As you can see, this plan provides many opportunities for me to die in a fiery explosion. — Andy Weir

As a chemist, Vogel knew how to make a bomb. In fact, much of his training was to avoid making them by mistake.

This allowed me to do what writers treasure more than anything else: catch the reader off-guard. There’s nothing better than knowing you’re going to outwit with the reader. And the type of people who read sci-fi are very difficult to outwit.

Amazingly, some of the bacteria survived. The population is strong and growing. That’s pretty impressive, when you consider it was exposed to near-vacuum and subarctic temperatures for over twenty-four hours.

My guess is pockets of ice formed around some of the bacteria, leaving a bubble of survivable pressure inside, and the cold wasn’t quite enough to kill them. With hundreds of millions of bacteria, it only takes one survivor to stave off extinction.

Life is amazingly tenacious. They don’t want to die any more than I do.