Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 1284 Time is like a knife
At this time, the Great Voyage Organization was already 200 million light years away from the Milky Way. A distance of 200 million light years, taking into account various interstellar obstacles and detours, means that humans have been away from Earth for 3.3 million years. With such a long time, if there were no obstacles and no need to repair, they would have been able to run 700 million light years.

But the sixth-level civilization does not have such ability, and can only move inch by inch, circumnavigating the galaxies one by one. There are conventional voyages like leaving the virtual galaxy, and there are also star gate shuttles like leaving the Andromeda Galaxy.

All in all, the Great Voyage Organization is only 200 million light years away from the Milky Way. For humans, 3.3 million years have passed.

After all, the long time has left heavy traces of time on human civilization. Although humans themselves have used anti-entropy factors, the anti-entropy factor technology obtained from the Andromeda Galaxy cannot make life eternal. Even if the Daya civilization's long-term hibernation technology is used many times during the voyage, it is still inevitable to be eroded by time.

The sacred substance originally obtained from the Tiannv Civilization, which is the anti-entropy factor technology mentioned by the Great Voyage Organization, was initially estimated by scientists to be effective for 500,000 years, but the result was better than expected, and its effect lasted for one million years.

A million years is still too short for a long voyage. Human civilization has tried every possible way to put people to sleep, but it has not been able to make them immortal.

Under such circumstances, the first case of natural death from aging finally occurred in human civilization.

That was a hundred thousand years ago.

One day one hundred thousand years ago, a human citizen who got up early as usual found that he seemed to become a little weak. He didn't care at first, but after just a few months, he felt more and more tired. Later, he didn't want to eat, until he couldn't walk.

Finally, after testing, it was found that the cells in his body had undergone irreversible aging, and the aging process was very fast. Biological and medical workers tried every method, including the intake of anti-entropy factors or cryogenic hibernation, but they were unable to stop the process.

Finally, this human died of old age. His normal active age was 1,034 years. Including various dormant and hibernating times, he spent 3.2 million years in cosmic time.

His consciousness died with his body.

But that was just the beginning. After him, natural aging began to occur frequently in human society, and the aging speed was just as fast. Scientists speculated that rapid aging might be some side effect of the anti-entropy factor, but they could not find any evidence.

During those 100,000 years, human civilization seemed to have returned to the cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death of the Earth era, and no one could escape the knife of time.

It is not just ordinary people who die of natural aging. Even scientists who have access to more resources are not immune to it. Many elderly people cannot resist the erosion of time and enter old age after the anti-entropy factors lose their effectiveness.

During this period, in order to save the lives of top scientists in various fields, humans once again launched the consciousness uploading plan and the quantum life plan, trying to break free from the constraints of the flesh.

Some scientists set an example by uploading their consciousness before they died. After years of technological accumulation, they were able to upload their consciousness successfully. They had new mechanical bodies and electronic brains, but human civilization later discovered that these scientists who uploaded their consciousness had lost the creativity that intelligent life is most proud of.

They seemed to have turned into a highly intelligent being with human consciousness and extensive knowledge, and they also completely lost their third-person dream ability.

This is just like memory resurrection technology. It may make sense for individuals, but it is meaningless to the entire civilization.

In fact, with the emergence and application of these technologies, many people have seen the disadvantages and called for limiting the application of such technologies, because they will pollute the entire human civilization. If widely used, it will make human civilization a race without talent. They call on individuals in human civilization not to ruin the future of the entire civilization because of their desire to survive. Human ancestors continued to lead the progress of human civilization with a lifespan of only a hundred years. Now everyone basically has a lifespan of a million years, so don't be stingy with yourself.

Sometimes death is a contribution to human civilization.

However, not all humans want to die. As the saying goes, the older you get, the more you fear death. The selfish nature of intelligent life is reflected at this time. A large number of people who are about to die oppose this call, saying that the reason why consciousness uploading technology and memory resurrection technology will make humans lose their talents is not because of the problem of the technology itself, but because the level of technology mastered by humans is not enough.

Some people even call for human civilization to not slow down its research on quantum life. Otherwise, all of humanity would have evolved into quantum life forms by now, and the current situation would not have occurred.

The two sides each held their own views and engaged in a fierce dispute on various social networks.

In this situation, the interstellar government had to express its position. After all, this is indeed a matter of human civilization as a whole.

After weighing the pros and cons in many meetings, the interstellar government issued supplementary legal provisions on the application of life science technology, including a provision that each human being can only use consciousness uploading technology or memory resurrection technology once.

This is a compromise that takes both into account.

It not only avoids having too many untalented human individuals, but also takes care of the group that wishes to continue living.

Although this is not a perfect solution, it can at least resolve the sharp contradictions at this stage.

Of course, legal provisions are one thing, and specific personal behavior is another. Many individuals still face death calmly. At the moment of their life ending, they voluntarily give up the survival brought by these two technologies.

They are indeed contributing to human civilization through their natural death.

Because in the next 100,000 years, different groups will inevitably emerge in human society. The first group is the people who live another 500,000 years through memory resurrection technology, and the second group is humans with mechanical bodies through consciousness uploading technology.

Human civilization, which has been in interstellar space for many years, naturally does not have such narrow racial concepts, so they are of course also human beings, and in the legal sense everyone is still equal human citizens.

But no matter how much regulations the interstellar government has, it cannot change a person's thoughts.

There will always be people who think these people are inferior to themselves, and there are quite a few such people. They even privately mock these people for being afraid of death, so much so that sometimes even those soldiers who died for human civilization and were reborn because of these two technologies are severely verbally hurt.

And these things also evolved into social contradictions within human civilization.

(End of this chapter)