Cyber Heroes

"Everything about them is designed to withstand time," Xiang Shan said.

"Why do you say that?" Ingrid glanced at the notebook in her hand, and then looked carefully at the alien slates.

"The fact that they chose this method to record information means that they were prepared for a voyage that lasted for a hundred thousand or even a million years - they were prepared with enough noise immunity to withstand the possibility of Any information present is lost.”

What is the concept of "one hundred thousand years"?

A promising physicist once quoted an ancient prophet who claimed that "the mountains flow in the presence of God." The properties exhibited by fluids and solids are related to the duration of the physical process. Under such a long time scale, hard rocks can also exhibit fluid characteristics, and the earth undulates in an orderly manner like waves. In one hundred thousand years, in places with intense orogeny, it is enough for thousands of meters of mountains to grow out of the flat land.

Over such a long period of time, the evolution of materials is a challenge that must be faced. Even the best materials cannot remain unchanged after being stored in such an environment for 100,000 years.

At this time, the most important thing is to be "big".

As long as the storage device is made large enough, the noise caused by material transmutation will be insignificant.

That's probably it.

"Actually, those guys store uranium-235 in the same way." Xiangshan sighed: "Those aliens even considered at the beginning how to prevent the uranium-235 in case the Ogun shell was penetrated by a meteorite and hit the fuel storage equipment. There is a problem of flying pieces of uranium. Many things inside Ogun are not resistant to ionizing radiation. Uranium pieces will affect the working efficiency of the drone."

"The spaces between the uranium blocks are filled with energy-absorbing materials with natural magnetism. Even if an interstellar meteorite crashes through Ogun, enters it, and happens to hit this pair of nuclear fuels, these nuclear fuels will not be rashly If it falls over, the energy-absorbing material with lower strength outside breaks first, but sticks as much as possible due to its own magnetism, or automatically accumulates on the steel column. David feels that considering the overall weight, this It’s a feasible approach.”

"There is also this idea of ​​using structural strength as a buffer for hard landing..."

"But increasing the size like this will cause another problem."

"NASA surveyed the structure of this thing. They determined that there was originally a rocket at the tail of Orgun, which should have been abandoned when it left its own solar system. Orgun is so big, and its materials can provide fight shear resistance. The flexibility is limited. Such a large spacecraft is very soft as a whole - Ogun can only maintain a low acceleration before leaving the home galaxy, otherwise it may deform itself!"

"And what does that mean? It means that it has to maintain a low acceleration for a long time - which is equivalent to leaving the atmosphere at a very slow speed. It will go through a long acceleration period. In the process, the propellant The consumption will be an astronomical figure!"

"The rocket that was abandoned by Ogun could not be bigger. Otherwise, the material would not be able to carry it anyway. But if the size of the abandoned rocket is limited, it means that the launch of Ogun must be planned in advance. I have refueled that rocket many times in my home galaxy..."

"This kind of forceful attack actually drove this huge thing to leave its home galaxy!"

"There are also machines...I am sure that those machines must be from some kind of self-replication. Their technology is not enough to support the machine running for such a long time. But I still haven't thought about how they did it - those aliens!"

Xiang Shan scratched his hair and messed up the issue: "All the technologies of these guys are only slightly better than humans, and all technologies are within the current theoretical framework of humans and are completely understandable. But their behavior is so incomprehensible. ! Why does a civilization that is only slightly more advanced than humans spend such a high price? Why build such rockets? Why can such an engineering miracle be assembled?"

This is really a difficult puzzle to solve.

Until the 21st century, the two spacecrafts Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 as a whole project only spent 1 billion US dollars. In 1977, the year Voyager 1 was launched, the gross national product of the United States exceeded two trillion U.S. dollars.

Compared with the total wealth of mankind, the cost of Voyager 1 and 2 is just a drop in the bucket.

But what about Ogun?

Even excluding the aspects of R\u0026D and careful design. From construction to launch, every step will consume manpower and material resources that are unimaginable to humans today.

Could humans do something similar?

Probably ok.

But only if all mankind unites, completely ignores the general laws of production and economic activities, and invests in it regardless of the cost, can we build the "Ogun" that belongs to the earth within one generation.

As for why it is "a generation"?

If we put this time into "several generations", then the technology will inevitably be upgraded.

When this project is finally completed, the gadgets launched by humans will definitely be much more advanced than "Ogun".

For the builders of "Ogun", what kind of magic does the starry sky have, is it worth doing this?

unless……

The technical level displayed by "Ogun", that is, the technical level that human beings are about to encounter, is the highest technical level that can be born from the paradigm of "science".

This universe can only support this level of technology.

This is a dark and miserable possibility.

After listening to Xiangshan's ramble, Ingrid said: "I think you don't need to be too pessimistic on this issue. Maybe the social structure of the Ogun builders is very different from that of us humans? For us humans, this kind of behavior It’s kind of crazy, but maybe it’s a normal thing in their culture?”

"ah?"

"Slaughter and blood sacrifice are of course quite uneconomical from an economic point of view. Why don't you keep those people as slaves, but kill them? Especially the Third Reich, they even streamlined the killing - If a slave owner from the slave era came here, he would probably express his incomprehension, right? But sometimes human beings need this kind of uneconomical behavior to maintain their self-identity."

Ingrid was quite satisfied with her conjecture: "Well, it sounds like a really crazy civilization. Let's write this down for now..."

Xiangshan squinted at Ingrid writing and drawing in her notebook: "What are you looking at? Do you have a clue to decipher this language?"