AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 92
ARES III SOL 94
[11:18] JPL: Mark, this is Venkat Kapoor. We’ve been watching you and your alien friends since Sol 8. The whole world’s been rooting for you. Congratulations on reviving Pathfinder and surviving that Hab breach. We’re working on rescue plans now. Hermes will receive a crash refit and mission-specific redesign and launch back out to you in the next Hohmann window with a minimum crew to pick up all six of you using Ares IV’s MAV. We’re working on supply missions to feed you in the meantime.
[11:29] WATNEY: Glad to hear it. Really looking forward to not dying. I want to make it clear that none of this was my crew’s fault. It was a string of freak accidents. What did they say when they found out I was alive? Also, “Hi, Mom!”
[11:41] JPL: We’ll want to know everything about your guests. You’re official first contact with alien life of any kind, you know. But right now we want to get a baseline for survival. Tell us about your crops. We estimated your food packs would sustain you alone until Sol 300 at ¾ ration per meal. Given your activity we don’t recommend you go any lower. We understand you gave your vegetarian meals to your guests. How are your remaining food stocks? How will your crops affect them? As to the crew, they were the ones who spotted you first. We kept them in orbit of Mars for over a week watching you. But when we couldn’t contact you via radio, we had to get them on their way back home. They didn’t want to leave you, but they had to.
[11:54] WATNEY: The aliens come from a sort of parallel Earth, or close enough. Three of them are equines of some kind. They had large stocks of viable alfalfa seed they were eating for breakfast cereal. We’ve converted a cave into an airtight, heated, illuminated greenhouse with 400 sq m of cultivated soil growing alfalfa and 200 sq m set aside for potatoes. First harvest will be around Sol 110, but most of the potatoes will have to be used for re-seeding and to replant the 110 sq m of farm I had in the Hab and pop-tents. The first hay harvest will be more than double what we need to get to the next one, but after the Hab blowout I’m hesitant to make predictions. What the fuck was with that, anyway? BTW, if crops fail, veggie meals for aliens run out on Sol 120. I run out on Sol 308.
[12:08] JPL: We’ll get botanists in to ask detailed questions and double-check your work. With all your lives at stake, we don’t want to take any chances. We understand that you don’t want to make predictions, but we’d like some numbers anyway. Are your guests true obligate herbivores? Also, please watch your language. Everything you type is being broadcast live all over the world.
[12:21] WATNEY: Look! Boobies! (.Y.)
[12:28] HERMES: I see you haven’t changed, Mark. This is Lewis.
[12:35] WATNEY: Hey! It is so good to hear from you! How is everyone?
[12:43] HERMES: We’re all fine. We just wish we could have come back for you. It hurt a lot to be so close and yet unable to do anything.
[12:51] WATNEY: There was nothing you could have done. When my biomonitor went dead, it was your duty to get everyone else off this rock. You did the right thing. Now get your asses home safe and I’ll be happy.
[12:59] HERMES: Mark, this is Chris Beck. How are you holding up?
[13:05] JPL: Please, Mark, the language. Also, Hermes, remember this is not a private line.
[13:08] WATNEY: I’m feeling good, but about ten pounds lighter. I’m taking daily vitamin supplements along with my rations. The redundant supplies NASA sent give me enough for five years by myself. I’ve been thinking about giving some to the aliens, though, especially once they go on an all-alfalfa diet.
[13:16] HERMES: Try to reduce your physical activity a bit. We were accustomed to a 3000-calorie diet and an intense activity schedule that burned all those calories. On rations you’ll risk burning too much of your energy reserves, leaving you vulnerable to injury and illness. Also, I understand one of your friends is injured?
[13:24] WATNEY: Yeah. One of the ponies. Her name is Starlight Something-or-Other; we’ve never got a good translation of her last name. She has a broken right foreleg- what would be the humerus on a human. It’s currently splinted, and she’s on permanent bed rest until Sol 110 at least.
[13:25] JPL: Yes, by the way, Mark, we’ll want details on alien anatomy when you can get them to us.
[13:32] HERMES: Oh, that’s not good, Mark. There are tons of complications with a fracture of the humerus. Also, she needs to move and get exercise or else she’s at risk for bed sores, assuming she’s anything close to human. Do you know if it’s a simple or compound fracture? Did the bone break the skin? Have you applied the inflatable cast in the medical kit? It would immobilize it much better than a splint.
[13:38] WATNEY: I have tons of photos, plus my logs. (Warning: I have a potty mouth. Also I got a bit silly sometimes.) You’ll have to figure out a way for me to transmit them, though.
[13:40] WATNEY: Damn. I completely forgot we had that cast. I’ll talk with Spitfire- she’s their medic- and see if it’ll work. The fracture seems to be simple but very painful. She can’t use that limb at all, but she has feeling all the way down, so we’re hoping no nerve damage.
[13:42] WATNEY: Okay, guys, I’m almost two hours past lunchtime, and I’ve been in this rover all day. I’m so glad to be able to talk to you, but I have to call it here. Try to figure out some way for me to slap together a new antenna for the Hab so the Rover can relay this chat to the indoor comps. Also figure out how I can send you attachments (photos, video, etc.).
[13:50] HERMES: This is Lewis again. Stay safe. I’ll buy you a beer when we’re all back on Earth. Hermes out.
[13:51] JPL: I’m putting our best programmers on that right now. I warn you that our bandwidth is very bad and will get worse as Hermes gets closer to Earth. Video is out, and you’ll probably have to resize your image files to under 500K each. Correction- under 200K each. Smaller if possible.
[13:54] JPL: Oops. Understood, Mark. Go eat something. Tomorrow we’ll ask what you have left of the Hab’s comms system so we can work out a procedure for a relay antenna. Also, we have questions about the alien ship’s communications systems. Please be ready for that tomorrow. Kapoor out.
[14:07] WATNEY: Your order for din-dins received and acknowledged with pleasure. Watney out.
They will probably figure out a way to at least send stuff to the Amicitas antena. It's just a matter of pointing a dish and sending a really strong signal in the correct frequency. The problem is using the Amicitas to transmit anything; they don't have the power and NASA can't orther the entirety of the planet to shut the fuck up with an entire commercialy used EM band so the radio telescopes can pick it up.
Somebody just needs to beam him an iPhone.
You can do this by mixing science and magic! Like this! *Alondro takes a beaker full of stuff labelled 'science' and begins to pour it into another beaker labelled 'magic!'... a small pony rushes in shouting "NO!! YOU MAD FOOL!! You'll destroy us a-!!" KA-BOOM! And everyone got Cronenberged.*
nerdist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Rick-and-Morty-6.jpg
YAAYAYAY the talkies and the befuddlement of the ignorant humans!
I can't believe it took me this long to consider this, but does Maretian!Earth have MLP:FiM? If so, I'm interested in seeing
8755223
As long as the radio telescopes are pointing at Mars, the noise from other broadcasts shouldn't be an issue: They probably aren't quite unidirectional, but they certainly aren't omnidirectional. The original issue with the competing noise was getting anyone to notice a signal, but if they know they need to look for one and where to find it, it ought to be a fairly small matter.
And now NASA has confirmation that there are ponies on Mars.
now we need to see the news media!
also so a basic jpeg pic then
8755268
I'm just waiting for the woman in charge of media to see pictures of the ponies and have a screaming fit about them. If they look remotely like the show, then they're going to be too adorable to be real and immediate cries of faking them will arise world wide.
I feel like half the questions both sides asked didn't get answered.
No one answers Mark about why the Hab blew out, and Nasa does at least have some ideas about that, and could probably get a lot closer with a few questions.
Watney doesn't answer them about the ponies being obligate herbivores either.
I really hope you don't skip over his explanations about the cave greenhouse or their biology. I'm really looking forward to how he describes it.
I'm curious about getting the photos under 200kb. I mean with 11 kilobits per second that would only take 2.5 minutes, but a 500kb image would still only take 6 minutes. Considering the rover could queue things up to do while he's not there that's not really a big deal. It could just have a long image queue that would gradually upload.
8755268
Well then... time to start the betting pool. I'm gonna put my money on "some form of the brony fandom manifests - rapidly"
but anyway he could make a disc from this!!!
https://youtu.be/3XfCvur7NLo?t=7m43s
I had a thought on getting a good translation of Starlight's last name. (Barring a convenient materialization of the book I mentioned before.) It was mentioned a while back that Equestrian (if that's what you are calling their language, I don't remember if it was stated) and English seem to have the same syntax but with different words, so it would make sense if they also have a lot of the same expressions. While it might be impossible to determine if the most accurate translation is glimmer, sparkle, flash, etc. using the definitions alone, they could use the expression "a glimmer of hope" to make the connection.
Magic unicorn, pegasus, love eating xenomorph horse, fire breathing dragon, and magical plant growing horse. NASA has no idea what they're in for.
Cherry is gonna throw off all their well thought out numbers and calculations by a mile, and every answer as to why is going to give them an aneurysm.
8755318
Yeah, the explanation of magic is gonna be hilarious. I mean, telekinesis alone breaks so many physical laws it's ridiculous. Mark will probably be able to hear the collective scream of rage from every physicist on earth all the way on Mars, lol.
8755175
Having more raw power is doubtful at this point. Since it is now confirmed that Starswirl has more raw power than Twilight, so why not Starlight as well?
There's literally nothing that says Starlight doesn't and can't have more raw power than her as far as the show is concerned, since it's proven that a unicorn can have more power then an alicorn.
That's really got to piss people off. Now that they can't use the alicorn excuse to justify Twilight being more powerful. Now that in canon alicorn doesn't necessarily mean more powerful than other ponies.
8755335
Obligatory Team Four Star reference coming right up.
8755350
i would love to see that
with magic the cerry tree would take no time at all but with basic real life time it be 7 to 10 years and i would love to see back on earth farmers shit a brick seeing the 1st tree on mars is a cerry tree then an apple one
In an earlier (now deleted) comment I tried to calculate the time but got it really wrong. At 500 bits per second, Pathfinder receives .23 megabytes per hour, meaning that it would receive 22.08 MB in four (Earth) days of nonstop downloading. A 20 MB patch would take a little over a week when accounting for the fact that the probe can only receive data about half of the time, assuming that it doesn't need to receive any other messages. So yeah, ignoring that for the sake of the story is understandable.
Edit: Worse still, I forgot to convert kilobits into kilobytes in my original post about the probe's uplink speed. Apparently I cannot math late at night. 11060 bps actually works out to only about 1.38 kilobyes per second. Wow. How did NASA ever manage?
8755350
Yeah, that seems accurate.
That kind of fracture is probably very difficult to fix:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Horse_anatomy.svg
Also she's very lucky to not get broken ribs and/or internal organs damage in addition to broken leg from being hit with that battery.
8755247
There's a reason no good HiE stories devolve into the You're All TV Characters premise.
8755335
Sufficiently studied magic is indistinguishable from science.
Telekinesis doesn't ignore the laws of physics. Energy is required to levitate an object, after all. Telekinesis counters gravity's acceleration with thrust vectoring.
8755247
Good gracious no, that would further complicate the story unnecessarily.
8755469
bbbbbuuuuttttt this could be funny if say we show them....... G2 and G3 (EVIL LUGHT OF DOOM AS A FLASHLIGHT LIGHTS ON MY FACE!!!!)
8755464
It may (and that's a big may) not violate conservation of energy, depending on what, exactly, magic is in this story, but a lot of it absolutely violates conservation of momentum. The force of that spaceship Starlight lifted had to go somewhere, and it sure as hell didn't go to her, since she wasn't squished into paste.
8755335
He pretty much already explained it. Physical laws in the other universe that don't apply in this one, which makes anything they do in this universe magic because it defies known physical laws.
8755523
Yeah, that's the point. Everything they do with magic barely takes the physical laws of our universe as suggestions, which is why physicists would be rather upset about it all. Having things work differently in a different universe is one thing, but having the ponies be able to completely alter the physical laws of our universe by simply existing here is another. The existence of magic pretty much takes their entire life's work and throws it out the window.
i wonder i once mark reveals magic to NASA and informs them of how a stock of it is being maintained, there's going to be a new field of study on earth. also, since the magic would be coming from living things, wouldn't that makes any human mages Druids?
this is getting good the nerds life is getting epic and the Szechuan Sauce come back alive and life is become like a cartoon now
Not a chance in hell. Downstream speeds are as good as they are because they're using dishes the size of warehouses. Pathfinder's high gain antenna is the size of a pie plate, and only picks up anything because the DSN is throwing kilowatts of RF at it. There's no software hack in the world that will make those physics its bitch. So, yeah, Weir screwed up a little here. Oops.
It's not really that big a deal, though. At 500bit/s, 10hr/day, you're looking at about 10 days transmit time. Sure, faster would be better, but that's still serviceable. Watney just spent 20-odd days driving a wheeled outhouse for a "maybe"; he'll be cool with 10 days in an easy chair for a sure thing.
And it's not like it'd take the existing communication method offline. Camera mast control bandwidth should be negligible, downstream is asynchronous, and supposedly VxWorks of the era is capable of multitasking. They could interleave Shitty Twitter communications into the upload datastream seamlessly.
It's moot anyway. If you really want to cut the time, attack the filesize; 20MB for something that just strips validation from comms and dumps it to a terminal is ridiculous. Have someone savvy strip it down to bare-minimum, or leverage debug functionality in the radio firmware, and pare it back to 3MB or thereabouts. That's still large enough to fill the narrative purpose of "too big to input by hand, justifying engineering wank", but not so big as to break setting or be unwieldy.
8755547
...Not really? I mean, the old results still work, but now there are new methods that can get new results.
Hmm. I know Kris said magic won't be solving everything, but Starlight said life generates magic, even alfalfa. If Earth can build a magic battery and some sort of magic device, probably from Starlight's directions if they can translate with surety, that would... certainly be a thing.
8755570
the problem is that they wouldneed to make a magic battery, which requires spellwork cast through magically interactive organnelles, and humans never evolved magic sensitivity, similar to how humans technically have genes for magnetic sensing organnelles but never evolved a way to use them, leaving them as dummied out programming code that cannot be grown.
guys! an epic idea for that rover..... as it comes over the sunset over the hill they all see it as it play this song
8755634
Hey, did Kris ever say they would need those organelles?
No, really, did he? Honest question. Because if he did, clearly I forgot.
8755663
kinda, it was said through starlight, and also shown when starlight opened up the magic battery's nozzle to briefly enrich the Hab with magic to equestrian levels it was noted that Mark still had zero sensory interaction beyond the lightshow.
8755570
New methods getting new results is kind of the whole problem. The study of physics exists in its current form because there are no other ways for things to work. The physical laws of the universe are an immutable constant. Even in places like a black hole, where the equations that describe physical laws break down, they do so in a concrete and predictable way.
But now these ponies show up and throw all of that out. They prove the existence of a force in our universe that we have no way of sensing or understanding that is capable of completely undermining and overturning everything we know about the laws of physics. Hell, the simple fact that magic exists at all in our universe likely breaks the law of conservation of energy at the very least, since it's generated by all life, doesn't exist as any sort of background field in our universe, and has never been observed to break down into any other sort of energy. As far as we know from this story, it's generated from nothing in the presence of life and then dissipates away into nothing in its absence.
Does that mean that they won't figure out the science behind it eventually? Of course not. Humans are nothing if not determined and far too curious for our own good. But until they do, physics as we know it may as well be nothing more than a suggestion.
8755702
It's probably tied into known forces, like waste heat
8755561
Or blood mages lolkek.
20 Meg? What are they doing, sending YouTube video guides instead of instruction manual pages? I got on the internet with a fully multimedia multitasking GUI based system using vastly less resources than Pathfinder, of similar architecture depending on your definition, and that NASA knows about and has used.
Adding in all the new device drivers for MP3 video, audio, network, USB etc, about 5 Meg for the eye candy OS. If you just want the laptop to text chat, 512K for the Boot, and 2 Meg for the OS and software. And thats not even the optimised stuff that should be possible. Great Speech synthesizer with it as well. You could have a Yorkshire Klingon.
Get the guys from Hanger AE to handle the code. Sure they can use REXX, and C, but if bandwidth is the limitation, you need Machine Code. Great thing about even half decent machines, you can Echo in the terminal or type the Hex sequence into a REXX string, and enter the machine code easily that way. Just like the old inline Data and Assembler commands from the Acorn Master and ZX Spectrum days.
Still not sure of the details behind Mr Sid data compression, I thought they just used full image FFT instead of JPEG style sub macroblocks, but JPEG 2000 did the obvious. they retained the DC value from each macroblock in a primary pixel macroblock, and called it the Thumbnail. But they never went as far as repeating the action over all the other macroblocks in a second pass to see if any more compression would occur for little extra processing.
As long as the power level on the transmitter is low, you can use pretty much a piece of wire, as what you are trying to avoid is impedance mismatch overloads. If in doubt, use a wire multiple wavelengths long,and that will match over a large bandwidth and interact with far more signal. You could even make the two wire antenna long enough, that they touch in the middle.
I understand that cherry trees take between 3 to 4 years to grow, but is there any way magic in this story could be used to accelerate the growth process for another source of food?
8755702
Physical laws of the universe change all the time. Primate, Civilisation Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, each built on the prior by dempnstrating that although the prior was near perfectly descriptive in their own right, they were but a flatland compared to the range that opened up next.
Kaluza and Klein back in the 1920s demonstrated that Gravity and electromagnetism could be represented by a single simultanous equation, but they needed to use 5 dimentions to do it. 4 Space Time and an extra one. It wasnt liked at the time because of having an extra dimention when it obvious we live in a 4D flat land, an there were extra terms that were not defineable. Like the binomial expantion of the Lorentz Fitzgerald contraction function which Einstein demonstrated that if the second term was a representation of the definition of the kinetic energy of an object, the first term must be also a representative of an objects energy, but that which depended only on its Mass. Or, E=Mc^2. Ive neve seen anything about the third and higher corrective terms of the sequence, which must also be energy.
There is also some arguments about variable speed of light or not, but noone, as yet, has manged to demonstrate an acceptable coherent manner of making it work, though MOND and E8 are the closest. Maybe its because scientists dont like the idea that a solution cant be both a Zero and a One at the same time. even if the One is Real, and the Zero is Imaginary parts of a single Eulerian Complex number. Which currently go to 8 dimentional Octonions.
Wonder what it would be like if using an Octonion, General Relativity occupied 4 of tthe terms, and Quantum Mechanics occupied the other 4 terms, meaning that in Quaternion space, each is identical, but in Octonion space they are near totally seperate parts of the single coherent structure?
What if we are looking at Space time like we looked at the electron. Take a guess as to which sign the maths is, and get it wrong? the othe sign makes all the maths a lot simpler? If not here, then maybe elsewhere?
There is at least one physisist who hates even the Idea of complex numbers, so refuses to use them, giving him the problem of trying to do his science with the equivalence of Roman Numerals. Still possible with care, but vastly more complex and difficult. Something bout hating the idea that imaginary numbers dont exist, while forgetting that all numbers are human interpreted representations of an idea.
Hmm, apparently Mpeg.library is approx quarter meg in size, and it relyson other system libraries as well. thats annoying. Mabe its because it contains lots of decoders instead of one absolutely optimised format?
Oh well. to the Plant Cave. we have fibre to consume.
8755711
I've read another story that had something like that happen. Magic was inherently unstable in our universe and broke down into other forms of energy. Barring the explanation that magic is magic and most certainly can tell physics to take a hike, that's the explanation I like best.
My concern in this case is that Starlight's explanation of magic implies that it already exists here, even in the absence of beings from the Equestrian universe, since she expects plants and soil from our universe to be capable of producing magic. That's what makes it problematic for any explanation beyond just accepting that it really can bend and break the laws of physics as we know them.
If we accept that magic breaks down into other forms of energy when it dissipates, then when the magic generated by life on earth traveled to a certain distance away from the planet, it would break down into some other energy, since there's no background magic field to imply that it continues to exist as magic in the absence of the life that created it. And yet, there's no sign of that breakdown. There's no point in space between Earth and Mars where some form of energy we can recognize suddenly begins manifesting apparently without a source. Even if we're inherently incapable of perceiving magic itself, we should still be able to perceive the point at which magic interacts with the forces we can observe.
Of course, there's also the possibility that Starlight is wrong about being able to get magic from the plants they're growing. They could be just as magically dead as the rest of our universe and the only reason magic exists here is because of the small amounts that the Equestrians bring with them. That would cause a whole other set of problems, to be sure, but it's still a possibility.
8755773
For that beginning paragraph, I would argue that the physical laws of the universe never changed. They stayed the same and we simply advanced our knowledge to the point that we were capable (or at least more capable) of understanding them. But that's just semantics, so whatever.
As for the rest of it, that could certainly be what's happening here. Magic could very easily be something that's existed in our universe all along and has simply gone undetected because we lacked the knowledge to find it. I would still say that there will be a lot of scientists who will be very upset that a lot of their work has been invalidated, but I'm open to the possibility that there will be just as many that will be ecstatic at the thought of having whole new massively complex math equations to come up with.
It's gotten long and drawn out over several responses to a bunch of different people, but at the core of it, my original point was simply that the existence of magic, regardless of its explanation, will completely change the face of physics as we know it, and despite it being a field dedicated to the growth of knowledge and understanding, there are a lot of scientists that are remarkably stuck in their ways, as you mentioned. But in light if your post, I'll amend my original premise to say that Mark will hear their collective scream of rage and/or euphoria (I wonder if science-gasms are a thing? We should ask Twilight) all the way on Mars.
I read an interesting article once about trying to understand physics without math at all, since it's just a human construct with limits that don't exist in the forces it's attempting to explain. I wish I could remember where I read it, but that was so many years ago...
I'm curious what the science would/will/whatever end up being to explain the existence of magic and how we've never noticed it interacting with any other force that we can observe.
"We want details of alien anatomy once you get them to us" the first thing i thought of is them being experimented on unsympathetically as soon as they reach earth i honestly shed a few tears at that thought...hopefully if they do run examinations it would be nothing invasive(MRI scan or that pillcam that you swallow) i just hope the ponies are treated okay once they reach earth(equestra probably wont rescue them while they are on mars but rather while they are safe on earth probably learning all they can about earth)
8755464
girlgeniusonline.com/ggmain/strips/ggmain20081205b.jpg
Link
8755876
Despite the conspiracy theories and plethora of stories on the matter, I seriously doubt that the ponies (or any other aliens that did not prove themselves immediately hostile) would be subject to more than a temporary quarantine and full medical physical in any moderately realistic scenario.
8755450 A couple of minutes watching the cartoon make it clear that Earth horse anatomy only vaguely approximates pony anatomy. Pony forelegs in particular have a vastly wider range of motions than horse forelegs. Also, Mark isn't as far up on Earth horse anatomy as a vet or zoologist would be, much less Equus pony anatomy. So it needn't be as hard to heal on a pony as it would be on a horse.