible, devoid of the incomprehensible language of space. Damon grows his own food in the excrement helpfully left by his departing colleagues. There is a trashy 70s disco soundtrack, the only play list his commander left behind, enough to drive hardened astronauts to suicide but which keeps him company; you just knew Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive would cover the closing credits.

 

Behind the adventure lies a serious philosophical question: what price do we put on a human life when we are forced to do so? The cost it took to save this solitary Martian does not compute on a rational, existential scale. The money would simply be better spent on earth, saving lives in developing nations perhaps. Yet the crazy notion of sinking several hundred billion dollars into a rescue mission makes sense not just in the darkened, emotional confines of the cinema complex but in real life too. Would NASA leave an astronaut for dead in space when they might be saved? Would the US government tolerate this? The film cleverly captures the fervid and emotive culture that would surround this man’s plight were something similar ever to happen in real life. The world would simply not permit him to be left to die. Serious efforts would have to be made at giddying costs.

 

Is this rational? No. Is it justifiable? Yes. The story echoes the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15, where the shepherd goes in search of one lost sheep in a flock of a hundred and parties hard when it is saved. If The Martian is not logical in its cost-benefit analysis, neither is God in his reckless love for the human race. The value which can be placed on the life of a single person is the blood of God’s own Son; this is an inestimable cost. This parable suggests God would have endured Calvary for just one lost soul, such is our worth. The madness of paying billions to save one astronaut carries echoes of this crazy, passionate God.

 

In an era when most decisions are determined by scarce human resources, both the parable and the film remind us that finite calculations can never place a proper value on the dignity of life. We should never succumb to crude economic pricing in our underlying assessment of people, even if the market must. The irrational value of a human soul is signalled to us by the stories of The Martian and the parable of the lost sheep; a challenge to us not to lose our souls by carelessly depriving others of theirs.