MISSION LOG – SOL 219
I wish that had taken longer.
We harvested the alfalfa from the cave today. That is, we harvested what was still fit to harvest, which wasn’t much. We just weighed it here in the Hab. What the methane and the sinkholes and the flooding left us amounts only to ninety-two and a half kilograms. That’s only a little more than thirty sols of pony food which took us almost sixty sols to grow. Not a winning trend.
Thankfully it’s not game over, either. We still have lots of hay left from previous harvests- just not enough to get all the way to Sol 551. Once the next potato harvest comes in, we’ll almost certainly have enough total food to hit that goal. We probably have enough right now, really. But though the ponies can eat potatoes, alfalfa has more protein and is better for them all around.
Since we were in the cave anyway, we took all but a handful of the remaining alfalfa seed and planted it in the restored sinkhole areas. We also took cuttings from the plants that aren’t dead but didn’t produce enough hay to be worth harvesting. I’m soaking the cuttings ends in water here in the Hab. I could have done that in the cave, but I didn’t have anything to keep the cuttings from sliding all the way into the water and drowning. Tomorrow I’ll go back and plant ‘em in the area left after we ran out of seed. So far my cuttings have about a fifty percent success rate, which isn’t great, but it’s better than zero.
I checked a couple of the potato plants. The tubers on one were ready to harvest, but the others were still a little green, so no harvest ahead of schedule.
We tried a new experiment today, more for Dragonfly’s sake than anything else. Starlight Glimmer took all the batteries in the cave and drained them into a single one to get a full charge. She then rigged it to project a magic field, like she does whenever she makes more batteries, and left it run for half an hour. Dragonfly tried to pretend that it was no big deal, but Fireball picked the bug up and carried her right to the battery and sat down beside it. Dragonfly complained, but she didn’t struggle.
The experiment had one definite result besides easing our worries about our resident Hello Giger. For the first time I could actually watch plants responding to Cherry Berry’s presence. The potato plants didn’t do much, but their leaves looked a little larger after she checked them over. The alfalfa responded even more, with the sick plants perking up as I watched and the cuttings actually growing an inch or so as I watched.
The cherry saplings, though, were the most dramatic. I swear I saw one of them actually bend its limbs towards her.
Cherry keeps insisting that she’s not really a farmer, that it’s not her “special talent”. After what I saw today, I really want to meet a pony who does have a talent for farming. Starlight tells me she knows a pony who can make a flower go from seed to full bloom in a couple of seconds. After today, I believe her.
Think of the possibilities we’re talking about here. Earth is approaching a population of nine billion humans. Half the world is in a state of what politicians call “food insecurity” and everyone else calls “famine”. Countries are fighting wars to defend or exploit depleted fishing grounds, while refugees flee countries that are turning to desert for places where food is more plentiful. In the last decade botanical science has kicked into high gear looking for sustainable ways to feed a population which will probably top 11 billion by the time I die- assuming the zombie apocalypse doesn’t strike before then.
Think about all that, and then think what ponies could teach us. Ponies like Cherry Berry turning poor, exhausted soils back into breadbaskets. Pegasi like Spitfire, who can control weather- imagine the Sahara turned back into lakes and jungle, as it was ten thousand years ago. And unicorn magic and magical technology, with the ability to tap into unlimited free energy produced by life itself, taking the place of fossil fuels.
We humans have done our planet no favors. When Dragonfly says Mars hates us, it might not be because we’re invaders. Mars might hate us the same way we hate an embarrassing skin rash. We’re Mother Earth’s cooties, and Mars doesn’t want any of that icky girl stuff on him.
But the ponies and their friends could help us fix all that. I’m not talking about hippie-woo stuff like “returning to nature” or “going back to the land.” Nature is a sadistic, malevolent bitch with a million ways to kill you. (Though right now I’d send Nature a bag of all-natural fertilizer and a Mother’s Day card, and Mars wouldn’t even get a shitty necktie.) Ponies have something better- a managed equilibrium, that satisfies the needs of people while preserving all the environmental systems that make people possible.
And we could pay them back by… video games? Bad ancient television shows? Childrens’ books? Training in how to not run suicidally dangerous space programs?
Obviously Earth needs better negotiators than me.
Starlight is reading over my shoulder, and she points out that they’re not perfect. They have barren badlands and deserts too. (She’s also appalled at the idea of nine billion people on one planet.) Also, we don’t know at all if the magic generated by all of Earth’s life is sufficient to create an Equestrian-style economy there. More work will be needed.
But in the meantime, I can dream.
And I can also have nightmares, because one fact remains: none of all that will happen if we don’t get ourselves off this goddamn icy death rock.