Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 704: Traces of Civilization

With the help of the intermediate-stage navigation technology of the fourth-level civilization, humans' journey across the spiral arm was relatively smooth. Although they had to develop a relay navigation method to cross the two stars that were the farthest apart, there were no accidents on the journey.

After emptying the transport ship of antimatter, it only took the human fleet thirty years to travel the rest of the way and reach the star on the other side.

However, within this star system, humans were surprised to discover some traces of civilization.

Originally, humans planned to blow up a rocky planet here to replenish some supplies, and then use these rocks as heavy nuclear fusion fuel to produce antimatter. After replenishing the antimatter fuel, they would go directly to the Perseus Arm.

But when the probe spacecraft arrived at the target star system and reported back the situation inside the star system, all the top human leaders couldn't help but shudder.

This star system has a red dwarf star, which is the most common star in the universe, as its main sequence star. Humans, who have not encountered a single star system for a long time, find it very rare. Scientists explain from the perspective of the evolution of the Milky Way that this may be because the density of matter here was low in the distant past, and the mass was insufficient to form a multiple star system.

This red dwarf is one-third larger than the well-known Proxima Centauri, but it still belongs to the category of red dwarfs. As a main sequence star, it has four planets under its gravitational bond, two of which are rocky planets and the other two are gaseous planets.

However, these two gas planets are not typical Jovian planets. They both have beautiful rings like Saturn's rings. One of them is very small, only about 600 times the size of the Earth, which is considered small among gas planets. If compared with Jupiter, it is less than half the size of Jupiter.

The two gas planets are located in the two outermost orbits of the main sequence stars, and they orbit once every twenty years.

The first and second orbits are the orbits of two rocky planets, but they are very close to the red dwarf, much closer than Mercury is to the sun, and are within the range of tidal locking of the red dwarf. Because they are too close, the average surface temperature of one of the planets facing the star is around 800 degrees Celsius, which is very unfavorable for mining.

The temperature has reached the melting point of granite, and the magma formed by the melting of granite is acidic magma, so most of its surface is magma ocean, and only a small part of rocks such as andesite can still maintain its rock properties.

The other one is even hotter, with the temperature on the side facing the star reaching thousands, which can basically be said to be a half-magma planet. But the side facing away from the star remains at around -100 degrees Celsius all year round.

On one side is the extremely hot magma, and on the other side is the cold world, it is like a world of ice and fire.

The images sent back from the detector are quite spectacular, especially the dividing line between hot and cold, which is both the dividing line between day and night.

Because one side is roasted all year round, these two planets always have a very hot core, so that volcanic eruptions often occur on the side facing away from the red dwarf.

Logically, volcanic eruptions would bring a lot of gas to the surface of the two planets, and then form planetary atmospheres. However, the fact is that the masses of these two planets are too small, and their gravity is not enough to bind the atmosphere, so that over the years, their gases have escaped into the universe and were blown into the vast space by the occasional stellar winds of red dwarf stars.

And because these two planets are semi-magmatic planets, their internal activities are so intense that all the gases inside them have been sprayed out, leaving only the rolling magma.

It would be very difficult to use star destroyers to blow up planets in such an environment to extract minerals, because they are too close to the star. The explosion would expose the entire planetary fragments to the stellar flames and turn them into lumps of magma in the starry sky. Large structures would also reassemble into a magma ball under the action of gravity.

Therefore, if you want to obtain mineral resources from these two planets, the best way is to send mining equipment to their backs for mining. However, it seems that humans no longer need to mine on these two planets, because humans have discovered a large group of asteroids in the orbit of the other outermost gas planet.

It was the gaseous planet that was less than half the size of the wood. In its inner and outer orbits were scattered asteroids of all sizes, some thousands of kilometers across and some tens or hundreds of kilometers across.

It was like an asteroid belt, but it was in the orbit of a gaseous planet. Human scientists could tell the anomaly at a glance without anyone telling them.

It stands to reason that such an asteroid belt should be in the orbit of a planet, but how could it be in the orbit of a gas planet's satellite?

Sure enough, after using the detector to explore, scientists quickly discovered the abnormality.

They found that these asteroids were distributed extremely unevenly. They were not all distributed in satellite orbits, but were concentrated on one side.

Humans are very familiar with the distribution of this kind of wood, just like the distribution of planetary fragments that were blown out when they used star destroyers to mine.

Sure enough, after close field investigations by spacecraft, people discovered that these asteroids should now be put in quotation marks, because they are not asteroids at all, but fragments of planets.

This obviously could not be the planet's own explosion, but rather the work of a certain civilization, which came here and destroyed the two rocky satellites of this gaseous planet with star-destroying weapons.

So why don't they have any intention of destroying the only two planets on this gas giant?
The answer is obvious: it is the same as what humans did in the past, for heavy metal minerals, for energy, and for various resources.

That is to say, a long time ago, there may have been a civilization that carried out cross-spiral navigation like humans do today, except that humans went from the Orion Arm to the Perseus Arm, while that unknown civilization went just the other way around.

Now, the wandering planet fragments, like a pile of asteroids, are the traces of their resource exploitation in the past.

"It seems that it's not just humans who use star destroyers to mine for convenience, other civilizations do it too!"

Seeing this situation, many people silently muttered in their hearts.

That's true. After all, there is no absolute overlord ruler in this universe to constrain the behavior of all civilizations. No one cares about things like blowing up planets, so each civilization can do whatever is convenient for them.

Judging from the mining methods and the behavior of crossing the spiral arm from this position, the technological level of that civilization at that time should have been similar to that of humans today, otherwise they would either have to cross it directly or not have been able to get through.

Now, after detecting these planet fragments, humans have discovered that they have not been fully utilized. Spectral detectors have detected the spectrum information of some heavy metals. For civilizations that have achieved heavy nuclear fusion, rocks themselves are a kind of fuel that can be burned to obtain energy, so this piece of planet fragments is a ready-made resource collection site.

(End of this chapter)