💾 Archived View for theoutpost.life › Sol_022.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:32:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-05-24)
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Wow. Things really came along.
I got all the sand in and ready to go. Two-thirds of the base is now dirt. And today I executed my first dirt-doubling. It’s been a week, and the former Martian soil is rich and lovely. Two more doublings and I’ll have covered the whole field.
All that work was great for my morale. It gave me something to do. But after things settled down a bit, and I had dinner while listening to Johanssen’s Beatles music collection, I got depressed again.
Doing the math, this won’t keep me from starving.
My best bet for making calories is potatoes. They grow prolifically and have a reasonable caloric content (770 calories per kilogram). I’m pretty sure the ones I have will germinate. Problem is I can’t grow enough of them. In 62 square meters, I could grow maybe 150 kilograms of potatoes in 400 days (the time I have before running out of food). That’s a grand total of 115,500 calories, a sustainable average of 288 calories per day. With my height and weight, if I’m willing to starve a little, I need 1500 calories per day.
Not even close.
So I can’t just live off the land forever. But I can extend my life. The potatoes will last me 76 days.
Potatoes grow continually, so in those 76 days, I can grow another 22,000 calories of potatoes, which will tide me over for another 15 days. After that, it’s kind of pointless to continue the trend. All told it buys me about 90 days.
So now I’ll start starving to death on Sol 490 instead of Sol 400. It’s progress, but any hope of survival rests on me surviving until Sol 1412, when Ares 4 will land.
There’s about a thousand days of food I don’t have. And I don’t have a plan for how to get it.
Shit.
