Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones.

Chapter 174 Dust
In this way, during this interstellar voyage, Li Qingsong only needs to bring enough deuterium, and he does not need to bring so much food or build a huge planting base.

Time continued to pass by bit by bit, and in the blink of an eye, more than two hundred years had passed.

At this moment, the distance between Li Qingsong and the sun has reached about 9 light years.

Looking at the sun from this distance, you can't find anything special about it.

It has truly merged into the sea of stars, turning into an ordinary, slightly dim star, inconspicuous.

There are still several light years of journey waiting for Li Qingsong ahead.

At this distance, Li Qingsong's fleet broke into a cloud of interstellar dust.

This type of interstellar dust cloud is actually quite common in interstellar space, and comes in various sizes, but it is simply invisible under normal circumstances.

The density of interstellar dust clouds is higher than that of ordinary interstellar space, which also means a higher frequency of dust impact events.

A single interstellar dust collision is not a big deal, but if it happens too many times, even an aerospace carrier with a mass of hundreds of millions of tons will have its course affected, causing it to deviate slightly from its target.

In interstellar travel, even the slightest mistake can lead to a huge error.

If it were the Bluetuk people, they would have to maneuver inside the nebula, adjust and maintain their course to prevent them from deviating too much and not having enough fuel to make adjustments later.

It was because of this that the Bluetuk fleet "lit up" the nebula, which was then noticed by Li Qingsong.

However, this nebula doesn’t matter to Li Qingsong.

If it deviates, it deviates. I have enough fuel anyway, and I can adjust it later. Remaining silent at this moment to avoid lighting up the nebula will also effectively avoid being noticed by that omnic scourge.

So Li Qingsong did not move at all, allowing countless particles of the interstellar dust cloud to hit the spacecraft, slowly and slightly changing the course of the fleet.

It took a year of traveling through the interstellar dust cloud, covering a distance of about 3500 billion kilometers, before it finally passed through this dust cloud.

Ahead, Altair is becoming brighter.

Looking back, Li Qingsong quietly looked at the nebula he had just passed through, but he only saw the vast and clear sky of the universe and countless stars, and nothing else, as if the nebula did not exist at all.

It is so sparse and has such low density that it is almost completely transparent and cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Its material density is even lower than the vacuum specially produced in laboratories by people in the Earth country era.

But why can such a place with extremely low matter density still be called a nebula?
The reason is of course simple, because the density of matter is lower in other places.

The matter in interstellar space is so sparse.

But even though it is so sparse, it is the mother of all stars.

Perhaps one day in the future, under the influence of some violent physical processes, such as a supernova explosion, this nebula will begin to collapse inward, becoming increasingly dense, and eventually condense into a star.

The original solar system was born from such a nebula.

The endless dust condensed into the sun, condensed into the Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and other large planets, condensed into countless asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, and so on.

This process is still happening in the universe today.

When a star ages, the dust that makes up the star will be thrown out by the star and form a nebula again, waiting for the next opportunity to condense into a macroscopic celestial body.

Thousands of stars cycled in this way, over and over again. Through observing this nebula, Li Qingsong's knowledge of the macroscopic evolution of the universe was greatly enhanced.

But at this moment, Li Qingsong was more concerned about another thing.

Regardless of the future fate of this nebula, whether it can form a new star or even give birth to life, at least at this stage, it has caused some trouble to Li Qingsong.

After sending out a large number of clones and robots to conduct a series of precise inspections on the armor of the leading spacecraft in front, Li Qingsong smiled bitterly in his heart.

"This nebula has reduced the performance of my spaceship's armor by at least 10%... I need to repair it. Otherwise, they might not be able to withstand the overload during deceleration, and the entire spaceship might fall apart."

Motion is relative. If our fleet moves at 1.2 kilometers per second, it is equivalent to the dust molecules in this dust cloud hitting the spacecraft armor at 1.2 kilometers per second.

Under this high-speed impact, the atomic nuclei and chemical bonds of the particles that make up the spacecraft's armor may be directly broken, leading to a series of changes in properties and even elemental changes.

A hydrogen atom might accidentally acquire a proton and become helium.

An iron atom might be smashed into a lithium or beryllium atom.

Iron oxide may be decomposed into oxygen atoms and iron atoms.

As a result, the originally complete spacecraft armor will become like a worm-eaten wooden board, with more rotten areas, eventually leading to a decrease in overall performance.

This kind of thing has actually been happening before entering this nebula. It's just that because the density of matter outside the nebula is lower, the process is slower. Now that we have entered the nebula, the process has been accelerated.

In just one year, the armor performance plummeted.

Li Qingsong pondered secretly, "Perhaps, the reason why the fleet of the Electroweak Civilization, a second-level civilization, cannot travel at a very high speed isn't just due to energy acquisition and propulsion methods."

The fleets of electro-weak civilizations generally have a speed no greater than 5% of the speed of light.

Previously, the Bluetuk fleet's speed was 3% of the speed of light. Li Qingsong's fleet's speed was slightly higher, but still only 4% of the speed of light.

The faster the speed, the more fuel will be consumed to accelerate, which may result in not having enough fuel to slow down in the future.

This is certainly one of the reasons, but it now seems that the extreme weakening of the spacecraft's armor performance caused by the impact of interstellar dust is also an important factor.

A collision at just 4% the speed of light can lead to such serious consequences. If the speed is faster, the consequences will definitely be more serious.

Don't forget that Newtonian classical mechanics doesn't apply at high speeds; instead, relativity comes into play. As speed increases, the impact force doesn't increase linearly, but exponentially.

Even if the speed increases by only 1%, the impact of the collision will increase by a hundred times.

In this case, the spacecraft may even fall apart before flying for long.

"The Blueprint people say that a third-level strong nuclear civilization's fleet can reach speeds of up to 70 to 80 percent of the speed of light. With such high speeds, how do they solve the dust impact problem?"

Just a speed of navigation fully demonstrated the power of nuclear civilization to Li Qingsong.

Li Qingsong increasingly felt that his decision to leave the solar system was the right one.

Such a powerful civilization is definitely not something I can contend with at my current stage.

(End of this chapter)