Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 1617 Broadening Horizons

The distance of a dozen light-years is just a matter of "lifting a leg" for the Great Voyage Organization. In fact, even without deliberately deciphering the information on the metal plate, the Great Voyage Organization could find this unknown civilization simply by scanning the nearby stars in detail.

Since they had already seen it, they decided to try and decipher it to see what interesting content it contained. The result was indeed quite good, at least piquing the interest of scientists and even the general public from various civilizations.

We've seen plenty of two-dimensional space, but we've never seen what two-dimensional creatures look like, and everyone is very curious.

Although we had encountered paper-based civilizations before, those guys only turned their warships into two-dimensional pieces of paper, and they could still travel freely in three-dimensional spacetime. They were completely different from creatures born in a two-dimensional world.

After arriving at their destination, the Great Voyage Organization quickly discovered the planet where the target civilization was located.

What you first see is a stable star and a stable two-dimensional white dwarf, along with a dozen or so stable planets orbiting around it. From a three-dimensional perspective, you can clearly see that they look like a bunch of small circles moving around the center of mass.

Clearly, this is a common binary star system.

It consists of a star and a white dwarf, which are intertwined and move together around the central center of mass, while the outer planets revolve around the binary system formed by these two stars.

Binary star systems are common in the universe, and it seems that this is also true in the two-dimensional world. The Great Voyage Organization has seen many binary star systems along the way.

After observing this binary star system, astronomers and dimensional physicists collaborated on observations and research. The final conclusion was that this binary star system was a newly formed star in a two-dimensional world, rather than the original three-dimensional stars that had been flattened.

Astrophysicists have also participated in the research, believing that these newborn stars most likely originated from the loss of mass when a three-dimensional star was reduced to two dimensions, which then reassembled under the influence of two-dimensional gravity. Some experts also believe they are composed of the remnants of a three-dimensional celestial explosion, much like the second and third generations of stars in the three-dimensional world.

It seems that both explanations are possible.

Although they cannot provide definitive answers immediately, their research clearly plays an important role in improving cosmological models, will leave a significant mark on the physical rules governing alien spaces in human civilization, and will further enhance human civilization's ability to revise and repair these rules.

Studying from a three-dimensional perspective is always faster and more intuitive than from a two-dimensional perspective. Scientists from various civilizations in the Great Voyage Organization only needed to glance at the probes to gain a thorough understanding of this binary star system.

Next, civilizations naturally turned their attention to planets with life.

The planet's diameter is not large, probably due to variations in gravitational strength. The planet in front of us, or rather, the "star ring," has a diameter of only six thousand kilometers, which is smaller than Mars.

As the probe zoomed in, the planet's condition gradually became clear to everyone.

First, it can be confirmed that this "star ring" also has hills of varying heights, just like most planets in the three-dimensional world. From a distance, they appear as flat spheres, but up close, they are undulating mountains.

This "star ring" has distinct concentric layers from the inside out, resembling a cross-section of the Earth seen in an atlas.

From a three-dimensional perspective, in space outside the "star ring," one can clearly see pieces of two-dimensional objects floating and surrounding the "star ring."

It's not hard to see that these should be the "artificial satellites" of this "star circle".

Even the various civilizations of the Great Voyage Organization discovered that on the moon of that life-bearing star system, there were many sheet-like two-dimensional creations. From small things, one can see great things.

It can be seen that the civilization of this unknown two-dimensional creature is quite advanced; they have even "landed on the moon" and built bases on their three "moons".

Moreover, the latest updated detection data shows that this civilization is already showing a tendency to venture into deeper space.

At a glance, one can see many spacecraft traveling between their home planet and three satellites.

It seems they have a deep understanding of space. Well, otherwise they wouldn't be able to send their "Voyager" spacecraft into space, would they?

The world looks interesting from a three-dimensional perspective, but it's not so interesting from a two-dimensional perspective. Looking around, the stars in the sky are all in the shape of lines, whether they are luminous or not, and they are arranged linearly in the sky.

It gives people a feeling of being very monotonous, boring, and depressing.

When we first encountered the paper civilization, people imagined what it would be like to live in that world. Now that we have seen it, although it is somewhat different from what we imagined, the monotonous, dull, and oppressive feeling remains unchanged.

As for how it differs from what I imagined.

First, let's look at the appearance of two-dimensional creatures.

After all, people at that time used humans as the starting point for their imagination, so in their imagination, two-dimensional creatures were also like flattened humans, living on paper.

But the two-dimensional beings we see now are not like that. Their activities or ways of moving, their daily travel, how they avoid each other when they meet, how they build ground transportation, and so on have opened the eyes of us three-dimensional beings.

In fact, similar ideas have existed throughout the history of human scientific development.

Gauss once proposed the concept of a two-dimensional being, and later, with Riemann establishing Riemannian geometry, many scientists raised practical and mundane questions about the existence of two-dimensional beings. For example: how does a two-dimensional being eat?
Scientists at the time called him Gauss's two-dimensional man.

They imagined that in order to eat, Gauss's two-dimensional man had to face the side, but if you drew their digestive tract, things would be bad, because the digestive tract completely splits the two-dimensional man's body in two.

Therefore, if two-dimensional people were to eat, their bodies would split into two pieces. Scientists say that, in fact, any tube connecting the two openings of their body would divide their body into two unconnected parts.

what does this mean?
This implies two answers, according to scientists at the time: either these two-dimensional beings eat like us and their bodies will be broken apart, or they follow biological laws different from ours.

It must be said that the scientists of that time were quite remarkable; they were right. The biological laws followed by two-dimensional organisms are different from those of three-dimensional organisms.

They do indeed rely on the ability to ingest food and also have a digestive tract, but they are not split in two by these two channels.

In order to understand how these two-dimensional beings eat and excrete, the Great Voyage Organization aimed its probes at the organisms on the surface of the "Star Circle" as soon as it arrived, observing their daily lives from both two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives.

(End of this chapter)