The Martian

6:30pm – Meet the Speaker reception | 7pm – Presentation by speaker Daniel Zajic | After the presentation – Stay for a screening of The Martian

The Martian (2015): An astronaut becomes stranded on Mars after his team assumes him dead, and must rely on his ingenuity to find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive and can survive until a potential rescue.

Presentation:
Housing today faces growing pressure—from rising costs, limited labor, and land constraints to sustainability and aging-in-place needs. Before the screening of The Martian, this talk follows a multi-year solo project building a new house in pursuit of better answers. By intentionally creating constraints to drive innovation, continually asking what’s truly necessary, and questioning assumptions, it explores what becomes possible when you start from first principles—guided by an ideal of what a home could be, and the attempt to get as close to that as reality allows. What if a home could give back more than it takes—producing more energy than it uses, minimizing waste not just today but over its entire lifetime? And if that’s within reach, why aren’t we already building this way?

Bio: Daniel Zajic was born in Ottawa, Canada, to immigrant parents, and came to the United States for college, where he met his wife, also Canadian. After several moves across the country, they settled in the White Mountains about a decade ago. He brings over 25 years of experience in software engineering, including work at several successful healthcare startups, and is a techno-optimist—an outlook that now fuels his ambition to apply his problem solving experience to his own long-held dream, and simultaneously help others achieve theirs.

Science on Screen at The Colonial is presented in partnership with White Mountain Science, Inc. (WMSI) and is sponsored by Kerberos LLC and Hacker.Nexus

Science on Screen is an initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation