MISSION LOG – SOL 96
The ponies have taken excellent care of the cave farm. I went there yesterday. It’s almost warm in there now. I may suggest pulling one or two of the pony ship heaters so we can get some of the solar cells back to the Hab. Hot air rises, and I’m assuming the air seal on the cave depends on a viable permafrost layer on top of the cave, so having it get too warm inside isn’t a good idea. But since I’m in touch with NASA now, I’ll give all the botanists they say they’re recruiting something extra to worry about by throwing the problem at them.
Seriously, looking at the plants, I felt kind of superfluous. They’re growing at about the same rate, maybe slightly faster, that they would on Earth in proper sunlight. The alfalfa looks almost tall enough to harvest already. The potato plants are flourishing. I dug up two and found half-grown tubers aplenty on them already. Still green, so too soon to harvest, but I have a feeling it’ll be a good harvest when the time comes.
And there are eight other little sprouts, which I know I didn’t plant, running down the eastern side of the cave parallel to the planting area. When I asked about them, Cherry looked positively guilty. Apparently she planted some cherry pits, and they’ve sprouted. I’m not mad at her, but I am puzzled, because what she’s done is absolutely impossible. Cherries require winter cold- a whole winter cold spell- before their pits become viable. And then it takes a lot longer than just one month for the pits to germinate. Some cherry pits never germinate at all.
But there they are- eight little leafy twigs, pretty nondescript at the moment. In a garden I wouldn’t think twice about weeding ‘em out. But seventy-five sols ago those were still fresh fruit. Now, thanks to whatever mojo Cherry has going for her, they’re living, photosynthesizing plants. I’m definitely not weeding these out, and not just because it would break Cherry’s heart. This is magic and botany at work doing the impossible, and I want to document every step from here on out. This shit is what I got my degree for.
Anyway, not much conversation with Earth today. They’re still absorbing the bombshell about magic being a thing. All pony questions are on hold until we get photo transfer capacity running.
NASA wants today’s bandwidth for another update of Pathfinder’s software and to send a new app to the rover which will convert photos into a format the Pathfinder-Sojourner parser understands. If it works, I can start sending the photos I’ve got banked up. Video is still out, though. I’ll be limited in my upload time to the afternoons, after a daily check-in and Q&A with the eggheads back home. Even using Hermes as a relay to cut transmission distance and increase bandwidth, the data’s being pushed through a really thin straw. Maybe a coffee stirrer.
Venkat Kapoor’s flying back to Houston today, so I did what talking I did today with Bruce Ng at JPL. He’s got a breakthrough idea on the task of getting the Hab radio working at least long enough that I don’t have to spend all morning suited up in the rover. Instead of using Rover 1’s radio and a new cable through the wall of the Hab, we’re going to use one thing I actually have a surplus of… suit radios!
Each suit helmet has a little antenna on it. The suits can talk to the rovers over a distance of about two kilometers- a bit better than an Earth walkie-talkie. When the Hab had its full antenna farm, it could hear suit radios even farther than that, but two kilometers is plenty to talk to a radio that’s parked right outside. And since the antenna is already vacuum-safe, we don’t have to worry about sticking it in a pop-tent!
The one problem is this: the Hab radio system puts out a lot more power from its transmitter to the antennas than a suit radio sends to its antenna. The excess electricity could melt the itty bitty antenna. So they’re doing tests at Johnson with spare antennas. (They have plenty now: all of the suit helmets for Ares IV and V have been scrapped, and a new contractor is building replacements with visors that don’t shatter into a billion pieces when the Hab front door suddenly comes flying at your face.) If the output is too strong for the conditions, they want to know what the best way is to reduce or step down the power before I dick with it here.
But assuming they find the solution, in a sol or two I’m going to take the antenna off the helmet I left in Airlock 1 and use some comm system spare parts to hook it to the surviving end of the wire leading to the dish mast. Obviously it won’t talk to Earth, and probably won’t talk to any of the satellites, but it can talk to the rover just fine. And the rover can talk to Pathfinder, and Pathfinder can talk to Earth.
I wonder if this was what the first days of the Internet were like. Maybe I should set a camera on my coffee pot and ask NASA to register me for mars_coffee_pot.com.
Anyway, convo’s done for the day. In a bit I’m going to go help Starlight and Dragonfly work on converting their measurement units into ours so they can tell us how powerful their remaining rocket engines are. Also, I need to nail down for certain the pony radio’s power output and wavebands so we can try to use that as a backup or parallel comms system.
But for now I’m enjoying my email! I haven’t had an email dump since Sol 5!
They’re not sending all of it to me at once, of course. There’s too much. NASA wants to parcel out my bandwidth and my personal time, too. They definitely don’t want me to spend all day responding to thousands of emails. So they’re sending me the cream of the crop.
So far there’s two emails from the President (both boilerplate, ho hum), one email from the Pope, half a dozen rock stars, several from movie stars (the one I really love is the one from Chris Evans- Chris Frickin’ Evans!!), several scientists, and other notables.
But the most important to me was the one Mom sent me. It’s exactly what you’d expect, no surprises: thank God you’re alive, don’t die, your father says hello, we didn’t return your Christmas presents, etc.
I keep going back to read it. It reminds me just how important it is that I not die here.
Anyway, I need to get moving. Cherry is dancing on her hooves waiting for NASA to give her the good word on whether or not we can MacGyver our way off this rock.
Right after I read that letter again.
TRANSCRIPT – WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE, ESA BALTIMARE and ESA SHIP AMICITAS
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas via suit SG, over.
AMICITAS: DF - Amicitas calling Baltimare, over.
ESA: Prepare for long message to be relayed to Mark’s people. Over.
AMICITAS: Standing by, over.
ESA: People of the planet Earth! Greetings from the people of Equestria! I, Princess Twilight Sparkle, greet you in the name of friendship and harmony between our worlds and thank you for the generous hospitality you have sh
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltmare, over.
ESA: Why did you turn off suit SG’s life support, over?
AMICITAS: How long is that message, over?
ESA: Not that long. Only about twenty-five hooves or so. Over.
AMICITAS: You must be kidding, over.
ESA: Proper diplomatic relations are a vital part of Amicitas’s extended mission, over.
AMICITAS: Can I speak with Spike or Moondancer, please? Over.
ESA: QC – Cutting in here. I got curious and tripped on TS’s scroll. I’ll explain facts to Princess of Prolixity. What are the limits, over?
AMICITAS: DF- Hello my queen! None of us know half the words in English for TS’s speech. We can’t write down anything longer than a paragraph. And floor in Hab is getting very soggy, over.
ESA: QC – Understood. Stand by for much shorter message, a perfect princess speech. Over.
AMICITAS: Standing by, over.
The first item of business at the meeting in Teddy’s office consisted of a message coming from Mars just before the daily transmission window closed.
Annie spoke for almost everyone when she said, “What the fuck IS this?”
The message, printed out on single sheets of paper for all the attendees, read:
[16:11] WATNEY: This is Dragonfly again. Mark told us not to do this, but our bosses back home wanted to say hello to you. Their first message was too long and with too difficult words for us to translate, so my ruler sends this message instead on behalf of Princess Twilight Sparkle, the founder of the pony space program.
“I am Princess Twilight Sparkle. Hello to Earth. I declare this bridge / bank / library / store open.”
I don’t know what it means, but my ruler says it is the best speech for princessessessessess. Sorry, I’m not sure where you stop writing that word.
(P. S. I had to look up “declare.”)
Teddy Sanders, alone of the group, smiled at the message. “I know what it means,” he said. “Venkat, please send the reply: ‘Tell Dragonfly’s ruler some of us understand completely.’” He shook his head and added, "I only wish I could spike some Congressmen like that."
“Okay,” Venkat said drowsily, still recovering from the red-eye from LAX to HOU. “I’ll do that when we remind them about not using bandwidth during software updates.”
“No, don’t do that,” Teddy said. “Mark can handle that. Just send the diplomacy.”
“What kind of alien fucking idea is this,” Annie growled, “for the first step in interplanetary diplomacy?”
“The kind,” Teddy said, still smiling, “that every history book will print verbatim for the rest of time. I guarantee it.”
The meeting moved on to more important business.
CSP Chrysalis is fantastic.
“I am Princess Twilight Sparkle. Hello to Earth. I declare this bridge / bank / library / store open.”
A perfect supposedly-important-person speech. If only all speeches by supposedly important people could be so brief and content-heavy.
The complete list of things that can stand between Cherry and fresh cherries:
Princessessess, is that like ciminuminuminum?
I bet Twilight will be so happy to go down in Earth history with that speech attached to her name.
The way the story is going, the failure of the launch of the supply mission actually does not have to happen.
In the book, the reason it happens is because NASA skips some checkups because they are scared Mark will starve, with the cave farm that worry is nowhere near as pressing and they can do more check ups.
Maybe they should also change the cargo. Add more crops, some fertilizer and earth soil, some propper gems for Fireball to snack on, etc.
Chrysalis is best Bug Queen XD
I know this will probably not come up in the talks with NASA but it would be fun to blow there minds in a update of supplies to list; unlimited air, unlimited hot and cold water.
Twilight "dumpster fire" Sparkle strikes again I'd offer bets as to whether there will come a time she won't mess up something that she touches, but I imagine I'd have a hard time finding takers
Priority number one at ESA should be luring Twilight away during telegraph time (a fancy looking book on a string ought to work nicely, so long as you can pull it fast enough) so she doesn't waste all of their available talky time on just the opening sentence. And get Celestia to take over diplomacy ASAP once that becomes a real concern.
Hmmm, do you like banananananananananananananananananananana,s?
A neat trick. If you use standard LZH compression algorithm on the text sequence of escape codes forming a GIF resolution image in pure text terminal, the resulting file size it almost identical to that of the origional pixel graphics GIF, look ma, animation through sigma delta, because GIF uses LZH compression as well.
full image FFT can be done in script pretty easily on modern hardware and really cuts down on the required bandwidth. I mean, Takes 5 minutes to do an image? Doesnt matter how slow the algorithm is, if the conversion is shorter than the transmission time, then any extra speed is just having it sat there waiting. Slower running means you can underclock and use less resource power as well. Always puzzled me with deep space probes that they cant leave the CPU running at a few Hz on microwatts, doing basic update loop every second etc.
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Could any of you explain this statement to me, please? I think I'm missing something, probably because I'm not a native speaker :/
We all knew darn well that Cherry Berry was going to plant cherry trees.
8758777
One of the sort-of duties sort-of important people have is to ceremonially open things. They'll cut a ribbon, or turn over the first shovelful of dirt (starting a construction project), or hit a thing of champagne against a ship, or whatever, and declare the thing open/begun/named/what-have-you. It makes the person look important, and it makes the thing look important, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the success of the thing.
Chrysalis is implying that Twilight's initial, verbose speech was basically the same: it would make Twilight sound important, and it would make the first "official" (read: third) communication between the worlds sound important, but it wouldn't actually accomplish anything diplomatic. So why not send the short version?
8758804
Thank you!
8758728
The way the story's going, I'd be severely unimpressed if the train stops at that particular station of canon, for pretty much exactly the reason you spell out.
With the added bonus of the catalyst that is earth pony magic having the affect it does on plant growth, they really don't need to push nearly that hard.
Well, I'd watch it.
I really get the impression Kris doesn't like Twilight given how he treats her. She's really quite the competent researcher in canon, yet in CSP she's useless. She gives quite a number of speeches in canon, and they're all quite succinct, yet here she can't write a short speech even when she knows she is limited by the transmission medium?
8758777
I guess it can also means about many thing diplomacy is about.
Bridge = A bridge between two people
Bank = Financial thingy between nation
Library = An exchange of knowledge
Store = INTER
PLANETARYDIMENSIONAL TRADE!I'm wondering how difficult it would be to rig up an air telegraph instead. Maybe put some sort of semi-rigid sheet in front of the tube so that it buzzes when air is pushed through, or Spitfire might even be able to read the flow of air on her own.
I'm a bit surprised that he decided to use solar panels + electric heaters for heating at all: assuming 20% cells efficiency he needed Starlight to make only additional 2m2 of her solar flowers to replace 10m2 of panels (less if panels lying on the ground), and she already made like a few hundred m2 of them. Pros: additional lighting and additional electricity (or possibility to stash panels for emergencies/degradation instead).
I think using "important guys speak" is really unwise thing to do even barring bandwidth issues: one of it's points is exactly signal that speaker is important and educated by using constructions that are hard to figure out for "simpletons". Chances that very culturally different other side would misunderstand something or even be triggered are exceptionally high for lengthy text. I don't really know it Twilight could guess it, but at least she had experience with yacks.
8759029 I like Twilight quite a bit, but she's such easy comedy in so many ways, and one of those ways is her unrelenting earnestness. Like me, she's one of those people who finds things difficult to learn if she doesn't find them in a book.
8759097 Neither Mark nor Starlight knew how much heat the crystals would put out. (And I have never stated that the heat is coming from them. The lion's share of the heat is coming from the hot water being pumped in from the AMicitas life support.
As for the Important Speech: Twilight, bless her, wants to do things right. And we have seen her give the Huge Pile of Note Cards speech, or attempt to, anyway. She probably didn't deserve what Chryssy did to her here, though.
8759071
Stick a kazoo on it!
This is the first chapter of the story that I actively disliked, because it felt like something out of CSP.
If you were trying to make Twilight's particular brand of idiocy endearing here, you didn't quite pull it off. And by the same token Chrysalis's Chrysalisisms didn't hit the mark for me. I like this story a lot more than CSP, in part because you've mostly kept that stuff out of this story.
i can't help but see this while there talking on earth
also GO Chrysalis for insulting her behide her back!
8759035
ya that kinda some it up very well over the history
8759143
A party horn would work better... Kazoos don't buzz unless the user is making a sound
8759124
I'm a bit confused here: they obviously needed to calculate amount of sunlight that is necessary for their plants. And sunlight is exactly 6000 degrees heat delivered directly from the Sun at the rate of ~1kW/m2 (on Earth, perpendicularly). Mars has ~1/2 of Eath's sunlight density, so, for example, if they want at least ~1/10 of Earth's equator irradiation for their plants, they need at least ~100m2 (latitude and efficiency adjusted) of solar flowers for 500m2 farm and get ~(50kW - "what consumed in photosynthesis") of peak heat as a bonus.
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And also the fact that he still has crops. Still having useful crops is good, and results in not-dying so quickly.
Chrysalis is Best Speech-writer.
CSP Chrysalis tripping over a scroll. Probably hilarious to see!
Trollysalis strikes again!
8759029
She also has a habit of letting things get out of hoof / freaking the heck out / getting distracted / getting all Twilight about things when she gets excited. Which she probably would be, given that she wanted to send the first official diplomatic message to a truly new and alien civilization.
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She learned friendship well enough to go from being a social recluse to the princess of friendship, and that wasn't learned from a book at all.
She's written a set of cue cards before but those aren't the same as a scroll. Cue cards commonly don't have very many words on them. All the speeches she has given have been quite short.
Also I could go back and find the math again, but for the cave to actually be warming up much the lion's share of the heat pretty much has to be coming from the solar lighting. You might think "that's light not heat" but any light that isn't fixed into another form of energy by the plants is going to convert to heat. This is easily conceptualized if you imagine that if the light wasn't converted to another form the space would continuously get brighter as more and more light accumulated and bounced around. That never really happens though, what happens instead is the light gets converted to heat as it interacts with matter.
8759470
None of those cases result in her giving long speeches though. The Yak prince is a good example of a similar case and her speeches to him are still short.
8759499
... I think you're really oversimplifying your examples there, boyo. There's a world (hah, puns) of difference between "foreign, barely had any contact with but basically like us" and "alien, never met before and operates on different laws of nature". I think it's entirely in her character to inject as much gravity, ceremony and magnamity into her speech and forgetting that she's communicating through splashes of water a message that would need to be translated into a different language.
“The kind,” Teddy said, still smiling, “that every history book will print verbatim for the rest of time. I guarantee it.”
That is a bold statement sir, I expect some phenomenal speech writing from you then. like on par with the speech after pearl harbor, the one that brought us to war, the Infamy Speech, in case you don't understand what i'm saying i'll include your competition
and this
That is your competition now can you beat those???
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He meant "Twilight's" speech.
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oh, that makes more sense, also that first speech would be hard to beat.
Cherry sitting there guiltily with 8 cherry tree saplings is an adorable thought.
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You know, so would I.
Maybe Mark and Cherry could take selfies with their cherry saplings every day and upload them to Cherry's_Martian_Cherry_Farm.com. I'd be hooked.
The first forest on Mars will be cherry trees, descended from pits brought over from the next universe over. I wonder if it will occur to Mark that the alfalfa and cherries aren't even from this universe, or that there might be subtle differences between Equestrian and Earth plants worth studying?
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There's not a single example of her giving an extremely long speech though in any circumstances. The closest we get is when she's invited to give a guest lecture at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, but lectures are supposed to take up a full class period. The guest lectures that speak for 5 minutes and then awkwardly try to fill the rest of the time with questions are the ones that failed to grasp the circumstances.
On the other hand there are tons of examples of her giving short speeches for various political events. The Yak prince is the most serious political event she's really had and it didn't move her speech one iota longer than usual.
There's no trend that indicates she'd give a longer speech to an alien race. If she was more inclined to add length to a speech the more alien the target, then we would have seen lengthened speech in the intermediate case of the Yaks. We didn't see that. And that's sensible because the more alien the culture the simpler you want your message to be because you can't be sure what translates across cultural boundaries. Ponies also have a lot more experience with this sort of thing than humans because there are actually different sapient species on their homeworld which think differently to have contact with with.
This is just making Twilight look stupid for the sake of a bad joke. And it seems to be a consistent theme.
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Was there ever any doubt?
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*Eyes widen* I am glad I saw this post, as I thought this was just popping Twilight's bubble. But you are right, our lovely Changeling Queen actually put more thought into this then I suspected.
Cause if it had just been trolling, she would have included ship and statue. She definitely picked each building for a reason.
Given Twilight and QC are immortal, this is also something QC is going to hold above Twilight FOREVER. It maybe Twilight's name beside that speech, but they will both know that the first diplomatic message was sent between Man and Pony was written by the Changling Queen.
Yeah, i undererestand the comedy here, but this is very defining moment of human history and it was just reduced to a joke by QC. I mean imagine what the optics of this are? It is something which humanity has dreamed for a long long while full of hope and dreams of finding people who might be new friends hoping against hope that they are not new enemies.
And then at that moment it is reduced to a practical joke, it cheapens it all by quite a bit. Long speeches, and words with gravity has their places, it assures both sides and all who listens that matters are taken seriously.
Hey, ya just passed the 5k view mark. Grats!
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Eh, I wish more jokes like this were made. I know Neil's words are wonderful and will always be remembered. But part of me thinks it would be kind of awesome if mankind's first words on the moon had been. "Holy shit I'm on the fucking moon guys!" Or "Oh God, what's that scaly green thing?!" Or something like that.
Ted wasn't exaggerating. If this were truly the first exchange of diplomacy from an alien race, our historians and political scientists would marvel at it for centuries to come. In the first sentence, the speaker wastes no time declaring her people or, indeed, herself as ruler or representative of said people. She leaves this implicit in her title of 'Princess'. That she wastes no more time explaining who 'Twilight Sparkle' is makes it clear that on her own world her name and identity carries the weight of universal knowledge. The second is her greeting, short, clear and simple with minimal room for intercultural misinterpretation. Some might think this was shrewdly calculated to minimize any possibility of early misunderstandings. The final sentence is a unilateral declaration - The Princess of Equestria declares the beginning to open diplomatic relations and the founding of her embassy. The statement promises the possibility of open borders and an exchange of wealth and knowledge, but on terms offered by Equestria to Earth and not the other way around. In three sentences, the Princess of Equestria (or Chrysalis as the case may be) has communicated the weight of her identity, her shrewdness and her iron grip of diplomacy.
....on second thought, that was all probably unintended, considering we're talking about CSP!Chrysalis.
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Wow.
I also realized that Chrysalis didn't pick any aggressive building like fort and barrack. I was confounded initially. A military nevertheless is one side of a nation sovereignty. So why Chrysalis doesn't include it?
But then it's clear to me that this speech by Chrysalis really capture the intention for diplomacy, friendship, and harmony of the Equestrian government. It is really the best speech for princessessessessess in Equestrian definition.
Imho, it also hinted that CSP will end with Happy Ending. Chrysalis understanding the Equestrian value of friendship and harmony. One can hope.
Or I think too much and Chrysalis is just doing it unintentionally.
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or this
or this