I ask you to build tractors, but you build rockets?

As Zhong Cheng listened to Lin Ju's narration, he gradually saw the beginning of the story in his mind:

In Amei in the 1950s, most of the wilderness areas were still uninhabited areas, but Guo Xiao loved exploring nature and discovered this huge unknown object by coincidence.

He initially thought it was a strange stone, but the aeronautical engineer's eyesight allowed him to quickly discover anomalies, and he discovered many extraordinary things from the delicate shell.

"Karst Black Stone", this is how Guo Xiao first called it. He put this thing in his garage as a collection, and even hoped to make a fortune through exhibitions.

But one day before he decided to take this action, when Guo Xiao was adjusting his black and white TV, he accidentally discovered that there was unknown interference.

After careful debugging, he finally discovered that it was a high-frequency signal with frighteningly high intensity, as if he had installed an antenna in his home.

But there are not many broadcast stations or other antennas nearby, not to mention that such frequencies hardly appear in daily life.

Guo Xiao made a simple homemade radio detector, circled it in a large circle and locked on the "Karst Black Stone".

A rock that emits a steady stream of signals?

Guo Xiao simply recorded the spectrum of the signal and found that its encryption method was not complicated and was very similar to the modulation method of TV broadcast signals at that time, so he modified his TV set so that it could receive and analyze the signal of the "Karst Black Stone".

The result of the analysis shocked him: the content of the signal was very simple. It was an introduction to a frequency band and the signal modulation method. It was easy to understand and made it easy for people to understand that the connection with the emission source could be established in this way.

At that time, the legend of extraterrestrial civilization had not yet spread widely, but this did not prevent Guo Xiao from keenly discovering that this ghost might have a great background. He had the courage to make his own launcher, and then imitated the "karst black stone" method and sent it to the mosaic. Cipher table.

He succeeded, and almost immediately received the Morse message sent back by the "Karst Black Stone", and the power was much smaller.

"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789?/()-·"

All the letters, numbers and symbols in the Morse code were compared. This was the first reply from the ‘Karst Black Stone’. It took Guo Xiao a long time to understand its meaning.

"Karst Black Stone" learned this encryption, but it probably did not know the meaning of the letters.

How do you make 'it' understand a completely different language?

You can still find ways to correspond to numbers and the like, but there may be ways to match letters, words, culture, etc., but Guo Xiao definitely does not have this ability. He is not a linguist or a litterateur.

At that time, he did not understand the way that AI could forcibly crack it through massive samples, and he was unwilling to expose the 'Karst Black Stone', so he could only hide in the basement and find ways to 'feed' it knowledge.

After three years of hard work, this poor quick language expert tried all kinds of methods in his spare time. One day, he may have given up on himself and simply typed in the text from his own drafting specification book.

From then on, he completely let himself go, sending his greetings, curses, expectations, and pleas to this strange rock in Pinyin or English. Sometimes he would also enter a music melody, and later even translate a TV program and send it over.

"Karst Black Stone" rarely responded to his messages after he spammed them, which may have contributed to his outrageous behavior.

Until one day, it replied to the first telegram with clear meaning:

"hello, human. (Hello, human)"

Six years after the "Karst Black Stone" was discovered, it finally accumulated sufficient learning samples through various chaotic channels and accurately expressed its intentions.

After greetings, it asked to contact through the TV, so a middle-aged man in his 60s really saw what artificial intelligence was.

‘Karst’ didn’t seem to be interested in chatting. After greeting him, he taught Guo Xiao a lesson on the screen.

Literally speaking, it was a more efficient automated control circuit, which corresponded to the work problem that Guo Xiao entered when he complained about the machine a few months ago. The engineer's intuition told him that "karst" was correct.

"Karst" has become a scientific wish-making machine. Many technical problems input by Guo Xiao have been given solutions, but they are limited to current practical technologies. If they are other questions or theoretical questions, there are no answers.

But before he could take advantage of this opportunity to show off his skills, "Karst" began to make conditions:

It asked Guo Xiao to build a rocket according to its requirements and send a 10 kilogram payload into Earth orbit. The mission period is 369 days.

In the special context of the 1960s, Guo Xiao himself was repeatedly marginalized and targeted. How could he complete this outrageous task?

At this time, the first artificial satellite had only been launched for a few years, and Gagarin was still preparing for his own adventure, so Guo Xiao failed unsurprisingly.

Of course Guo Xiao thought about reporting it to the federal government, but his identity and the situation at the time made him resolutely avoid this option, but it seemed impossible to return to the motherland with "Karst".

"Karst" fell silent and no longer sent any signals to the outside world. For such a long time, Guo Xiao even suspected that it was a big rock and that he had suffered from mental delusions.

It was not until nearly 9 years later, nearly 109 months later to be precise, that "Karst" woke up again and issued the same mission.

At the end of 1968, the mission failed again. This time Guo Xiao contacted several reliable Chinese engineers or scientists and formed an unknown small group.

In 1977, "Karst" woke up again, with the same mission. The small group made a lot of preparations in the past ten years, spent all their money and secretly launched three miniature rockets, and finally completed the mission.

"Karst" gave generous feedback and pointed out a completely different ternary development route to catch up with the wave of integrated circuits.

Not to mention how Guo Xiao’s team used this advanced knowledge, “Karst” followed up with a second task:

The deadline for building rockets and spacecrafts to send human astronauts into space is 1107 days.

In 1981, the mission failed.

In 1990, "Karst" woke up again and waited for three years before falling silent again. But at this time, Guo Xiao finally saw a glimmer of hope for private aerospace. Before his death, he found a way to push his nephew Guo Shen to NACA and began to absorb new people. members, officially naming the organization 'Blackstone'.

In 2002, 'Karst' woke up and released the mission again. Guo Xiao and other first-generation founders had passed away one after another, and it was difficult for successors to realize this dream. After all, the impact of Master's failure at that time was not fake, but They began to focus on research on ternary technology.

In 2005, before falling asleep again, perhaps "Karst" realized that this task was too difficult and downgraded it to "sending a payload of no less than 100 kilograms to Earth orbit for a period of 369 days", and was given the K120 engine technology for the first time.

After that, in 2006, Musk's SpecaX successfully launched "Falcon 1", and "Blackstone" finally felt confident enough to start preparing for the next awakening.

"Black Stone" was inherited from Digital Rootless Duckweed. Its successors finally chose the goal of being a forerunner. While making preparations, they decided to place the incubation site in China, just in time for the official release of the domestic aerospace market opening regulations in 2014. .

Xinyuan is here, and following Lin Ju back is Guo Shen, who has just resigned from NACA. With years of accumulation, Xinyuan No. 1 finally achieved the second mission of 'Karst'.