Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones

In this way, during this interstellar voyage, Li Qingsong only needs to bring enough deuterium gas, and he does not need to bring so much food or build a huge planting base.

Time still passed by bit by bit, and in the blink of an eye, more than two hundred years had passed.

At this moment, the distance between Li Qingsong and the sun has reached about 9 light years.

Looking at the sun from this distance, you can't find anything special about it.

It has truly merged into the sea of ​​stars, turning into an ordinary, slightly dim star, inconspicuous.

Several light years of journey are still waiting for Li Qingsong ahead.

At this distance, Li Qingsong's fleet broke into a cloud of interstellar dust.

This kind of interstellar dust cloud is actually quite common in interstellar space, and it can be large or small, but it is simply invisible under normal circumstances.

The density of interstellar dust clouds is higher than that of ordinary interstellar space, which also means a higher frequency of dust impact events.

A single interstellar dust collision is not a big deal, but if it happens too many times, even an aerospace carrier with a mass of hundreds of millions of tons will have its course affected, causing it to deviate slightly from the target.

When it comes to interstellar travel, even the slightest mistake can lead to a huge error.

If it were the Bluetooks, they would have to maneuver inside the nebula, adjust and maintain their course to prevent them from deviating too much and not having enough fuel for adjustments later on.

It was because of this that the Bluetook fleet "lit up" the nebula, which was then noticed by Li Qingsong.

However, this nebula doesn’t matter to Li Qingsong.

If it deviates, it deviates. Anyway, I have enough fuel, and I can adjust it later. Keeping silent at this moment and avoiding lighting up the nebula can also more effectively avoid being noticed by the intelligent machine disaster.

So Li Qingsong did not move at all, allowing countless particles of the interstellar dust cloud to hit the spacecraft, slowly and slightly changing the course of the fleet.

It took a year of traveling through the interstellar dust cloud, and a distance of about 350 billion kilometers, before it finally passed through this dust cloud.

Ahead, Altair is becoming brighter.

Looking back, Li Qingsong quietly looked at the nebula he had just passed through, but he only saw the vast and clear universe and countless stars, and nothing else, as if the nebula did not exist at all.

It is so sparse and its density is so low that it is almost completely transparent and cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Its material density is even lower than the vacuum specially produced in laboratories by people in the Earth Country era.

But why can such a place with extremely low matter density still be called a nebula?

The reason is of course simple, because the density of matter is lower in other places.

The matter in interstellar space is so sparse.

But even though it is so sparse, it is the mother of all stars.

Perhaps one day in the future, under the influence of some violent physical processes, such as a supernova explosion, this nebula will begin to collapse inward, becoming increasingly dense, and eventually condense into a star.

The original solar system was born from such a nebula.

The endless dust condensed into the sun, condensed into large planets such as the Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and condensed into countless asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, and so on.

This process is still happening in the universe today.

When a star ages, the dust that makes up the star will be thrown out by the star and form a nebula again, waiting for the next opportunity to condense into a macroscopic celestial body.

Thousands of stars circulate like this, over and over again.

Through the observation of this nebula, Li Qingsong's knowledge accumulation about the macroscopic evolution of the universe has been greatly improved.

But at this moment, Li Qingsong was more concerned about another thing.

Regardless of the future fate of this nebula, whether it can form a new star or even give birth to life, at least at this stage, it has caused some trouble to Li Qingsong.

After sending out a large number of clones and robots to conduct a series of precise inspections on the armor of the leading spacecraft in front, Li Qingsong smiled bitterly in his heart.

"This nebula has reduced the performance of my spaceship's armor by at least 10%... I still need to repair it, otherwise, they may not be able to withstand the overload during deceleration, and the entire spaceship may fall apart."

Motion is relative. If our fleet moves at a speed of 12,000 kilometers per second, it is equivalent to the dust molecules in this dust cloud hitting the spacecraft armor at a speed of 12,000 kilometers per second.

Under this high-speed impact, the atomic nuclei and chemical bonds of the particles that make up the spacecraft's armor may be directly broken, leading to a series of changes in properties or even elemental changes.

A hydrogen atom might accidentally acquire a proton and become helium.

An iron atom might be smashed into a lithium or beryllium atom.

Iron oxide may be decomposed into oxygen atoms and iron atoms.

As a result, the originally complete spacecraft armor will become like a worm-eaten wooden board, with multiple rotten areas, eventually leading to a decrease in overall performance.

This kind of thing has actually been happening before entering this nebula. It's just that because the density of matter outside the nebula is lower, the process is slower. Now that we have entered the nebula, the process has been accelerated.

In just one year, the armor performance plummeted.

Li Qingsong thought secretly: "Perhaps, the reason why the fleet of the Electro-Weak Civilization, which is at the second level, cannot travel at a very high speed is not just the energy acquisition and propulsion method."

The fleets of electro-weak civilizations generally have a speed no greater than 5% of the speed of light.

Previously, the speed of Bluetuk's fleet was 3% of the speed of light. Li Qingsong's fleet had a higher speed, but it was only 4% of the speed of light.

The faster the speed, the more fuel will be consumed to accelerate, which may result in not having enough fuel to slow down in the future.

This is certainly one of the reasons, but it now seems that the extreme weakening of the spacecraft's armor performance caused by the impact of interstellar dust is also an important factor.

A collision at just 4% of the speed of light can lead to such serious consequences. If the speed is faster, the consequences will be even more serious.

Don't forget that Newton's classical mechanics is not applicable at high speeds, but the theory of relativity must be introduced. As the speed increases, the impact force increases not linearly, but exponentially.

Even if the speed increases by only 1%, the impact will increase by a hundred times.

In this case, the spacecraft may even fall apart before flying for long.

"The Blueprint people said that the fleet of a third-level strong nuclear civilization can even travel at speeds of 70 to 80 percent of the speed of light. With such high speeds, how do they solve the dust impact problem?"

With just a speed, the power of the nuclear civilization was fully demonstrated to Li Qingsong.

Li Qingsong increasingly felt that his decision to leave the solar system and escape was the right one.

Such a powerful civilization is definitely not something I can contend with at my current stage.