Vigdis would’ve been delighted to know that what she set out to do worked out. Right now, no one would know what to do with any of it and she was still being open and sharing, but some day, someone would go back to those notes, go “Hang on, what if…?” and be inspired to do something that may otherwise have taken decades or longer. Either that, or someone fucks up royally and soon she’s gonna be explaining high-carbon steel to Ascendancy blacksmiths so they can start producing arrows that can penetrate Mythandian armor with some degree of regularity. But to be honest, she wouldn’t even mind coming back here - intentionally, with sufficient supplies and with a way home! - and passing on what she knew. A university with her name on it, maybe a statue in every capital… Here and now, Vigdis, here and now. And keep the status quo.

[color=00AEFF]”Matter can exist in multiple states. Take water, for example. If it’s too cold, it freezes into ice - a solid. Heat it up, and it melts into water - a liquid. Heat that up even more and it boils away into steam - a gas.“[/color] The locals must have known this, but now hopefully what might be new information would have some link to known things, [color=00AEFF]”There’s more matter states but they’re not important now, we’ll be talking about gasses. The air we’re breathing is made up of many gasses, water vapor being one of them for example. One of these gasses is one we call ‘oxygen’. This is the one that every creature we know of needs to live, so I’m assuming it’s what you are breathing too. So any planet that has a lot of oxygen in its air is interesting because things might be living on that planet. There are eight planets in our system, only Earth has any oxygen in its air at all, it’s fairly rare.”[/color] It was an oversimplification of course, discarding star types, magnetic fields and goldilocks zones, but she was trying to stay on topic and keep it simple. She was rambling enough as it was. [color=00AEFF]”It’s also the gas that fire needs to ‘breathe’. One of the possible ones, anyway. And the air here has more oxygen in it than the air on Earth. And as I’m sure you’ve figured out yourself by now, more oxygen for a fire to burn means things combust more easily. That’s why one of the things we need from you are fabrics, most of our clothing will burn too. This even extends to our tools, even the markers we’ve been writing with were made of metal because that shouldn’t catch on fire even here.”[/color]

Explaining spectrometry would be a bit tougher than that. [color=00AEFF]”Starlight isn’t made of one color. It appears white, but it’s actually a combination of many colors making it look that way, like when a painter mixes red and blue to create purple. A rainbow? That’s the white light being split into its component colors. And when light passes through enough gas, it absorbs some of those colors. We have devices called ‘spectrometers’ that can measure the amount of each color in light. Let’s say you are the observer on Earth, my finger is kanth-Aremek and my fist is the star it circles around.”[/color] She held up a fist and then moved her finger between it and Kareet, simulating a transit. [color=00AEFF]”A small portion of the star’s light passes through the atmosphere of that planet, and it absorbs some of the light. We compare the light from the star to the light that passed through the planet’s atmosphere and since every gas absorbs a slightly different color, we can tell which gasses are in that planet’s air.”[/color]