A request by Admiral Biscuit:
Pony on Earth, pony discovers some life-changing piece of kitchen equipment. I was thinking a blender.
Far Shores sat on a little pillow in her friend’s dorm room, and sank deep into existential crisis.
Grasped in her hooves, in a cheap little plastic cup with a simile face on the side, was a hay-oat-and-kale smoothie. The first such smoothie she had drank in her entire life.
Oh, certainly, she’d consumed things that were called smoothies, back in Equestria. Things full of chunks, full of floating bits, where the shards of hay floated and clung together on the surface. Smoothies made by hoof, by grinding stone, by the labor of earth ponies and their broad hooves.
But how could they be smoothies, she thought, when they were not smooth? Not like the drink she had just sipped, the ambrosia that flowed like liquid gold, and whose flavored intermingled so entirely she could imagine that they had grown that way, that hay, oat, and kale were all but a single plant.
She could never drink an Equestrian “smoothie” again. Not without the pain of knowing what she had lost. She had beheld the true nature of the cosmos, at least as far as it pertained to ground vegetable drinks, and she could not go back to her state of ignorance.
And yet, how had it been made? With a blender, one of those gadgets with which humans festooned their nests like magpies with shiny junk. Never before had Far Shores truly desired one of the human’s technological devices, save as anything more than a toy or a momentary convenience. But she had to have a blender. She had to.
And yet, where would she plug it in?
To use her blender back in Ponyville, she would need a generator. To run her generator, she would need fuel. To get fuel, she would need a refinery, which would itself require specialist metal parts, specialist gauges, modern glassware, digital thermometers, crude oil. Of course, she had a job in Ponyville, and couldn’t spend all day refining crude oil to make gasoline for smoothies. To make things easier, she would probably want to hire ponies to do it for her. Establish an oil company. But she couldn’t possibly afford to pay multiple pony’s salaries. So she should invest in automation, computers or robots or…
That’s when the revelation came.
It was impossible to make a smoothie, a true smoothie, without first creating all human civilization.
“This is it,” she said to her human friend, staring at the drink, eyes wide and dark. “This is the special talent of the whole human race. This is why you exist.”
She took another sip.
“It’s really sweet though,” she went on after a moment. “Do humans have to put sugar in everything? Like, I went to the Starbucks in the physics building and they put syrup in my coffee.”
Is keeping all my secrets safe tonight.
10723672 I have had that in my head ever since this appeared in New Stories last night.
Solar panel or wind generator attached to a battery bank? Wouldn't even need an inverter if the blender was retrofitted with a DC motor. (Skipping the inverter would also make it more efficient, so more blending could be done from the same battery charge.)
Or skip the electricity entirely. Treadle blender? Could be a thing, I'd imagine. Though might need some fun step-up gearing to get the RPM from a treadle.
Hmm, now I'm wondering how hard it would be to *actually build* a treadle blender, or failing that a pedal-powered one. (Actually, looking it up just now, someone made a pedal blender already.) I suspect that a treadle blender would take up a lot less space than a pedal one, though. And could be used while standing, if so desired.
Pony logic 101.
10723960
Treadle blender’s totally doable; treadle sewing machines existed and the concept would be more or less the same.
Treadmill-powered is also a possibility. Remember that episode where Rainbow and Big Mac ran on a treadmill to make cider? That was a legit method of production back in the day, and I have an old farm implement catalogue which offers them in sizes from dog to oxen.
(volume warning)
Starlight Glimmer has a blender spell (modified from one designed to liquify Parasprites. If those bugs showed up in Ponyville again and started eating her stuff, she wasn't going to wait for Pinkie to assemble a one Pony band)
The issue of Human Slavery was hard fought, but ultimately legalized when Princess Twilight took her first sip of a Banana smoothie
This reminds me of a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I've heard worse hypotheses for humanity's purpose. Though I've also heard similar arguments for the development of ice cream.
And to be fair, Starbucks coffee is designed to be adulterated. If you're going to drink it black, use beans and brewing meant for that.
10723672
Best Bond movie ever bar none.