« Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it's turned into a nightmare.
I don't even know who'll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now.
For the record… I didn't die on Sol 6 ⁽¹⁾. Certainly the rest of the 5 crew thought I did, and I can't blame them. Maybe there'll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, "Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars."
And it'll be right, probably. 'Cause I'll surely die here. Just not on Sol 6 when everyone thinks I did.
Let's see… where do I begin?
The Ares Program. Mankind reaching out to Mars to send people to another planet for the very first time and expand the horizons of humanity blah, blah, blah. The Ares 1 crew did their thing and came back heroes. They got the parades and fame and love of the world.
Ares 2 did the same thing, in a different location on Mars. They got a firm handshake and a hot cup of coffee when they got home.
Ares 3. Well, that was my mission. Okay, not mine per se. Commander Lewis was in charge. I was just one of her crew. Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be "in command" of the mission if I were the only remaining person.
What do you know? I'm in command. A sol is a Mars solar day. It lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes, the duration of the day-night cycle on Mars.
I wonder if this log will be recovered before the rest of the crew die of old age. I presume they got back to Earth all right. Guys, if you're reading this: It wasn't your fault.
You did what you had to do. In your position I would have done the same thing. I don't blame you, and I'm glad you survived. »

« The entrepreneur details his plan to send one million humans to the red planet.
In the year 2014 Elon Musk doesn't need much of an introduction. Not since Steve Jobs has an American technologist captured the cultural imagination like Musk. He is the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man. His life story has already become a legend. He decided idle hedonism wasn't for him, and instead sank his fortune into a pair of unusually ambitious startups. With his automobile company he would replace the world's cars with electric vehicles and with his space company he would colonize Mars. And so I wondered, why space?
"I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary," he told me, "in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct."
Musk told me this first group of settlers will need to pay their own way. "My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it's not going to be a vacation jaunt. It's going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies."
A million people on Mars sounds like a techno-futurist fantasy. And yet, the very existence of Musk's space venture is fantasy. »