Age of Cosmic Exploration

Chapter 384: Surveillance

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Whether to venture into the green light or not, this was truly a troublesome question…

Thankfully, they were still 3 months away from the green light, so there was enough time for the people on the Hope to come to an agreeable decision.

Life moved on…

The citizens of the Hope felt anxiety and consternation when they left warp drive and saw the many alien spaceships outside the window. However, to prevent mass hysteria, the human government had already clarified the situation in a morning announcement at around 6 AM.

After realizing that they were not invaded by any aliens and life went on as usual on the Hope, the emotions of the public gradually returned to normal. Even though in the initial few days there was worry that aliens would suddenly storm the ship or the Hope would be decimated in the middle of the night, as time passed, after about half a month of nothing interesting, the people on the Hope had gotten used to this situation. Certain busybodies even started critiquing the spaceships around the Hope or used this opportunity to soak up as much information about other space civilizations as they could.

This was especially shocking for Blue 6 because there had never been any space civilizations, at least from those that they had known, to be so hardworking. Compared to humanity, almost all of the space civilizations were in a state of laziness. After all, the common lifespan for an alien civilization after they entered space was several hundred or even one thousand years, and thus many space civilizations extended their studying period to more than one hundred years. This was something unimaginable for humanity. One hundred years? That was pretty much a lifetime for human beings.

Similarly, humanity's hardworking nature was something unimaginable for Blue 6.

Thanks to this, 3 years after the war at the Shelter, the proposal to update the Gravity Cannon was ready and the person behind this proposal was not the Whisperer, Bo Li.

"…When the anti-gravity systems are layered on top of each other, we can see clearly the wave fluctuation of the systems. On this, I have done some improvement. After all, this is not supposed to be a simple layering on top of each other, there has been a conceptual mistake. We are modelling the system using energy and so they are not in a physical state like the ones on the Hope. Because of that, we don't need to care about the limitation of three dimensional space. And this is the newly updated version of the Gravity Cannon…"

In a meeting room in the Academy, a middle-aged Caucasian man was explaining his proposal to improve the Gravity Cannon excitedly on stage. This man was not a random person, he was a famous physicist from the Noah One. He was nearly 70, but thanks to the usage of the genetic mesomeric device, he looked to be in his 30s.

This famous physicist was a shining example of the survivors from the Noah One. Ever since they were rescued, they had assimilated into life on the Hope in the shortest amount of time. After all, they were all humans, the biggest difference being skin color and language, a difference that was barely noticeable in the context of space. Therefore, the assimilation was smooth.

The only thing that rubbed the survivors from the Noah One the wrong way was that their political demands were not met.

However, the fault did not lie with the human government or Yao Yuan. After all, before saving the Noah One, the Hope's governmental system had already stabilized, especially after the period of peace on the new planet. Unless this human government did something truly out of sorts with the public, it would continue to enjoy a support of more than 90 percent approval rating on the Hope.

In short, the elites from the Noah One were disappointed that they were not invited to become part of the leading community on the Hope, be it among the House of Representatives, the Barracks, the Academy, the Workshop, or even the world of business. If anything, they were given a later start than everyone else. However, they too realized this had its cons too because this meant that the Hope was a true meritocracy, and from there, they worked harder to improve themselves. An example was this famous physicist who used the shortest amount of time to familiarize himself with the scientific developments and standards on the Hope and later focused on his own field to impress everyone.

Through the calculations by the Academy and the AI's simulation, this physicist's design would improve the efficiency of the Gravity Cannon by 0.6 percent. Be it from the perspective of tidal force or the gravity system, he had opened a door for the scientists by using a different method of layering the energy systems, and perhaps the power of the Gravity Cannon could be further improved.

This physicist admitted that his inspiration came from the level 3 space civilization products Guang Zhen had seen at the Shelter, the atomic condensation of liquid and air. This impressive storage method by stacking atoms in small space gave him the inspiration for the new Gravity Cannon.

Improvements like this were happening all over the Hope. There were already scientists discussing the practicality of cold agglutination reactors, even though there was still at least a decade until the finished research of cold agglutination technology. This could already be considered part of the foreseeable future. In other words, the Hope already had one of its legs in the door to becoming a level 3 space civilization.

And then…

The Hope was getting closer and closer to the green light. So far, the Hope was about 10 days away from reaching the green light, but the question of entering it or not still hadn't been solved. The key issue was whether this green light was the so-called star path or not, and if it wasn't, then was it the ruin?

If this was the ruin, the fact that it had hypnotized all the space civilizations into coming into it was truly spine-chilling. It felt like… an ominous invitation, like a high-tier space civilization was attracting all the low level space civilizations for their own insidious purpose, just like the bug-eating plants back on Earth.

Therefore, the issue remained unsolved. For one, other than going forward into the green light, the Hope had no other visible choices, but on the other end, entering it without additional surveillance was simply too dangerous.

Finally, a compromise was made. It was to send a nonhuman piloted spaceship into the green light first to retrieve any information before deciding to enter it or not. Of course, there was also the possibility of the green light being a one-way opening… naturally, there was a solution to that too.

A super long nano rope could be released into the green light. The Hope could use this kind of primitive and physical method to find out more about this green light and what was behind it. If the rope was snipped or dissolved, then it meant that this green light was most likely dangerous, that it was some kind of super powered energy entity. In that case, the Hope was definitely not getting into the range of the green light.

In any case, to ensure the safety of the Hope, there had been more than ten proposals around the surveillance of the green light. Following the improvement in technology, the available surveillance method had also increased. Other than the one mentioned above, there were also energy simulation technology, nanobots, or super-atomic bombardment. With the Hope's current scientific level, creating these devices would require less than 24 hours. Therefore, for the sake of the best results, Yao Yuan approved every single one of the proposals. His only request was that all surveillance plans could only use lifeless robots or AI, no human pilots or volunteers were to be involved.

Time passed in waiting. In the three months the Hope was heading towards the green light, more than ten thousand alien spaceships had entered it. There were still plenty of spaceships wandering around this part of space. As one batch had entered the light, another batch appeared to fill up the space vacated. It was now that the people on the Hope realized just how crowded the cosmos was. Human beings had spent too little time in space, so they had the impression that the cosmos was empty. For most space civilizations, they had more than one spaceship. In fact, most of them had fleets. A space civilization with the Hope's type of existence where all of its several ten thousand population was in one mothership was quite possibly the sole exception in space.

It was also because of this that humanity had to be extra careful…

Finally, the Hope reached the edge of the green light. Another 10,000 kilometers and they would be inside the green light. With a closer look, the people on the Hope agreed that instead of light, this green "light" should be called fog, a fog that covered up that part of space…

"Activating pilotless surveillance spaceship, control of AI normal, creator's particle resonator functioning, energy system normal…"

"Initiating surveillance plan number one!"