Reddit reviews Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

It's a commonly studied strategy for long-term space voyages, including potential Mars missions. Married couples reduce the likelihood of new romances blossoming between people in very close quarters- preventing loads of potential drama while increasing cooperation. Also, married people tend to trust other married people over single people. There are many others reasons that make it a good plan.

[Source: Packing For Mars by Mary Roach.]

I've been on a non-fiction kick myself.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is good. Very funny, very informative.

Packing for Mars and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers both by Mary Roach were also fun to read.

> He also frequently talks about his love of space and his extreme desire to venture out there

There's this book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, that has astronauts talk about how it actually is to be in space, it's filled with stories from engineers, researchers, some history of space flight and a ton of trivia. Your boyfriend might really like it and at $14 you can add other small gifts.

If he's more visual, he might also enjoy Universe by Martin Rees, a visual guide to the Universe - the pages are filled with pictures and interesting facts, everything we know about the Universe, very interesting and stunning to look at. Admittedly more expensive at $35 considering the high quality pictures.

Shameless self promotion coming right up too:

> Walking Dead [...] Comic Con

By any chance, he might like The Walking Dead Boardgame and you could both play together or with friends.

With video games, it all depends on what games he plays. Portal? This Portal 2 Desk Defender is very fun to play with and so is this Wheatley LED Flashlight. I'm not sure what else to suggest from your details, maybe it would give you a few ideas if you checked my SO and mine's website, introduce some details about him and see what gifts come up if they catch your eye.

I hope some things were useful!

Thingy.

Thanks for the contest, Jason. :D

I'm doing the same thing. At the beginning of my story, the young protagonist from an old earth colony "runs away" from the planet by stowing onto a departing spaceship. Why would he have to run away to have a chance at a life in space if the planet's colonized?

Whenever I explain the premise, everyone's immediately enchanted and captivated. It's immensely compelling. And it's throwaway background for the setting of the book. It would only be mentioned in passing as exposition.

It's probably a sign that I'm writing the wrong book.

The best thing to do is to get in the habit of thinking of things logically. Look at Star Trek? Massive computer cores and printed digital readouts with data tapes. Black stars (the term "black hole" was finalized a year after the episode). Half of everything makes logical if sometimes dated sense for 1967, and the other half became real in the intervening 45 years because it inspired engineers.

So decide if you're doing hard sci-fi (technology-based, hard science), soft sci-fi (person- or situation-based, lesser or no focus on science) or space opera (pew pew lol space adventure!) and work from there. watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read about the NASA moon programs Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo, read about Skylab, and read about the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Know that in Russian that last one's called Экспериментальный полёт «Союз» — «Аполлон»: "Experimental flight Soyuz-Apollo".

Real life will teach you quite a lot about how humans get along, much less aliens. And history can often come alive. I mean, just look what I found in the absolute best book at the library about life in space?

You can also look at various resources. Probably the far more comprehensive (and second-most fun) was Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.

Just give an intriguing premise with a consistent setting and compelling human characters and the rest will fall into place.

I think a podcast recently did a story on this. Maybe it was on Science Friday or something, while interviewing Mary Roach?

One of my favorite non-fiction authors is Mary Roach. She picks a topic and gathers all kinds of detailed and odd information about it, often covering the kinds of details that the genuinely curious find fascinating.

Stiff is about what humans do with the dead remains of other humans, including her visit to the body farms where scientists figure out the cascade of beetles, bugs and grubs invade the remains.
https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1502060523&sr=8-4&keywords=Mary+Roach

Gulp is all about the human digestive tract
https://www.amazon.com/Gulp-Adventures-Alimentary-Mary-Roach-ebook/dp/B00AN86JZ4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502060523&sr=8-1&keywords=Mary+Roach

Bonk is about sex, including the author convincing her husband to have sex in an MRI for science
https://www.amazon.com/Bonk-Curious-Coupling-Science-Sex-ebook/dp/B003M5IGE2/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1502060523&sr=8-9&keywords=Mary+Roach

Packing for Mars is all about the details of putting people into space
https://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life-ebook/dp/B003YJEXUM/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1502060523&sr=8-5&keywords=Mary+Roach

Basically, I think everything she writes is worth reading if you write fiction.

Sure.

If evolution is of interest to you (and if you have interest in the intersection between theology and science), Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller explores both sides of the debate and debunks many common misconceptions about evolution. I first read it in a college biology topics course.

If you like the topic of 'creationist attempts to dispute or disrupt the teaching of evolution in the classroom', Summer of the Gods, about the Scopes Monkey Trial, is a great book (although not explicitly about science).

You may find The Selfish Gene by Dawkins worth a read.

Books by Mary Roach can be fun; I've read Stiff and enjoyed it, and Packing for Mars was pretty good as well.

I have heard good things about The Emperor of All Maladies, though I haven't read it myself.

Our Stolen Future, about contamination of the environment by artificially produced estrogen and estrogen analogs, is dated but interesting.

The Discovery of Insulin by Bliss is a great story about how science happens and how scientific discovery occurs, and it lays out what may be the most important discovery in medical science during the 20th century.

Were those types of books what you were looking for?

Hmm, I don't have any suggestions in the mythology vein at the moment, but for generally accessible nonfiction, I cannot recommend Mary Roach enough. Stiff and Packing For Mars are probably the best ones to start with.

Read this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YJEXUM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

Read Packing for Mars by Mary Roach for confirmation that, indeed, you would not be able to handle it. ;>) It disavowed me of any notion that I would.

You jest, but it turns out that selecting for these missions, along with stuff like selecting for astronauts, is mostly about stuff like how you get along with people. Researchers now believe that mixed gender teams are best precisely because you end up with pair bonding and stabler psychologies.

I strongly recommend the brilliant and readable PACKING FOR MARS which is all about this stuff. She talks to a lot of antarctic scientists.

http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life-ebook/dp/B003YJEXUM/

There is minimum and maximum height for astronauts. You can't be too tall or too short. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact numbers, but the max is higher than 6'. The reasoning is that space suits are incredibly complex and very expensive so they are only made in certain size range (Source: Packing for Mars by Mary Roach).

Spacecraft too are a limiting factor especially since the Space Shuttle is retired and manned space flight relies entirely on the much smaller Soyuz capsule.

GASTON!

Item! Why should I worry?

How about actual science non-fiction? Mary Roach's Packing for Mars is a very readable primer about currently-available space technologies.