AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 12
ARES III SOL 16
“We’re supposed to be rationing, you know,” Starlight protested as Spitfire pushed the full, uncut meal (Horseton Special Blend Spicy Gumbo with Beans and Rice) in front of her.
“Patients get full nutrition,” Spitfire said coldly. “Now put your nose in that and eat. If I see that horn light up even for a second I’ll play with it like a foal with a doorstop.” A moment later one of Mark’s glasses, filled with a white liquid that was probably reconstituted milk, got set next to the plate.
Starlight set aside the whiteboard and began eating lunch. The food didn’t take her mind off the urgent problem she’d spent the past hour going round and round in circles over. In fact, she barely tasted the food at all. (Fortunately for her, her body had more sense than her mind, pausing every thirty seconds or so to grab the glass in her hooves and take deep swigs of the vile spice-quenching liquid that might have once been milk before it was captured by the princesses and sent to Tartarus for its crimes.)
She hadn’t spoken to Mark at breakfast; her horn was sore and she was tired, both signs of another bout of magical exhaustion. But she’d been curious when he took two shovels, the two largest plastic bins in the base, and Cherry, Dragonfly and Fireball out the airlock after breakfast. Obviously something had been planned while she was still asleep, and she didn’t know what it was.
She didn’t figure it out until the airlock reopened some time later to admit Mark and Fireball, each carrying one bin filled with Martian soil. Together they took the bins to the far corner of the base… well, not that far- Mark’s shelter was about the size of a modest one-story family cottage- and dumped them out into an area of the floor Mark had carefully cleared.
After seeing that she’d used her magic, you bet, sore horn or not, to ask very specific questions.
Q: Why are you bringing dirt in here?
A (allowing for the spell’s hit-or-miss translations): To grow food in.
Okay, that made sense in one way, but in another way not. Nothing could grow outside, true… but this was a small habitat with six beings living in it, and the box that nopony wanted to talk about, currently hidden behind a privacy curtain at the back of the bunks, made it smell more like sixty persons even with the lid closed. The available space wouldn’t even make a good hobby garden.
Q: Show me on the whiteboard how much alfalfa you think you can grow.
A (translation spell off, Mark used his typing screen thing for a moment, then wrote the answer on the whiteboard using the numbers Mark and Starlight had practiced during the Great Towing): 1.5 kg / m2 / 65 days. (Mark drew a sunrise to indicate “day”.)
Starlight recognized the “kg” as one of the symbols on a device Mark kept on one of the worktables. She’d dragged him to it and pointed, and Mark had put his coffee mug on it. (She assumed it was a coffee mug- it was almost the right shape, but the handle was far too small to slip a hoof inside.) A display on the side lit up with a number next to the “kg” symbol. Ah! So this was a scale, and kg was a unit of weight. She wondered what it stood for.
That left one part of the equation unexplained, so she’d lit up her horn again.
Q: Draw me how big one of these is (pointing at “m2” on the whiteboard).
A: (spell off, Mark draws a picture of the outside of his base, then an equals sign, and the symbols, “92 m2”)
Starlight had thanked him, taken the whiteboard in her forehooves, and staggered along on her hind legs back to her bunk, using one last bit of magic to bring the marker after her. Halfway back Spitfire had taken both whiteboard (in her wings) and marker (in her teeth) away from her, growling dire imprecations about ponies who didn’t know when to quit. Meanwhile Mark and Fireball, taking a couple of smaller bins with them, went back out for more digging.
Once back in her bunk Starlight had wheedled her grouchy nursemaid into taking three random food packs from their supply and putting them on the alien scale. The numbers were large enough to read from across the room, and when Spitfire dropped the third pack onto the scale they read 1.2. So, Starlight mused to herself, whatever kg stands for, it looks pretty close to a pony kilogram. It might even be a kilogram. I wonder if the old kingdom system of measurements line up as well? Do Mark’s people have pounds and quarts and hooves? We really need to work on the language barrier.
But that was idle thought. For simplicity’s sake she used Mark’s numbers, taking the marker in her teeth and sketching out the math on the whiteboard.
The astromare rations were high-energy meals that provided considerably more calories than your average pony required. An ordinary working pony needed about two pounds, or one kilogram, of food per day and could get by on slightly less if they didn’t do much. (Starlight still wondered how Pinkie Pie lived on a diet of almost all sugars and starches in quantities double what any other pony consumed without becoming a blimp. Somehow she stayed only slightly chubbier than her friends… and skinnier than certain other citizens of Ponyville like, for example, Spoiled Rich… or, she noted with chagrin, herself.)
So, call it a dead minimum diet. Eight-tenths of a kilogram per pony per day. Leave Fireball and Dragonfly out of the equation; Dragonfly didn’t need solid food, and Fireball claimed he could eat raw hay but couldn't digest it. Just keep it simple: three ponies equaled 2.4 kg of alfalfa every day, if they sat around doing nothing.
Mark specified 1.5 almost-kilograms per em-two, whatever m was, per sixty-five days. In sixty-five days the three ponies would eat a total, on rations, of 156 kilograms in that period of time.
One and a half kilograms multiplied by ninety-two em-twos equaled… 138 kilograms.
That left a shortfall of eighteen kilograms of food that would have to be made up from food packs. And the ponies wouldn’t have any left. At a rough estimate, Starlight thought they had just barely enough food left from ship’s stores to make it to the first hay harvest… if it was planted today. And from the pitifully small area of the floor the first load of dirt covered, that certainly wasn’t going to happen.
That meant dipping into Mark’s food again… and this plan left nothing whatever for Mark, even assuming he could eat alfalfa. Mark was larger than any of them except Fireball, and so presumably he’d need more, which meant a larger shortfall, which…
Oh, Fireball. Growing crops does nothing for Fireball at all.
This isn’t going to work.
And as Starlight automatically finished off her lunch, her mind kept coming back to that point, again and again.
This isn’t going to work. We need more land. And we need crops Fireball and Mark can eat. Mark might be a farmer, but is he a rock farmer? Can you even grow rocks in a low-magic environment?
Fireball had eaten a sapphire each night the previous two nights. He had eleven left. On the other hoof, he’d been rationing a bit before that, so he had twenty-one days of food packs at full rations, twenty-six at reduced rations, remaining. But once those ran out, he would be on the pony food packs or on Mark’s, and from that point on he’d begin to get sick from malnutrition. How sick and how fast, she didn’t know.
Just as she licked the last bit of uncomfortably spicy food off her muzzle, Starlight heard the sound of the airlock repressurizing. Another load of dirt was coming in, and given the time, the others were probably also coming in for their lunches.
Starlight really hoped that was the case. She wanted another crew meeting. She didn’t feel up for any more magical conversations with Mark, but this was a problem everypony needed to be working on.
If they didn’t find a solution fast, somepony would die- possibly everypony.
She stared at the planting box, where a small forest of tiny alfalfa shoots had begun to rise from the soil. A few flecks of green peeked out from a tiny forest of white.
It wasn’t even a start.
LOG ENTRY – SOL 16
Ugh! This is backbreaking work! But it’s better than towing a spaceship, and at least I had a lot of help.
We divided our labor once we figured out the right way to do things. Cherry Berry and Dragonfly can sort of handle a shovel, but Fireball and I can do it more effectively- yay thumbs- and we only have two sample shovels. So he and I did most of the digging while the other two scraped up surface material with their hooves, kind of like dogs in spacesuits. We filled up small sample containers, and then Dragonfly or Cherry would carry the full containers to the airlock and dumped them into the two largest bins I could find. When those got full Fireball and I would cycle the airlock (which takes about ten minutes to pump out or trickle in the air, depending), take the dirt into the Hab, and dump it.
We could have just dug a big hole right next to the airlock, but I don’t want to do that. For one thing, I don’t want to risk being half-awake one morning, going out to clean the solar panels, and falling into a big-ass hole and breaking my neck. I’d spend eternity in Heaven with every Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronaut laughing their asses off at me.
I can see it now. "How did you die, Bassett?" "I missed a runway and flew a jet straight into a factory I was supposed to be inspecting. They found my head in the parking lot." "That sucks. How did you die, White?" "I was martyred in the name of space flight by North American's shoddy construction of Apollo One." "Yeah, that really sucked. What about you, Watney?" "I fell in a hole on Mars." "Watney, you're a schmuck. Hey, go get Gene Cernan, he needs to meet this schmuck, like, yesterday."
But more to the point, once you get more than a few inches into the topsoil you hit the permafrost layer. The topsoil’s dry as hell, but get deep enough and you find more ice than you’d believe possible, and digging through it is a bitch. Our sample drills are built to do it for very short bursts, but shovels? Forget it.
Of course, getting more water with my soil might sound like it’s worth the backbreaking work to ship out the permafrost. Unfortunately along with the water ice you also find a lot of a certain nasty class of substances called perchlorate salts- mostly potassium perchlorate and magnesium perchlorate. I don’t know what they do to aliens, but they’re mildly toxic to humans, and magnesium perchlorate in particular is an oxidizer and color agent used in some fireworks.
Perchlorates are hydrophilic, which means they suck water out of their environment and act as a sort of antifreeze. That's why every now and again you see a new rivulet or some other sign of recent water flow. Ares I and Ares II found concentrations as high as 2% in their subsurface samples, so I’m sticking with the easy-to-dig stuff.
We got fifteen square meters of the Hab floor covered in dirt today. I’m going to try to fill the entire floor space of the Hab to a depth of ten centimeters. Anything more than that and I get too close to the access panels of all the machinery that keeps me alive.
I’m doing more physical labor than I did during the tow, but I’m happier. I’m doing what I was trained for on a scale NASA’s mission planners never imagined. By the time I’m done Mars will learn the true power of the botany side!
I’m happy, but my back isn’t. I just raided the medical supplies for pain killers, skipped right over the acetaminophen and ibuprofen and went straight for the Vicodin. It should kick in just in time for dinner. (Three-quarter ration, sigh; I’m regretting my celebration yesterday, because after today I really need a full meal. But I can’t splurge two days in a row.)
No time to eat yet, though. I have to wet down the soil we brought in. Remember those perchlorates? They’re all over the surface too, anywhere from 0.2% to 1.4% depending on what part of Mars you’re on. Acidalia’s topsoil has a lower than average concentration, but it’s still 0.3% by weight- way above what would be considered safe back home.
Fortunately the proper way to dispose of perchlorates is- da da daah!- just add water! Which I was going to do anyway for the plants!
Diluting the perchlorates reduces their risk and, coincidentally, makes it easier for Earth soil bacteria to eat them up. There are lots of perchlorate-eating bugs on Earth, and one of my scheduled experiments was to introduce them to Mars soil and see how they performed. It should add extra potassium to the soil- which is good, because alfalfa requires a lot of potassium for maximum yield.
I just realized: today is Thanksgiving. I wonder what my family is thinking. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I know what they’re thinking- they’re thinking I’m dead. Which means the annual feast at my parents’ house is going to be anything but jolly. I just hope NASA didn’t wait too long to declare me dead. I’d hate to think they’d hold my memorial service on Thanksgiving Day. God, that would totally suck.
I’d been looking forward to Thanksgiving. We were going to all cook a communal meal, my crewmates and me. NASA didn’t send us a full kitchen or a whole unboned turkey, but they developed this whole rigamarole to use the microwave, the chemistry lab, and even part of the oxygenator to either heat up or cook from scratch several traditional Thanksgiving dishes.
Sitting in food storage, right now, is a big boneless roll of reconstituted turkey meat with a layer of pre-made stuffing inside. We actually cooked one as part of the training for this mission. It’s not bad- nothing like grandma made, but not bad. But I don’t dare break it out now. I can’t exactly serve meat (okay, meat by-product) to a bunch of obligate herbivores and whatever Fireball is. (Or Dragonfly, for that matter. I keep forgetting she has fangs, but she must have teeth that sharp for a reason.)
But at least I’m not alone today. It’s not my family, and it’s not my crew, but me and the aliens, we’re together, and that counts for something.
I better get to adding that water. I’ve already rolled up a lot of the Ares crew’s abandoned uniforms to make a sort of garden box around my garden, so all I have to do is pour in… let’s see, twelve square meters X 0.1 meter deep = 1.2 cubic meters, which requires 48 liters of water, so…
… wait a minute…
… I need to check my math. I may have a problem.
I wonder, would it be possible to get the viewpoint of the CSP ground team's reaction to the shuttle disappearing, and recovery efforts?
You know what's REALLY explosive? Ammonium perchlorate, AKA solid rocket booster fuel. Google "perchlorate explosion", and one of the first results is the explosion at PEPCON. Scary stuff.
Did Starlight kinda assume that the entirety of the food Mark was growing would be set aside for her and the other two ponies? It was kind of 'this is the total area, and yeah, this still isn't enough for the three of us.'
So, the Hab-dinberg is still planned? Or will ponies help catch that out? 'Cause that's next chapter or the one after is my memory is accurate.
Shouldn't you complete this other story before you work on this "sequel"?
8659628 She started out there, but she quickly realized her math left Watney out completely... and of course alfalfa doesn't help Fireball that much at all, either.
8659663
I'm glad you brought up the salts in your notes; was going to mention that when the book was written they didn't know, but you're adding it in after the fact.
Hmm... I'd wonder if meat might serve as a nutritional substitute for gems, but even if it did, that's hardly a sustainable solution.
Suffice to say, there just isn't enough of anything for everyone given the time they have. And that's before taking into account Mark's alchemy lab. (The risk of explosions and poisoning let it qualify.) Flooding the Hab with hydrogen may prove even worse with a dragon in there.
8659646
I think in the other fic, they had a solution for water... don't know if they can get that working or not with the limited magic.
Permafrost layer goes a long way down, pretty much all alluvial deposits will have retained damp down to origional basement rock? If theres so much chlorine, wheres its origional binder, such as all the sodium got to, or are there complexes of high metals to small amounts of oxygen or even veins of alloys deposited somewhere on the planet?
Aluminium chloride boils before you can electrolyse it at atmospheric pressure, which is why you use cryolite because using pressure vessels is more expensive and complex?
Either they use the inside of the pony ship for room, or they position it to form the second wall of a triangle for low pressure fill greenhouse between?
What temperatures, pressures do the contaminants gas off relative to water, water vapour?
8659592
Maybe, IDK, but that would be a good idea
Use the giant aphid to nuture the crops!
8659770
Actually, there's one thing they have in plenty- carbon dioxide. Mars air is like 95% CO2, and if you take that and pressurize and then heat it, it becomes a very, VERY good way to break down everything else. It's the same process we use to decaffeinate coffee beans and such. As a tool here, it's tremendously useful one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide
8659869 They have the air, and they even have a way to compress it into tanks, possibly even at the pressures required.
But they'd have to cobble together the rest of the apparatus, which includes a second pressure vessel either with heating elements or inside an oven or kiln of some kind. At this point we're running up against the problem of whether the materials and tools at hand were sufficient for the task, assuming Watney can build the apparatus more or less from scratch.
And then, assuming it worked, Watney would have to know the proper procedure to operate the thing.
So, it's not impossible, but it's pretty improbable. At the very least Watney and the ponies would try every possible alternative before attempting a solution like that.
I am loving this story.
But...
aaagh!
Sorry, I always find that aggravating when I see it in a fic. Of course, Watney is probably ignorant, and thinks that Earth equines are obligate herbivores, and assumes that these equinoid aliens are too. Earth equines are actually perfectly capable of digesting meat, though their lack of a gall bladder limits them to lean meat. They're essentially omnivores, adapted to a mostly vegetarian diet.
It's perfectly reasonable to assume that MLP equines are similar, especially considering all the baked goods they eat. (If you can digest eggs, you can digest chicken, and many baked goods are made with eggs)
I know it's kind of become accepted fanon that they're strict herbivores but I think it's better to treat it as a "would rather not" than a "can't"
Especially in a survival situation....
don't worry Mark; the Crews of the Space Shuttle Columbia and Challenger had their $1.7 billion dollar spacecraft destroyed by a hunk of spray foam, and an o-ring that was too cold and could not withstand the pressure of both the exhaust gas, and NASA's Top Brass!
8659924 Yes, I know, and Watney should know a good bit of this because you can't do botany without a lot of general biology. But even scientists take shortcuts, and Watney knows earth horses are specifically built to be grazers.
Incidentally, interesting thing I hadn't known until just today: every part of the potato plant except the tuber- and ONLY if the tuber is fully developed- is toxic, not just to horses but pretty much all mammalian life. Potatoes are part of the nightshade family and carry a powerful neurotoxin. There's still a little neurotoxin even in the ripe gray-skinned spud, but it's destroyed by cooking. Green, immature spuds are still potentially deadly, though, and even if not deadly the toxin damage is permanent.
Fortunately, all signs are that Equestrian ponies are herbivores mostly by habit and preference, to the point that they routinely consume other things (chocolate for example) that would kill them pretty near instantly if they ran like earth equines. So ripe spuds should pose no problem if the alfalfa plays out. And earth horses hate the taste of potato plants and will only eat them if absolutely starving, so I'm guessing nobody else would like them either.
(My main evidence for my personal theory that we humans evolved as scavengers is that we can eat damn near anything on this planet. In fact, we actively seek out poisonous things like the coffee and cacao bean and the hot pepper because we either like the taste of the poison or enjoy its effect. Our stomach was just as important for conquering our homeworld as our brain.)
Any reason for misspelling the "kg" as the "Kg"?
8659770
They did say the life support crystals on their suits were still providing air and water, so I imagine that problem will be solvable.
Nitpicks: "kg" (not "Kg") is a unit of mass, not weight. Otherwise Mark's scale should be showing "N" (and wouldn't need to be calibrated for Mars' gravity.)
8660026 Yes, I know. Quoting the pulp author H. Beam Piper: "Weight is what pulls you down; mass is what hurts when it hits you. Weight depends on location; mass is a constant." But the first thing anybody except the most irrepressibly pedantic scientist is going to think when they see a scale is "weight."
And of course it's either calibrated for Mars or built to produce proper mass readings in any gravity well. The Ares III crew would need to know, down to the last gram, how much weight in soil and rock samples they were packing on the MAV. They were budgeted for five hundred kilograms, and anything above that would jeopardize their ride home. The book never mentions a scale at all (there is one in the movie, though), but if they were doing any on-site geology they absolutely had to have one... and the book DOES say that the mission plan was to collect lots of samples and only bring back the most notable or scientifically interesting.
8659654
Hmm as I got to both of them [and onto the Patreon] through this I 'd say no ^^;;
It would be nice to have more of CSP but for that there must be more Patreon voting for it ^^;;;
As things go, if she only took into account the three ponies, they could survive for quite awhile even with 138 kg instead of 156 kg, similar to Mark going from maybe a preferred 3000 Cal baseline to 2100 Cal. So it's obviously a plan that needs improvement, but it's still a step in the right direction and cause for some optimism.
8660023
Not really viable. That magic is recycling water, not making more. And with how fast the magic is burning out, it’s not going to last long enough to accomplish whatever it is you’re hoping for.
8659764
Sapphires are crystallized aluminum rust. It's plausible that he might be able to eat the hull of the ships. It depends on what exactly it is that that he needs to be eating. "Meat" is mostly the "same stuff" regardless of whether it's meat of cow or meat of dog or meat of whatever. Proteins and oils and water, simply in different ratios. That's not true with gemstones, which chemically are an extremely varied mix of completely different things. Some gemstones are crystallized metals, some aren't. For example, while sapphires are aluminum oxide, diamonds are pure carbon.
That he can live on things that are chemically so completely different, sort of suggests to me that it's not necessarily the material that he needs. Remember, he commented at one point that he could go out and eat rocks, but it would make him sick. What makes a gemstone a gemstone isn't it's components, it's its structure.
If all he needs is crystals, then feeding him might be as easy as growing some salt and sugar crystals in a glass. if that's too easy to make the author happy, there are plenty of other crystals that can be grown easily enough from materials they might plausibly have on hand: alum, iodine, copper, copper-sulfate, borax, etc.
Alternately, he might be able to eat silicon computer chips, or semi-conductors, or computer LCDs AKA "Liquid Crystal Displays" etc. A lot of human technology incorporates crystalline materials.
He could've just shown one m2 on the ground, with a measuring tape or something
Don't go there - imperial measurements don't even line up internally
But I bet a "hoof" would be a tad shorter than a "foot".
It is theorized she has very high calorie usage due to a natural ability to bend space, and possibly even time
Ahh, Mark was talking about the actual available area for growing. Makes sense then to say that instead of just indicating how much a m2 is.
Yeeeah... can you like, plant potatoes between the alfalfa?
...crap.
Go find that fecking Rover, and tell Earth that We Require More Minerals!
Hah.
I was wondering if you'd mention that, heh. Is this actually accurate? Is it only in the ice? Because that's one of the things I heard people mention that would completely mess up the original story. Not nice if the soil you can get is all kind of poisoned.
Join the Botany side! We have cookies... eventually. If the wheat manages to grow.
Ahh. Very nice way of solving that
Well, whoops
That was a critique? Really? Weir said several times in interviews that that scenario was unrealistic, but he needed it to set up the story.
Not sure about the airlock, though it didn't seem that unrealistic given the hab is obviously pressurized compared to the thin Mars atmosphere.
Remarks and corrections:
> Fortunately the proper way to dispose of perchlorates is- da da daah!- just add water!
Inconsistency in spaces around your, um, ersatz-dashes. General rule is, if you use en-dashes (–), you put spaces around them at both sides. If you use the longer em-dashes (—), there are no spaces around it at all.
8660454
I wouldn't be surprised if it less about their composition and more about magic. Crystals and gemstones are often associated with magic; with innate magical properties or working as power sources, batteries, foci and amplifiers, etc.
If that is true, then it's possible that Earth-verse gems might not do much for Fireball even if he had any. Which sucks for the big guy.
8660390
I was under the impression those crystals were linked to Equestria through magic bullshit, with the same enchantment as the one used to provide unlimited air and water to the Amicitas, and they just weren't knocked offline during the crash. Am I mistaken? Assuming these are the same ones used in CSP.
Now, I would not be suprised if that enchantment wouldn't work quite right across dimensions and thats how they discover the full scale of their predicament next chapter, but that has yet to be explicitly stated that I've noticed.
Fighting the Maritian soil for crops: Round One.
8660544
Didn't they say the crystals were delinked during the crash
I am really wondering what is happening back in Equestria when contact with there ship was lost. The other story has them producing ships relatively quickly so I wonder if a followup mission is already on its way or in the later stages of planning.
8660890 A quick summary for now, since I'm still leaning against showing post-CSP Equestria for the time being: (1) They know the ship vanished at a point in space where all tracking spells, etc. just stop dead. (2) They know something went badly wrong, because the failsafes on the main life support kicked in. (3) They are pretty sure the crew is still alive and have found shelter, because the crew spacesuit life support keeps going on and off. There was a kerfluffle when they all went off more or less at once the first day, but after they came back on, and they began watching their behavior, they figured it out. (4) They've tried the conventional means of contacting them- no result. (5) Rescue plans are on hold until they can figure out (5a) what broke on the Sparkle Drive and (5b) exactly where the crew is.
(5b) is beyond all question the most difficult problem to solve.
8660834 Only the main ship system. The suit systems, demonstrably, work just fine... and today's chapter, once I get out of my sickbed, will show that crystal clear (cue CSI Miami open).
We really need to find a way to feed Fireball.
8661168 I'm about to go do my writing for the day, after which you'll get to see Mark facing magic full on.
As for holding his breath... dragons are extremely resistant to heat but sensitive to cold, from what I've seen. The book suggests that it's spring leaning to summertime in Acidalia Planitia during the early part of the book, but even so the warmest it'll ever get is still below zero. Furthermore, the pressure differential between Fireball's lungs and the outer atmosphere will make it very difficult for him to hold his breath. So, no, going out without a suit isn't an option for him.
Also, as he said in an earlier chapter, non-gem rocks tend to taste like the contents of the Box We Shall Not Speak Of.
8660307
My point exactly. In other episodes like Every Little Thing She Does, Starlight's reliance on magic for problem solving just made things worse. It was refreshing to see that apparent vice used in a constructive manner. Plus, anything that can fluster the Royal Sisters is always entertaining.
8661091 Aww, you not feeling so good?
8661468 Put it this way: I could contribute to Watney's soil problems and his water problems at the same time.
8661544 Ah, that doesn't sound fun. Tell me you didn't find out about all those parts of the potato being toxic the hard way?
Mark's obviously not as much of a zoologist...even Earth horses are not obligate hebivores, and ponies are certainly herbivore-leaning omnivores who are culturally vegetarian.
Once the crop is set up and it's timefor the waiting, they really need to hammer out that language barrier.
That's ok. Dragons can eat ponies. Unicorns are the tastiest.
8661576 Green potatoes are great if you have a colon infection! Clean ya right out!
But, as for the perchlorates, we discovered potatoes don't really absorb them, and what they do absorb is mostly broken down by their metabolism. Most plants even in contaminated soils don't have levels higher than a few tens of parts per billion.
The primary toxic effect in animals is iodine uptake inhibition, something plants aren't affected by since they don't have a thyroid gland and don't rely on iodine as an essential nutrient. Perchlorate is not metabolized by the body and has so little effect other than sodium-iodide symporter inhibition that it is the mainstay of treatment for hyperthyroidism in many countries even today in concentrations up to 300,000 ppb (about the concentration of sodium in Gatorade, for comparison).
Daily levels above ).007 mg/kg bodyweight (which amounts to 24.5 ppb drinking water equivalent) was enough to inhibit thyroid iodine uptake from the bloodstream. But, as a 2006 adjustment to the initial study found, this association may also be partly due to the effects of elevated creatinine levels in some people. The toxicity-relevant dose of perchlorate in those with normal creatinine levels may be an order of magnitude higher (0.07 mg/kg).
But, for the sake of argument, let's stick with the 0.007 since we can't measure the creatinine of the Martian castaways.
Boiling taters in pieces in distilled water will dissolve out a good amount of the perchlorate, and so taters grown in perchlorate rich soil and cooked properly shouldn't exceed dangerous perchlorate levels.
In actuality, the soil dust is far more dangerous, as inhaled perchlorate can damage lung tissue via inflammatory mechanisms AND it will also be absorbed via that route into the bloodstream, contributing significantly to the overall daily dose, perhaps even exceeding the dose from all other sources.
Fortunately, perchlorate is also excreted efficiently, so drink lots of distilled water to pee it out.
Basic minerals, yes. Gems? Not without highly specialized melting chambers with the correct ratios of elements. Gem growing requires the presence of either leylines or a general omnipresent thaumatic field, which acts as a catalyst for crystallization of gem minerals, while excluding minerals which do not naturally conduct thaumatic energy. Think of it as something akin to the way electrolysis can be used to purify precious metals with the principle of freezing sea ice pushing out salt added.
I know this because I have visited Equestria several times and conducted intensive research! ....
.....
I'M NOT CRAZY!! YOU'RE CRAZY!!!
Just noticed a small error:
> "One and a half kilograms multipled by ninety-two"
Should be "multiplied".
I mean, considering the fact that potatoes are a member of the nightshade family... if you're gonna eat perchlorate-laced potatoes, you might as well eat 'em green while you're at it. Neither experience would be particularly enjoyable...
They are rather springy.
Duh, she absolutely BURNS it off on nigh-constant pronking, beating physics up way beyond what most ponies consider sane, and planning parties.
Hmm. The Forest is strong with this one.
He'd make a great apprentice.
Darth Martney (Mark Watney): You don't know the TRUE power of the Botany side!
So THATS what rock farms do. But how does one even GROW a rock?
I have much to learn.
Hmm, maybe they could make explosives now! Sounds like the best idea!
8917663
Then I’ll be like