My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 48

It's time to start giving them serious language lessons.

The same thing happened about twenty times every night while we watched TV. Sometimes a pony will suddenly appear and ask Starlight what the English word for such and such means. In the past, before Spitfire decided to undergo "forced withdrawal" from her "magic addiction", she would start to cast a translation spell and relay the content of the question to me; and I would repeat the specific answer five to six times. times until the translation results obtained by Starlight are stable enough. Sometimes if the corresponding concept is complex or abstract - such as when Danny Partridge talked about royalties - the spell will be stuck and unable to continue, and Starlight will have to choose to give up the treatment.

And now that Starlight is unfortunately under a magic ban, we can only communicate sentence by sentence with a few English words that everyone recognizes (sometimes I will try to guess a Pony language word - so Nothing good ever comes of it). But this approach seemed to work, at least most of the time we were able to communicate our ideas without using a whiteboard. I think they have amassed somewhere between a hundred and five hundred words this way, although individual interests may make the difference. For example, Starlight and Dragonfly are both top students, while Fireball is firmly at the bottom.

But even if they have accumulated a lot of vocabulary through this method, their grammar knowledge has not improved much. For example, every time I give my cherry pie to Berry Berry at lunch, she still says "stuffing". Words like "pie bang bang". (To me, this dessert looks terrible compared to my mom’s summer cooking. But apparently Berry is addicted to cherries and is suffering from severe cherry withdrawal syndrome. , you can tell by the way she devoured every bite of the pie. I’ll have to check online someday to see if there’s a listing for a Mars Abstinence Cheerilee Rehabilitation Center.)

After being immersed in the electronic companion for a few days, since Starlight has not been allowed to use magic, both Starlight and Dragonfly began to ask me some questions about grammar rules and writing. Starlight's behavior didn't surprise me much, but I didn't expect Dragonfly to be so interested in this knowledge. So after careful consideration, I decided to give them one hour of English class every day if the tasks were not heavy and time allowed. Basically every time I will select a certain episode of Electronic Companions for lesson preparation, so it should actually take about an hour and a half.

Speaking of writing, I'm very happy that NASA has prepared several boxes of markers for us (in case of extreme situations such as the loss of a supply aircraft or the loss of pressure in the residential area causing the unsealed markers to dry out, these markers have also been prepared. Dual redundancy processing). In fact, if I can get back in touch with NASA one day, I will ask them to send more. None have really been used up yet, but it will be a matter of time.

My right arm is still itchy. By "itchy," I mean "it feels like there are about a hundred thousand well-trained fire ants tap-dancing on a long public tour from my shoulders to my elbow sockets." But believe it or not, this is actually a good sign. Feeling itchy means that even though the outer layer of skin in the affected area has been peeling off layer by layer in recent days, the subcutaneous nerves have not been damaged. There are still patches of exposed scarlet skin on my arms, but the previous blisters have completely disappeared. In fact, I don't feel much pain there. As things stand, I should eventually make a full recovery.

Unfortunately I ran out of time to rest. We'll have to go see what's going on in the cave tomorrow. If the temperature in the farmland goes above freezing, we have to start moving in the soil that has been accumulated since the last soil doubling mission. But we don’t have time to wait for these nutrients to slowly react with the soil in the cave; once all the treated soil is transported in and mixed with the old soil, we will start sowing directly.

Berry and I checked the food package and counted the quantity. Assuming that the dragonflies can continue to live by eating air, the ponies' food packs will be exhausted by 90 solar days at the current consumption rate. Then my vegetarian food packs will keep them going until solar day 117. After that I had to split up the rest of my food packets to provide vegetables for the three eating ponies. This solution is not a good idea. The most important point is that it will eventually lead to food spoilage and cause serious waste. In this way, I lose the most scarce high-protein food, and the result is more than worth the gain.

Under ideal conditions, it takes at least sixty days for alfalfa to grow from sowing to the first harvest, and theoretically ninety days should be allowed to allow the crop's root system to fully develop. Our current situation is far from ideal, and is almost below the minimum survival standard.

To give you an idea of ​​how bad things are right now, I just did a quick inspection of our first batch of alfalfa seedlings, the ones I'll be harvesting from. Even if the soil depth is very shallow, the plant stems still grow surprisingly high. Under normal circumstances, you can start harvesting when it grows to this height. However, according to the plan, these plants will be left to produce seeds for future crops. To set seeds you have to let them bloom, and before they bloom, buds will appear.

So far I haven't seen any plants growing buds. Judging from the growth time of these alfalfa seedlings, there must be at least signs of flower buds forming.

But you must know that these alfalfa come from an alien world in a parallel universe. They may have some special habits and different growing conditions, and there may be some aspects that I have not considered. But they look like alfalfa, smell like alfalfa, and grow like alfalfa, so I just treat them like alfalfa. In alfalfa, these signs usually mean the plant is in a state of stress. The reason why alfalfa does not start to grow buds is because it has invested all its energy in the development of roots and stems, and there is no leftover for reproduction.

I took photos, took measurements, and dug up a few plants to record the exact state of their root systems. Although there is no control group and it is not a rigorous scientific experiment, any data I can collect may be helpful to the future development of Mars. (See attachment for data.) Long story short, the final measurements didn’t tally up with the missing buds. Even if they were exposed to environmental stress that prevented them from flowering, they shouldn't be as tall as they are. And after seeing their stunted root systems, I had no idea how they could grow so tall.

So, plans changed. I will leave the remainder of this alfalfa crop to grow freely. If by the time I harvest the seed potatoes there are no signs of budding, I will harvest the alfalfa at the same time. The yield should last the ponies less than a day. The alfalfa plants I dug up today will be chopped (especially the root part) and mixed into the farm soil in the cave to further ensure that there will be sufficient nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil when the alfalfa seeds germinate in the future.

The point is, in this bizarre situation, we can no longer rely on Earth or pony standards for plant growth. We must plant as quickly as possible to provide plants with as many opportunities to grow as they can. I will try my best to catch up with the pace of time by learning all my life. And our time is running out. Ten thousand years is too long, just seize the day; we must see changes now and hope that the situation will turn around. Every day we waste means constant consumption of food, and food consumption directly squeezes our living space.

Say no more. This kind of thing can only make people depressed. It's time to call the ponies over for some instructive television, followed by a "probably not very educational" language lesson from Mr. Watney. I hope these things can calm my mind and stop thinking about how to say "I'm hungry" in pony language. But if something goes wrong with the cave plan, this sentence will probably come in handy soon.