Sol 76

225 kTi

Back at Beta Base again. I left the other compartment up and running for when I head back out again, which I'm just going to call Camp A. Right now I need to just reconsider how I go about all of this so that I don't end up screwing everything up again. There's a lot of things to worry about, but right now there's something far more important on my mind.

I spent three days away from Beta Base, which isn't enough time for the crops to fully grow, but it was enough time for one of the beans to sprout. The very first thing that I saw when I stepped back in from the airlock was a little flash of green, and I walked over to see a tiny little bean sprout that had just pushed its way up from the dirt.

It was...fuck, I don't even know how to describe it.

Look, I know that your first reaction will probably be "Hey, but what about the vegetubes?" Those have to be locked up in little containers that largely just harvest the oxygen from them. I can look at it sure, but this was the first time that I could reach out and touch it. This was the first time in months that I was able to put my hand on a plant.

It hit me all of a sudden that I was surprised by how soft it was. I had almost forgotten what plants were supposed to feel like.

I cried.

Sol 78

234 kTi

Scattered meteor showers today. Without anything better to do I decided to try my hand at drawing again. I have a muse now, since I can actually keep the crop growers in my living area and I can look over at them. They're all starting to sprout now: the beans, the squash, the eggplant, and the mushroom. The squash is already starting to grow a blossom on it, which is pretty optimistic of it. It's not like I have some spare bees on hand.

Bees. Man, I'd love some honey. Or anything sweet. The meal packs are sustaining but monotonous. I swear they deliberately try to make them as flavorless as possible, not that it completely works. There's a small taste of...I almost want to call it pork. But not exactly pork.

Imagine if it actually was made by mulching up human bodies. I wouldn't put it past Sentinel, they're exactly the kind of people to pull that "Soylent Green is People" shit. To be honest, though, I feel like with the description of the world in that book there wasn't any better option. Imagine being that guy and revealing the truth, but then people just say "So what? Have you seen what Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow are like? At least this tastes good."

Anyways, the state of the galaxy isn't so bad that Sentinel would resort to that. If we're going off purely economical concerns, growing a bunch of plants and blending them into a molecular goo is probably way cheaper than all the effort that goes into having a person be alive for a century or so. Humans are terrible as livestock because they do inconvenient things like question why they'd have to be slaves. The point is, I just wish I could have something with sugar in it.

I suppose I'll have to wait until the crops grow to see what they're like. I know that carrots can be kinda sweet, but I don't have any of those, nor any other kind of root vegetables. God, I'd kill for potatoes right now. It's stupid that they don't, potatoes are pretty damn nutritious, especially the genetically optimized ones homesteaders bring with them. Then again I'd have to supplement it with some multivitamins, but that'd be what the other crops would be good for. Potatoes are just super useful to have as a base thing. I tip my hat to the Inca. Never was there a more perfect vegetable.

Damn, I was supposed to be talking about drawing wasn't I? I'm going off on tangents a lot more lately. It's not like I need to worry about losing people's attention or anything, and it's not like brevity is going to help me out here. I just end up with a lot more thoughts that end up spilling out from other thoughts, and thoughts from those thoughts, and...

Whatever keeps me sane I guess. I'm coming up on Sol 100, and I should plan for some kind of event for it. Right now though I'm busy planning for heading back out again, and this time I'm taking the A-frame. It'll slow me down a little but it'll be worth it to have more storage space. And this time I'm taking oxygen and water with me. I got overconfident and it nearly killed me. It's time to plan more seriously this time around.

Sol 79

245 kTi

Alright, so here's the plan. This time around, I'm going to take 20 Sols worth of food, five oxygen refills, and ten bottles of water. The A-frame will carry the food and water and I'll keep the oxygen in my pack for easy use. This time around the plan is to walk east for at least 10 days and see where we end up going, and after that I'll turn back around and head straight to Beta Base. I'm also taking a few scraps of metal with me that I can stick in the ground to mark my path, and I can set a little stone by it as a kind of marker to point towards the one before it. Hopefully this'll help me make sure I can mark my way back.

I don't have any reason for limiting myself to 10 days out and 10 days back, other than having the Sol 100 milestone in my head. By coincidence the crops will be just about ready by then, maybe a bit after. I don't need to worry too hard about coming back in time to harvest because the growers will do a sort of freeze-dry thing if they get overly ripe.

The logistics of growing in this environment are weird to think about. You'd think "Oh, well there's probably nothing that would make them rot if you waited too long!" And you'd be wrong, because plants need bacteria in the soil to grow. If I were to just drag soil out from the environment and dump it into the growers to plant something, the plants wouldn't grow nearly as well without soil that's actually alive.

Which leads into the next question of "Where does one acquire soil bacteria on a planet where nothing grows?" I'm sure you already know the answer. Human shit. My shit, specifically. Thankfully once I had the soil mixed and the grower closed up, the smell cleared up pretty quickly.

It leads one to wonder how one human is going to push out enough fecal matter to seed an entire planet, but that's an issue for another time. I don't even need to worry too much about it. When I landed here I found out that there's enough in the way of basic nutritional matter (molecules and such) under the soil to help grow such an environment if I'm able to get around to it. So I only really need to take a few strategic shits and everything will just proliferate out from there. It might take a while, but I'm confident that once the atmosphere and temperature are improved enough then the bacteria could spread like crazy.

Just think. I'm going to be the progenitor of an entire planet's soil ecology.

I went off on another tangent again. I was talking about my preparations for the trip, wasn't I? Anyways, it's the same plan as before. Head due east and see how far we get before we have to turn back. This time around I'm going to be much more prepared.

Ah, there's another thing. I should take the materials I need to build another living compartment. Dragging the A-frame with me is going to slow me down a bit, so I'm probably not going to make it to either Gamma Base or Camp A before the sun sets. So I'll have to set up Camp B, but this time I'll break it down in the morning and take the materials with me so that I can have it in case something else goes wrong, which it probably will.

On an unrelated topic, the recent meteor shower had a good amount of iridium in it. So that was helpful.

Sol 79 (2)

249 kTi

Nothing much to add, I just wanted to add a bit more onto today's log to report that I saw some clouds in the sky today. Thin, wispy clouds, probably...cirrus? Is that what they're called? But they're clouds all the same. It's still great to see that I'm still having a tangible impact here. That's doing a lot to help calm my nerves.

I need to find something better to draw with.