MISSION LOG – SOL 48
It’s time to begin organized language lessons.
During TV watching time, the same thing happens about twenty times each night. One of the ponies asks Starlight what X word in English means. Before Spitfire made her go cold-turkey on magic, she’d cast her translation spell and ask, and I’ll repeat the word five or six times until Starlight gets the same answer often enough. Sometimes, if the concept is complex or obscure- for example, Danny Partridge talking about royalties- the spell will just choke and Starlight gives up.
Now, with Starlight forbidden from using magic at all, we just bounce around the few words of English we share (sometimes with me guessing at a pony word- that never works out well). That works well enough that, most of the time, we get the idea across without having to resort to whiteboard-talking. I think the ponies have got somewhere between one and five hundred words this way, depending on how much the individual cares. Starlight and Dragonfly are the top students, Fireball the bottom of the class by a mile.
But though this exercise builds vocabulary, it does nothing for grammar, which is why Cherry still said “good-good clobber” when I gave her my cherry cobbler for lunch. (Me, I think the stuff is pretty vile compared to what Mom makes in the summertime. But Cherry is obviously an addict undergoing serious cherry withdrawal symptoms, based on how she savored every single bite. I wonder if there are any Google listings for “cherry rehab clinics on Mars.”)
And after several days of The Electric Company plus Starlight not being allowed to use magic, Starlight and Dragonfly are both beginning to ask about grammatical rules and writing. Starlight didn’t surprise me, but I hadn’t expected Dragonfly to take so eager an interest. So, after thinking about it, I’ve decided to have an hour of English lessons every sol when duties permit. Basically I’ll take one episode of Electric Company and build off of it, so it’ll really be an hour and a half.
Speaking of writing, I’m glad that NASA sent us a couple cases of markers (double redundancy in case a supply ship went missing or a Hab breach caused the opened markers to boil off). In fact, if we get in contact with NASA, I’m going to ask them to send more. None have died yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
My right arm still itches, and by “itches” I mean about ten thousand classically trained tap-dancing fire ants are doing a constant recital between my shoulder and my elbow. Believe it or not, that’s a good sign. All that itching tells me that I haven’t lost nerves along with the outer layer of skin that’s been coming off with every wash over the last couple of days. There’s huge patches of raw, fire-engine red skin on my arm now, but the blisters are gone. So is the actual pain. It looks like I’ll eventually make a full recovery.
Unfortunately I can’t afford to take any more days off. Tomorrow we go to see how the cave is faring. If the temperature in the farm area is above freezing, we’ll start hauling in the soil we banked from the last dirt-doubling. We don’t have time to let it properly infect the cave’s soil, though; once all the cultured dirt is in and rotated into the old soil, we go straight to planting.
Cherry and I went through the food packs, and we’ve revised the numbers. The pony food packs run out on Sol 90 at the current ration, assuming Dragonfly keeps living on nothing but air. After that my meatless food packs extend that to Sol 117. After that I have to start dividing up multiple food packs to provide vegetable content for the three ponies that eat food. There are a lot of reasons why I hope to avoid that, but the biggest reason is that I’ll end up wasting food from spoilage if I do that- and not just any food, but the high-protein stuff that I need to ration the most.
Under perfect conditions it takes a minimum of sixty days for alfalfa to go from seed to first cutting, and ideally you should allow ninety days instead for the root system to develop. These conditions aren’t just less than ideal, they’re barely tolerable.
To give you an idea how bad things are, I’ve just done a quick inspection of the alfalfa starter crop, the one I was going to use for seed. The stalks are surprisingly tall, considering how shallow the soil is. Under normal circumstances they’d almost be ready for harvest. But the plan was to use these plants to make seeds for future crops. In order to get seeds, you need flowers. And before you get flowers, you get buds.
There isn’t a single bud on any of these plants. And given the age of the sprouts, there should be at least the signs of developing buds.
Bear in mind these are alfalfa plants from an alien world in an alternate universe. It’s possible they have some behavior, some requirement, something I’m not aware of. But it looks like alfalfa and smells like alfalfa and grows like alfalfa, so I’m treating it as alfalfa. And when alfalfa does this it usually means the plant is under stress. The alfalfa isn’t budding because it’s pouring all its energy into growing stems and roots and hasn’t got a surplus for reproduction.
I took photos and measurements, and I dug up a few plants to document the roots. Without a control group this isn’t much of a scientific experiment, but whatever data I can collect might be useful for future Mars colonists. (See attached documents.) Long story short, the measurements don’t line up with the lack of flower buds. If the plants were under enough stress to not flower, they shouldn’t have grown as tall as they have. And given the stunted roots, I don’t know how they grew so tall anyway.
So, change of plan. I’m going to let the remaining starter alfalfa grow as it likes. If there’s no sign of buds by the time I harvest the seed potatoes, then I’ll cut the alfalfa at the same time. It should yield almost a day’s food for the ponies. The plants I pulled today will get chopped up (especially the roots) and added to the cave farm soil to make doubly certain the nitrogen-fixing bacteria are there when the alfalfa seeds sprout.
But my point is, with results as odd as this, we can’t rely on Earth or pony benchmarks for growing. We need to plant as quickly as possible, to give the plants all the chance we can give them to prosper. It’s going to take every trick I can think of to make this work in time. And there’s no more time to spare. We have to make this happen now. Every day we lose is lost food, and lost food is lost margin for survival.
Bleargh. This is depressing. I’m going to call the ponies together for some educational television time followed by some probably-less-educational Watney time. I hope it takes my mind off of wondering what the pony words for “I’m hungry” are. If the cave doesn’t work, we’ll know the words soon enough.
By the way, earlier today I took FanOfMostEverything's card suggestion and ran with it for a list of Secret Shipfic Folder cards for Changeling Space Program and The Maretian.
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/794304/a-distraction-from-van-shopping-pony-shipping
Well thats not good. They need that plant matter to survive!
Pretty sure this should be, "If we get in contact with Earth..." You're on the right track here, just about 140 million miles off.
Should Mars be NASA, or should we be they?
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8707235
Rrrrgh.
I would ask if the extra height in the alfalfa was due to Mars' lower gravity, but since Mark is a botanist, he would have probably already taken this into account. It could be accelerated growth from Cherry's pony magic (what little she's able to give off at the moment), but then why just height and not buds as well?
I'm still abit confused as to why they don't just save up the magic battery, then give all the "juice" to Cherry, and she could use her earth-pony magic to make the crops grow much faster than normal?
Also, very minor typo: Mark says he should ask Mars for more markers, but I think he meant Earth?
Obviously the Equestrian alfalfa plants are suffering from magic deficiency.
8707278
You could be onto something. Magic's presence as an ambient force and potential energy source means that Equestrian plants are just as likely to have evolved to exploit it as the animals. Cherry's lowered magical radiation may not be cutting it.
There's a bunch of reasons plants can grow tall without budding, including excess nitrogen and a lack of light. And yes, probably low gravity, but strangely there isn't a lot of testing on this subject :p.
Mark's a botanist, so I assume he probably tested for those things.
Twenty years from now, linguists of both species will marvel at the spread of "dipstick"- a word for which there was no pony equivalent- to become the most common insult in Equestria.
Let's hope Pony alfalfa doesn't need magical changing seasons to produce seeds, else they're rather screwed.
I can't but imagine equestria will be the one to rescue them, in the end. They have the tech already, they just need to find out how to teleport to the right dimension. And how to transfer magic between them, but something tells me that's not the hardest part.
8707394 Stunted roots, no flowers... lack of potassium or phosphorus? I'd lean toward phosphorus, since that's the central one for flower formation. Zinc deficiency would cause plant dwarfing and a form of chlorosis (as would iron deficiency... and Mars has lots of soil iron anyway). Can't be nematodes from the poop, as the digestive system would utterly destroy any of the nematodes which infect plant roots.
So I'll go with phosphorus deficiency.
8707300 They must supplement it with energy from SOULS!!
8707300
8707278
Inclined to agree. However the good news is this is a problem that will fix itself, especially in the cave.
Plants and animals produce a small amount of Magic, according to Starlight. If this is the case the more MLP plants they grow the more magic their is avalible. This is as compared to humans ( and I suspect most Earth plants and animals) that produce next to nothing.
This leads to an important long term consequence of this.... which could have short term consequences as well.
Just how much Magic can Equestrian plants produce. E even after they have left, have tje actions of the Ponies given mankind a new source of energy. But MOST important for Mark.... given that human technology is not designed to deal with the Magic Field, is anything going to start malfunctioning as magic levels begin to increase.
I mean even a tiny increase in the magnetism of the area can start to cause issues to magnetic based equipment. And atmosphereic electricity can really mess with raido waves.
8707477
Only supply of phosphorous I could think of is matches and other incendary equivalents. Or Cola. Thats phosphoric acid? So were the fuel cells on Apollo? Maybe Lithium Polymer Phosphate rechargeable batteries?
8704429
In my defense, I haven't wached that particular episode (or any particular episode not from the newer seasons) in like... three years? Wow. Time really goes on.
However, that is a completely valid argument. I'll call the good old "it's a show about colorful ponies, what did you expect?"
Moustache Spike was cool tho. Wait, it IS COOL NOW TOO! Some things never change...
8707493
Nearly every place on Earth, and apparently even some celestial bodies exist in Pennsylvania.
The naming of areas, towns and cities in my previous home state is just so weird.
Well that’s ominous
8707786
this
8707529 Bone meal has lots of phosphorus... but which pony to sacrifice?
8706919 Nitrogen triiodide is cool. Totally stable in solution. Crystalized, a feather touch makes it explode.
Same with a bunch of the heavy metal fulminates. Those little paper-wrapped popper-snappers you throw and pop have just a few of the tiny rocks inside coated in a thin layer of silver fulminate. It's so unstable that if the crystals grow beyond a certain size their own mass causes enough pressure at the base to trigger self-detonation.
8707873
Now I want Mythbusters to ultra high speed video dropping a sugar cube of the stuff.
8707873
Please explain roughly which quantum scale chemical interactions of being in a crystal lattice increases reactibility of an already highly reactive chemical?
Because im a know nothing layman, my only bullshit guess (spoilered for sanities sake) is this: "the energy stored in the bonds joining the chemical into the crystal structure that get released when broken is, while minute, still enough to excite the electron energies of the chemical's contituent bond electron pairs to unstable positions that reduce the effective redox energy barrier of the entire molecule so low that its own meager kinetic energy is enough to behave and react as freely like it were a loose collection of free ions"
Please, please, correct me here! I cant honestly stand my own bullshit answer, but i don't know how to correct my ignorance in a vacuum! All i know how to fix it is to purposefully put my misunderstandings on display and hope someone who knows better sees it and gets bothered enough by the wrongness of my opinion that they invest the energy to viscerally tear apart my bullshit using facts!
8708075
It's not the structure, per se. Crystallization is a technique to concentrate, purify, and dry a chemical substance to within an inch of its life, and so there's no solvent or other chemical there anymore to improve its bad attitude. That's why this and most other, uh, "energetic" compounds are bad news bears when crystallized.
And don't feel bad, mi amigo. There's no shame in asking questions.
8708075 For nitrogen triiodide, it's due to steric strain from the high relative proximity of the 3 big iodine atoms squished tightly around the tiny nitrogen atom. Additionally, the favored and most stable and lowest energy arrangement for nitrogen is in it's diatomic molecular form (atmospheric nitrogen), so thermodynamics overwhelmingly favors its formation. And out of solution, lo and behold! The nitrogen of one of these triiodides finds itself in the proximity of other nitrogens and desperately wants to cast aside its tri of iodine tormentors for the safety and stability of the tender caress of one of its own kind (nitrogen likes to be monogamous, I guess).
The atoms are thus not happy with this arrangement and thus, just a little nudge of any energy is enough to make them rage-quit. They don't even need to be crystals. Even a thin layer of the dry compound will blow up if you look at it wrong. In addition to being touched; a small gust of wind, a laser pointer light, or a truck rumbling by too closely can set it off. Then the happy nitrogen couples formed by the decomposition float away to rejoin the atmospheric community while the dumbass who made a gallon of the stuff is left splattered all over his shredded garage.
As for silver fulminate, I believe it has to do with the molecule's unusual crown-lattice structure called a cyclic hexamer. Forming crystals puts excess strain upon an already strained relationship between the atoms, and as such even a small amount of pressure. There are several theories of how such explosions work on the atomic level, some involving entropy and some involving the electron bond energies as you found. The strain of the crystal formation gives these bonds a very low energy of activation overwhelmed by a sharp impact. Otherwise, unlike nitrogen triiodide, silver and mercury fulminate are chemically stable in that they won't break down spontaneously (as NI3 will do rather rapidly). They are contact explosives.
Now, conformational strain from crystallization doesn't explain explosives such as nitroglycerine, which quite merrily explodes as a liquid. Interestingly, it freezes at about 13C and while frozen solid is quite stable. In liquid form those molecules apparently don't like to rub elbows, and when they do so briskly enough they get very angry at each other and proceed to pummel each other to bits... along with everything else around them.
Anyway, this is enough research upon explosives. I'm sure the FBI is now watching my computer. I mean, they probably were already, but now they just threw another team of agents on the job.
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Actually, phosphorus is readily available in urine, and since they're already using their "compost" to fertilize the pants anyway, the plants may be getting it from that.
In fact, there are labs and agricultural companies on earth that pay for urine in order to collect the phosphorus. Otherwise, it's a finite resource that's somewhat difficult to find in very large, pure concentrations. Surprisingly, the vast majority of Earth's supply is controlled by Morocco. It's, like, their primary export.
8707200
Another great chapter. Good to see Watney ponder the potential for failure.
Though one thing I'd be worried about is how in the hell is he going to move the plants from the hab to the cave without them dying due to the cold, lack of air, or simple internal pressure being greater than the external atmosphere on Mars?...
8708963 Airtight tubs, brief exposure to the outside, rides in the rover. It's how he's getting plants into the pop-tents outside the Hab, after all.
Should've brought spinach along.
Just figured I'd drop a comment on this story (I don't think I've complimented you yet). I took a bit of a break while drilling through a really long fic, but always see updates in my feed.
I really like the amount of attention to detail you're willing to put into this fic. I can tell that it's really something that you care about, and wanted to thank you for the hard work giving this to us.
I'll be focused on this one for now, I look forward to seeing how this plays out. The characters are believable, and I care about how they're going to interact through this challenge.
Cheers!
Fireball sticks to the words Mark mutters under his breath when he hopes no one hears them
Dragonfly is one clever bug
Well, lower gravity might have some influence on that.
Oh. Right. Seeds take lots of energy, of course
Ooh, these are Equestrian alfalfa. Do they need ponies to induce them to start budding/flowering in the same way the trees need ponies to start the leaves falling off?
Why do people itch? According to my old psychology class (1970s), most people itch most of the time. It's just that various things distract you & you don't notice. This is why you always seem to itch when/where you can't scratch -you notice.
The universe is harsh... Stay strong crew
Incidentally, there is now a Google listing for “cherry rehab clinics on Mars.”. It's this story...
The magic of friendship will see them through it all eventually
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If I had a nickle for every Google Result for that phrase, I'd have two nickles. Which isn't much, but it's odd that it happens twice :-0).
(Bonus points if you can figure out the second before you Google it)
Food quality can make up a lot of moral. At least having food at all should keep them motivated enough to work towards rescue...
Guess Cherry Berry helps them grow instead of focusing on reproduction.
There are worse things than only Potatoes...