My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 43

My arm still hurts, and the damaged skin under the gauze wrap is really itchy and I can't touch it. I have stopped taking the magic pills given by the ponies and have not experienced any withdrawal reactions. However, this period of torture has made me more deeply aware of the fact that aspirin is useless.

But the desperate thought of struggling to survive drove me to cheer up, so I devoted myself to various tasks all day today. The same is true for Starlight. Her condition is obviously still not good, but she refuses to stop working on her hands and feet. Spitfire was very annoyed by both of our actions - especially Starlight, because she had recently made me a magical suit communicator without Spitfire's knowledge that would allow me to talk to their suit's communication system. Inside the device is a brick-sized magic battery that was removed from the spaceship before; a gem found from the fireball snack pile and enchanted; and a bunch of other improvised parts; when you need to use these It all has to fit inside my spacesuit, but luckily it works.

When Spitfire realized we were trying to get to work, she flapped her wings like crazy and almost hit the ceiling. She wanted to restrain us, but we insisted: if we don't work, everyone will collectively GG. The ponies' food packs wouldn't last long before they ran out; and once their reserves were depleted, mine would only last a few days at most before we starved. Only planting crops now will allow us to harvest the first crops in time before the weather cools down.

The explosion on Sol 40 may have alarmed NASA, so yesterday I added a few words to the "doctoral thesis" written in Morse code on the north side of the solar array. Indeed, if NASA saw "burns, healing", it would be enough to worry them for a while; but if they could read the message I wrote before they saw the smoke coming from the cave, I would have nothing to say. It will drive them crazy.

Of course, it's more likely that they didn't see both sides. Even if this perchlorate explosion looks thrilling at close range, considering that the satellite image is based on the entire Martian surface as a background, the actual effect is estimated to be inferior to that of a fly's fart. They had to be staring at Area E at that time to barely detect any movement. The hour before and after the explosion was completely calm, quiet and peaceful, with no traces visible. But since this possibility exists, I still made a note in the Stone Blog.

Today was another busy day of soil doubling - probably the last, but certainly the largest ever. All the soil in the living area and the inflatable tent is now fertile, but assuming the plan is still feasible, we still have to leave some soil for the cave farm so that we can start planting in the future. So today Fireball started carrying buckets of soil to the alien spacecraft for temporary storage. Thanks to the spacecraft's own life support system and an electric heater powered by the habitation module that is always on inside, the cabin currently has a suitable air pressure and comfortable heat, which is enough to support the survival of soil bacteria. At the same time, Berry, Dragonfly, and Spitfire dug up more Martian soil and moved it into the cabin to fill the gaps left by the soil that would be used for caves.

Originally I should have helped with this matter, but I had other work to do at the time. And I found a good excuse: as long as I remind Spitfire that there are countless various human bacteria, pony bacteria, dragon bacteria, and... forget it, I don't know what the hell dragonflies are in the air in residential areas, But the bacteria that I should be carrying on my body are flying freely, so she will happily let me go out to work. In this case, it made sense for her to let me out. After all, burn wounds are particularly susceptible to infection. I might get tetanus, E. coli, or something like flesh-eating bacteria. Or maybe it was some kind of magical pony superbug that restored me to full health, except my hair turned green and my arms mysteriously fell off.

In this case, the problem is very serious. If I broke my arm, NASA would have to kick me out of the space program; not only would I be stranded on Mars, but I would also be unemployed. I just hope that the unemployment insurance department can send me benefits directly. After all, the bank where my account is located probably hasn’t opened a Mars branch yet.

Okay, let's not talk about it. This joke is too awkward. I did spend a few days thinking about a lot of weird things about cross-species cross-infection, space wars, etc., but I don’t plan to mention the content here again, because I finally convinced myself to overcome this worry: we Now that we all live in habitable pods, we are inevitably exposed to the germs we each carry. There's nothing we can do about it, even if we no longer have to pour manure on the soil every week to grow crops. We can either work hard at the risk of contracting the disease and die; or we can go our own way and work hard to protect ourselves, which is not the same as seeking death.

And judging from the current situation, no major problems have occurred yet. Starlight still worked herself to death every day, Tingting seemed a little listless, and I burned myself like an action movie hero, but other than that, no one had any serious illness. In order to prevent the carrying of contagious pathogens from affecting the mission, the Ares 3 team members deliberately began strict isolation two weeks before launch. Maybe Pony and the others had done something similar, or maybe it was just that Pony's "magic-stealing arm" bacteria hated the smell of poor lowlife Mark.

In the face of inevitable risks, you can only admit that you are unlucky, but it does not mean that you can start giving up on yourself. Even if all the bacteria we have here are healthy and harmless, we need to know that good bacteria can be just as dangerous as harmful bacteria when they appear in places they shouldn't be. Since they are all out in the residential area today, I'd better choose to go out to work. I put a new piece of sterile gauze on the burned arm, and headed toward the cave with Starlight.

Not surprisingly, the flight suit was a total wreck. The right arm completely disappeared, leaving only a pile of burned-out electronic components. The same is true for much of the torso. The helmet may still be in good condition, and the glove on the left arm may be salvageable, but without the right glove, it probably won't be of much use. The life-support system was burned to coke and was most likely damaged, but in an emergency some parts could be removed and spared. My extravehicular spacesuit was of course unscathed, and compared to work clothes, it was designed to be stronger and more reliable considering the spacecraft cabin environment, and was more suitable for use on planetary surfaces. If something unexpected happens, I have several other extravehicular spacesuits as backup.

There are still a lot of perchlorate residues scattered around the cave. Fortunately, the previous explosion dispersed the pile of things, causing the temperature to quickly drop below the decomposition temperature after the combustion support was exhausted, so the remaining ones should be easy to clean up. About a quarter of the perchlorate we originally dumped at the foot of the mountain has been blown away by the wind or mixed into the soil and disappeared. Thank God for being able to send away these ancestors! If in the future I come up with some crazy suicidal plan that requires making solid rocket booster fuel in order to survive, I'll have Starlight repeat her last spell; otherwise I don't want to see any more perchlorate .

But these are not the main purposes of our trip to the cave today. We have long known about the situation in the cave from the reports of Berry and Fireball. Today's task is to airtightly seal the cave.

We entered the cave with a magic battery and two ten-liter tanks filled with liquid compressed carbon dioxide produced by the stage fuel generator on the ascent vehicle. Of course, it is impossible to pressurize the entire cave with these gases, and the effect would be worse than farting. The entire open space volume in the cave may vary from cubic meters to cubic meters, and twenty liters of liquid carbon dioxide can only fill forty cubic meters of space based on one atmospheric pressure. If they were released into the cave all at once, the internal air pressure would only increase by about one-tenth of the original basis - 0.09 pounds per square inch. If you round up, just think of it as 0.1 pounds per square inch. (The air pressure in a residential area is a standard atmospheric pressure equivalent to the earth's sea level, which is 14 pounds per square inch.)

But it was enough for Starlight to say this, and in fact she was right. She used magic batteries to create two sealed protective fields, isolating a small section of the cave at a distance just wide enough for me and Starlight to stand. I adjusted the valve on the carbon dioxide tank and watched the pressure indicator on my spacesuit to make sure that the air pressure in the section of the cave we had separated was always one-tenth of an atmosphere (1.4 pounds per square inch, equivalent to (about fourteen times the natural atmospheric pressure of Mars).

We just kept moving in and inspected the entire cave. Starlight was a little wobbly and unsteady at the beginning; by the time we reached the end of the cave, she almost fainted from exhaustion again. However, she still chose to bite the bullet and used the last remaining magic power to use up all the remaining carbon dioxide in the tank to ensure that the far end of the cave was accurately measured. In the end, I carried the starlight and the battery back to the rover; the two empty storage tanks had to wait until tomorrow to pick them up.

The end result is actually quite good, even surprisingly good. The entrance to the cave was leaking like a sieve, but according to Starlight, she could fix the problem once the ponies had installed the airlock, which should ideally be done by tomorrow. A little further back, almost to the middle of the mountain, there was another serious leak; but most of the cave was actually well sealed. I don’t know whether it’s the permafrost or the compacted soil at the top of the cave that forms a sealing structure, or whether the leakage is actually so low that starlight and my spacesuit can’t detect it, or there are some other reasons; but the current situation means With just a few magic welds, the cave is ready to begin filling with pressurized air.

After doing some calculations, I began to realize just how vast the amount of air used in this project was. NASA provided us with 350 liters of compressed oxygen and nitrogen. These gases are enough to pressurize the rover, all space suits, and the approximately 240 cubic meters of space inside the living area to a standard atmospheric pressure, and there is still a lot of margin left; however, for this cave, it is just a drop in the bucket.

Assuming that the space from the entrance to the end of the cave is about cubic meters, it would take a full liter of liquid compressed air to pressurize it to a standard atmospheric pressure. The maximum amount of oxygen I can safely transport per trip is fifty liters, and to make up for the gas gap, I have to spend seventy-five hours waiting for the upgraded vehicle fuel generator to slowly run, and in addition to that The time required for the oxygen synthesizer in the residential area to convert the incoming carbon dioxide into oxygen. If I had to fill it manually, the food reserves would be exhausted long before the ambient air pressure allowed us to grow food.

Luckily I don't have to actually do that. The pony spaceship's life support system has been repaired and can operate normally, and it is directly connected to the atmosphere of their main world's home planet. Their equipment can do a job that would take me years to do in just a few hours. Better things are yet to come. The CO0.028 concentration in their system's air supply is comparable to Earth's (well, at least close - the measured value is 0.045%, while Earth's global average is %, but that's more than enough for plants) . This also reduces the amount of Martian air we would expect to introduce to farms in order to adjust the right composition of the atmosphere to help crops grow.

(An interesting science fact: The mass of carbon dioxide released by plants at night is almost the same as that absorbed during the day! Photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugars, but at night the metabolism of plants begins to undergo a reverse reaction, using the produced sugars Continue to grow. This is why the carbon dioxide concentration in the earth's atmosphere does not need to be high enough to kill most animals to support such a huge amount of green life. But once we really start growing crops in large quantities, we enter a period of rapid growth. , the small concentration difference will gradually be magnified. The little carbon dioxide contributed by my lungs and that of the aliens is just a drop in the bucket in comparison, so it is still necessary to replace it with some "fresh" air from Mars from time to time. , to ensure good growth and maturity of crops.)

Anyway, we are now back in the residential area and the soil doubling has been called to a close - probably for the last time we will do it here. Praise the dragonfly! The eloquent Dragonfly had just used her superb language skills to persuade Feihuo away, who was about to circle like a vulture (meaning preaching and scolding) beside Starlight's bed. I'll have to find a way to return that favor to that bug someday. But first I have a three-quarter dinner in front of me, and then it’s time for high-quality film reviews of tonight’s new batch of dramas.

First we'll take a look at e-Partners. Of course, the thought of Morgan Freeman actually ever being young makes me tingle. And obviously, he's a hippie. Or a member of the "crossover generation". Or you could say he was an anti-traditional hippie. Or some other weird person. I wonder if that bug will write a sequel in his fanfic, about the story of the group of boys from the Justice Forward rescuing Easy Reader from Hogg's machinations. I'm pretty sure there's never anything wrong with this kind of plot.

By the way, I would like to remind you that what I just said is ironic.