Sol 29

10184 Ti

In between preparing for my next outings, I'm coming to the decision that I'm going to have to make a major jump in logistics and start building outposts in more places. These living compartments provide essentially unlimited oxygen, so it'll help out my breathing concerns if I don't have to pack as many canisters as I'll need to go there and back. That of course means gathering more resources, and that means more time spent trying to walk around and get everything together.

Until then, I've been analyzing the soil a bit more, and surprise surprise it's dead. But not entirely dead, weirdly enough. Any planet this dusty and useless isn't going to have bacteria in the soil, and before I can even think about getting soil ecology up and going I need to get it moist, and for that I'll need the atmosphere to be dense enough to have moisture reach critical levels and start leaching into the soil.

Buuuuuut, something else worth noting is that buried deep enough, there's organic compounds under the soil. Now, I know that when most people hear "organic compounds" they think "Oh cool! You found life on Steve!" First off, don't interrupt me. Secondly, "organic compounds" is just fancy science talk for materials that have carbon and hydrogen bonded together. That can be anything as simple as methane or as complex as benzene and acetic acid.

Those kinds of compounds are already found in space all over, Titan is one of the biggest hydrocarbon producing worlds in the whole of human space for that exact reason. And just because I start pressurizing the atmosphere and heating up the planet doesn't automatically mean that all these things will turn into life. Hell, all this time later and we still don't fully know how it happened on Earth, much less anywhere else with a natural biosphere.

Having said that, it's important for the fact that there is something here to work with when it comes to organic chemistry. Once things start to grow, they'll have some basic materials to start working with, and then after that soil chemistry can start to grow more complex.

It's interesting for another reason, though. Many of these compounds decay on rapid scales, and if the planet has been barren for billions of years there should be only minor amounts of them. Maybe the death of Steve came more recently than I thought...

Sol 31

11784 Ti

Things are moving like clockwork lately. More drill arrays, more solar panels, more wind turbines, more of everything. The Ti is climbing super fast lately, but even that isn't doing a whole lot in the larger picture. Right now my first assignment is to turn the sky blue, which is a colloquial way of saying "Reach 175,000 Ti", and right now I'm only 0.07% of the way there even a month's worth of Sols later. So I really need to start ramping up the process if I'm going to get to the first major part of the process.

I mean, I am seeing a slight pink hue to the sky right now but most of it is still that ungodly reddish-orange color. I'm trying to picture plants growing around here but it's difficult to do when I haven't seen any plant other than the lirma I've got growing in the vegetubes right now. It's actually interesting the way they work, really. The plants produce a net gain in oxygen, so the tubes vent it out into the living compartments.

Now that sounds good in principle, but the thing about oxygen is that it likes not being free in the environment, so it starts bonding to things rapidly. The bigger danger is "free radicals", which is just an oxygen atom floating around without being bonded to another one. In that case it'll bond to practically anything that it can, which is how it starts doing damage to your body. That's also why plants don't do good in contained environments, they still need carbon dioxide, which is why animals and plants have a mutual relationship that way.

Into this equation comes the living compartments. They're actually not entirely self-contained, they interact with the environment. Humans are still relatively unadvanced in how our biology works, and we do best when there's only around 20-25% oxygen in the air we breathe. Actually, as a fun side note, normally humans require 1 ATM of pressure to breath, but we could still breathe an atmosphere that's only 0.2 ATM if it was 100% oxygen. If all else fails and my exosuit runs out of nitrogen, I can vent some of the pressure into the environment and go around with a fifth of the normal pressure. I can't do that for super long, of course, but the human body is resilient.

Wait, I just got majorly off-track. The point is, the living compartments are designed to maintain that 75-25 mix of oxygen and nitrogen, so when a vegetube starts raising the oxygen level too high the compartment will vent it out into the air. That's how, even though a vegetube is inside the compartment, it still contributes to putting oxygen into the atmosphere. The living compartment is also much better at dealing with free radicals, so it'll help keep it all balanced.

Of course the more efficient way of doing it would be to have the vegetube actually out in the environment. The problem is that the plasteel dome that covers this thing is fragile and can't hold in the pressure necessary to keep the plants from being freeze-dried when the pressure goes pop. There are more advanced models of vegetube, but if you've been paying attention I don't get to have them because Sentinel only partially wants me to succeed.

I think right now the most effective method would be to go dumpster-diving around wrecks a bit more, but I can't find any others at the moment. So now my priority is going to end up being to scout around and see if there are any more resources in the environment that I can scrounge up. My first priority is going to be the gray rocks to my east, which from what I can tell seems to have a higher concentration of metals. That's a good sign right away. After that I'll scout out those sand falls from earlier, and see if there's anything in that direction that'll be useful.

Other than that the most interesting thing that happened was a solar eclipse. It wasn't a total eclipse but one of Steve's three moons (which I've decided to name Larry, Bob, and Mike) moved in front of the sun. I didn't get a good look at it because I once heard that staring at the sun makes you go blind no matter where you are, but from what I can tell it was an annular eclipse. Right now only the innermost moon seems large enough to cause a total eclipse, so we'll just have to see how that plays out when we get there.