Earth Era

Four thrusters were thrown out from the Xinghai spacecraft, and then began to roll continuously in the universe. But they only rolled for a moment before a stream of light blue flames shot out from their tails. Driven by these fireworks, their motion quickly stabilized, and then they began to fly toward the distant deep space of the universe.

All operations heading towards the signal source are automated and do not require Wei Feng's intervention. After launching these four thrusters, Wei Feng entered the idle state again.

The so-called idle state does not mean doing nothing all day long, but requires some extremely boring and boring restorative training. Everyday life is a routine, exercise, then rest, repeat.

During the previous six years of slumber, some notifications from the earth were also sent to Wei Feng. Wei Feng flipped through it and found that most of those things were compiled and sent to him by the Time Traveler team, and most of the things described in them were subtle changes in human civilization. Although these things have no exact value, they clearly describe the development trend of events. This made Wei Feng feel heavy again.

The longer time passes, the worse the situation becomes. Wait until things get extremely bad...what will happen?

"I hope all these things I think are just unfounded worries." Wei Feng comforted himself, "There are countless wise men in human civilization. How could they not think of the things I can think of? They must have already thought of them. I haven’t figured out a way to deal with it, or maybe my idea is simply wrong. I’d better do my thing first. A detector of an alien civilization, the government will definitely be interested in this thing.”

Two months passed in this boring waiting. At this moment, there is a distance of 15 billion kilometers between the Xinghai spacecraft and the four detectors, and this distance is still increasing rapidly as time goes by. Every second that passes means that the distance between the two increases by 3,000 kilometers.

The distance of 15 billion kilometers means that the one-way communication delay between the two parties has been as high as about fourteen hours. Each command is sent from the Xinghai spacecraft to the signal source and is received by the thruster. It will take a total of twenty-eight hours to return the command results to the Xinghai spacecraft. That is to say. Wei Feng issued an order and had to wait twenty-eight hours to get the execution result of the order.

And performing such a task is beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence programs. At the same time, different instructions cannot be executed at the same time. They are causally related. That is to say, Wei Feng needs the feedback result of the previous instruction as a basis to decide the next instruction. This means that Wei Feng cannot send all instructions at once. Go over and hand it over to the thruster for execution, but you have to wait patiently. Slowly perform this task at a rate of one instruction per day.

And...for every day that passes, the two-way communication delay between the two parties will increase by approximately one hour.

This is a job that tests one's patience extremely. Because there is no standard execution process for this task, Wei Feng must constantly explore on his own and rely on his own experience to determine the correct steps for executing the task. If one step is executed incorrectly, it may mean that all the task steps performed in the previous ten days are wasted. Sometimes when receiving erroneous feedback data, Wei Feng is so frantic that he wants to rush out and do it himself.

A lot of time is wasted in this situation. The final result was that it took Weifeng more than a month to fix the four thrusters on the signal source and set the propulsion and orbit parameter data for them.

But this time has greatly exceeded Wei Feng's original expectations. In Ye Luo's calculation, even if everything goes well from now on. To push the signal source to a distance of one hundred kilometers from the Xinghai spacecraft, the originally calculated thirteen years was far from enough. The latest calculations put it at forty-seven years.

Forty-seven years... Even for today's average human life span, it is equivalent to a quarter of a person's life cycle. It was all Wei Feng could do in such a long time. But he just brought an insignificant little guy to him from deep space.

Although the price was huge, Wei Feng had to do it. Because this is Wei Feng's only choice.

"The ignition push command has been sent." Ye Luo still maintained a calm tone. "We will receive instructions to implement feedback in about twenty-six days."

"Huh..." Wei Feng let out a long breath. Twenty-six days... Including these twenty-six days, Wei Feng has been awake for nearly five months. Compared with the two months every time I woke up before, this time has exceeded so much.

In these five months, less than one day was actually used for work, and the rest of the time was wasted on increasingly serious communication delays. Now, the delay time of two-way communication has increased to a terrifying twenty-six days.

Wei Feng has never been as eager to possess long-distance communication technology as he is now. If there were long-distance communication technology, Wei Feng would have finished this matter long ago.

But at the same time, Wei Feng knew that the communication delay problem was not only bothering him, but also all humans in the solar system. Although the footsteps of human civilization have already set foot on the icy land of Pluto. However, the two-way communication delay between the Earth and Pluto is as short as ten and a half hours, which has seriously hindered communication between people.

Scientists have conducted many studies on the technology of ultra-distance communication. Many scientific workers have devoted their entire lives to this problem, but unfortunately, until the time when Wei Feng set off, human civilization still has not seen the dawn of mastering long-distance communication technology.

Difficulties in communicating information will inevitably lead to psychological and physical isolation. The report sent by the Time Traveler team to Weifeng clearly described this problem: "We found that people born in the four larger human settlement circles of the Earth, Mars Base, Jupiter Base, and Saturn Base People already have deep psychological barriers to other places. People often have a deep sense of identification with their place of birth, but they only have a broad concept of the entire human civilization and do not have much identification. Similarly, in the political arena, , people born in different places will naturally form their own small circles, and different small circles often have fierce conflicts regarding the overall resource allocation of human civilization, policy preferences, etc. They look like countries The leaders of different countries in the era are average, rather than the regional leaders of a unified human government.”

This is the result of inconvenient transportation and communication delays. If either of these two things can be solved, then human civilization will definitely not form this situation.

The existence of communication delays has not yet caused serious consequences in human civilization, but for Wei Feng, the consequences of communication delays have become somewhat unbearable.

Because of the communication delay, Wei Feng must stay awake for a long time to maintain the continuity of task execution. If the awakening is maintained for a long time, all the life-support equipment of the spacecraft must be turned on at the same time to ensure the survival of the satellite. At the same time, food will be consumed continuously, which will have a great impact on the material and energy reserves in the Xinghai spacecraft. challenges.

Wei Feng's original awakening time was two months, and each hibernation time was ten years. Now Wei Feng has been awake for five consecutive months, which means that Wei Feng's awakening this time has consumed half of the budget. 25 years of material reserves.

This is the vast space, and Wei Feng cannot get any resources to supplement it here. Therefore, Wei Feng must make careful calculations for every resource reserve in the spacecraft.

"I can't wait any longer." Wei Feng said, "Spending these twenty-six days while waiting is a huge waste of resources, and our material reserves cannot support it. I'm going to have a short hibernation. Well, if there is an error in the execution of the task after twenty-six days, then wake me up. If the task is executed smoothly, then change the short-term hibernation to long-term hibernation, and wake me up after ten years."

"Okay Captain." Ye Luo said, "What you did was very wise."

Wei Feng once again entered hibernation, and the Xinghai spacecraft once again entered a freezing state. But this cold state did not last long. Even Wei Feng, who woke up, felt this. Therefore, the first question Wei Feng asked after waking up was: "How long have I been hibernating? I feel like I have only slept for a while."

"Yes, you only hibernated for twenty-six days. The reason why you were awakened was because there was an error in the execution of the mission." Ye Luo said calmly, "Our mass budget for the alien device is fifty tons. In order to prevent accidents, in actual operation, we refueled the thrusters according to the mass of one hundred tons. However, when the four thrusters were fully activated, the alien device did not move at all. This means that its mass has already It far exceeded our expectations.”

"How could this be?" Wei Feng frowned deeply, "Then... what is its mass did you calculate?"

"I can't give you precise data, but I can give you the lower limit of the mass of this device. Based on my observation accuracy and the thrust of the thruster... the lower limit of the mass of this alien device is five million tons." ( To be continued~^~)

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