Or: Apparently We Now Need to Fact-Check Mars
This morning I came across an interesting post on LinkedIn from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
It announced:
Australia produces 2.9 million times more potatoes than Mark Watney grew on Mars.
There is even an infographic.
Australia: 1.5 million tonnes of potatoes.
Mars: 515 kilograms of potatoes.
Very impressive.
There is, however, a small problem.
Mark Watney does not exist.
Neither does his potato farm.
Mark Watney is the fictional astronaut in Andy Weir’s novel The Martian. No human being has ever set foot on Mars, let alone fertilised Martian soil, planted potatoes in it and harvested 515 kilograms of them.
The Australian potato crop is agricultural statistics.
The Martian potato crop is literature.
Yet place the two numbers beside one another, add an official logo, draw a graph and suddenly something psychologically interesting happens.
They begin to look equivalent.
The Authority of Numbers
Numbers possess an extraordinary authority.
Write:
“Mark Watney grew some potatoes on Mars.”
and almost everyone immediately recognises that we are discussing a novel.
Write:
“Mark Watney produced 515 kg of potatoes in 119 Earth days.”
and suddenly it sounds remarkably like agricultural data.
Add:
1,841 potatoes × 280 grams each = approximately 515 kg
and the transformation is almost complete.
The fictional event now possesses units, methodology and mathematical precision.
It has become data.
Except, of course, it hasn’t.
The calculation may be mathematically accurate.
The underlying event remains fictional.
And that distinction matters enormously in the age of social media.
Then Came the Comments
What interested me even more than the original post was the response beneath it.
Rather than pointing at the enormous elephant sitting quietly in the room — namely that nobody has ever grown a potato on Mars — people began discussing potato-production statistics.
Other countries were mentioned.
National crop yields were compared.
Arguments developed around who produced more potatoes.
The fictional number had been accepted as the starting premise of the discussion.
Nobody needed to say:
“For the purposes of this amusing comparison, accepting the events of the novel…”
The 515 kg figure had simply entered the conversation as though somebody had been standing beside Watney with a clipboard and a set of calibrated scales.
This is where an amusing social-media post becomes rather more interesting.
Repetition Changes the Status of Information
Human beings do not continuously re-investigate every statement they encounter.
We couldn’t function if we did.
Instead, we use shortcuts.
Does it look plausible?
Does it contain precise numbers?
Does it come from a recognisable organisation?
Are other people discussing it as though it were true?
Have I seen something similar before?
If enough of those boxes are ticked, our scepticism starts to fall.
Psychologists have long studied what is commonly called the illusory truth effect: repeated information can become easier to process and, under some circumstances, feel more believable simply because it has become familiar.
Social media adds several powerful ingredients.
Authority.
Repetition.
Sharing.
Commentary.
Algorithms.
And social confirmation.
A claim appears.
Someone comments on it.
Someone else disputes a detail.
A third person supplies another statistic.
Someone links another article.
Before long everyone is arguing about the branches while nobody checks whether the tree exists.
The Mars Potato Problem
The ABS post itself is clearly playful.
It explicitly refers to The Martian, and nobody seriously believes the Australian Bureau of Statistics has dispatched agricultural inspectors to Mars.
That isn’t the concerning part.
The interesting part is how quickly our brains accept the structure of the comparison.
Australia grew X.
Mars grew Y.
Therefore Australia grew Z times as much.
Mathematically, the statement works perfectly well.
Epistemologically, the two numbers belong to completely different categories.
One describes the physical world.
The other describes the internal world of a fictional story.
This is essentially the same mistake we make when social media places speculation, modelling, anecdote and measured evidence next to one another and presents them in identical visual formats.
A number does not become an empirical fact simply because someone can calculate it to three decimal places.
Precision Is Not Accuracy
This distinction is important.
Something can be extremely precise and completely imaginary.
If I write:
Sherlock Holmes solved 93.7% of the murders investigated at 221B Baker Street between 1881 and 1904
the decimal point does not make Sherlock Holmes real.
Nor does producing a spreadsheet.
Nor does putting the statistic into a graph.
Nor would 20,000 people discussing whether Hercule Poirot had a superior clearance rate suddenly transform either detective into a historical police officer.
Yet online information frequently acquires credibility in precisely this way.
Numbers are repeated.
Statistics are quoted.
Charts are reproduced.
People argue over secondary details.
And eventually the original premise disappears from view.
Social Media Does Something Particularly Clever
It doesn’t necessarily convince us that something false is true.
Sometimes it does something subtler.
It gets us to stop asking whether it is true at all.
Once a conversation moves from:
“Did this happen?”
to:
“Was the figure 515 kg or 520 kg?”
the most important epistemological battle has already been lost.
The argument has moved onto the territory of detail.
The premise has quietly been accepted.
That phenomenon extends far beyond potatoes.
Health claims.
Political claims.
Historical claims.
Scientific claims.
Statistics about crime.
Statistics about immigration.
Statistics about education.
Claims about medicines.
Claims about climate.
Someone introduces a number.
Someone else challenges the percentage.
A third person produces a graph.
A fourth questions the sample size.
Twenty comments later, nobody asks where the original proposition came from.
Fiction Has Always Been Powerful
None of this means fiction is dangerous.
Quite the opposite.
Good fiction allows us to explore possibilities.
Science fiction in particular asks:
“What if?”
The Martian works because Andy Weir built a fictional story around enough real engineering, chemistry, orbital mechanics and botany to make the predicament believable.
That is part of the enjoyment.
But there remains an important intellectual boundary between:
scientifically plausible
and
actually happened.
Social media is extraordinarily good at eroding that boundary.
Not deliberately.
Structurally.
A photograph, graph, headline, number and authoritative logo all occupy exactly the same screen whether the underlying proposition comes from a peer-reviewed study, a government database, somebody’s opinion or a science-fiction novel.
The interface equalises them.
Perhaps the Most Important Question Online
We spend enormous amounts of time asking:
Is this statistic correct?
Perhaps we should occasionally ask something even more basic:
Is the thing being measured real?
Because once enough people start debating the statistics surrounding a fictional premise, something remarkable has happened.
The fiction hasn’t actually become fact.
But socially, for the purpose of the conversation, it has begun behaving like one.
And somewhere on Mars, Mark Watney is presumably wondering why nobody has asked him for his tax return.
Richard Purchon FRGS AC RODP
The Purchon Papers
