Don't The Needs Of The Many Outweigh The Needs Of The Few?
A central debate for NASA in The Martian once things go tits up (as they are wont to do in space) is, quite simply, whether or not to save Mark at all. The problem is this; as the only way to efficiently save him is by sending the Hermes back to Mars, you're adding five more people into the mix; definitely kill one man or risk the lives of six. It's Star Trek's "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" on a highly personal level and NASA, a big organisation who by their very nature must think about events very plainly, chooses to go along with Spock. They only reverse that decision when the Hermes crew mutiny and reallign the ship's path, leaving the agency no choice. The key here though is that, ultimately, this gamble was the right thing to do - humanity rallies behind the Hermes as they go to rescue Mark and the public mood would assumedly have been positive towards the decision even if the mission had been a failure. When you humanise the person behind the statistic they go from being a single number to a fully fleshed-out human being; Mark may be only one man, but he is still a man. This shouldn't be too surprising. The "outweigh" line was, of course, first spoken by a being who was a half-human, coldly-logical tactician. So The Martian, in contrasting to this thinking with one man alone on an entire planet (who has, pun incoming, gone where no man has gone before), shows the power of human connection and the strength of the individual.
