Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones.

Chapter 194 "Alchemy"

Although Li Qingsong has not seriously developed technology over the years, he has made some technological progress.

During these years on Altair, these technological advances have been incorporated into spacecraft construction, resulting in a certain degree of improvement in the performance of existing spacecraft compared to the original solar system migration fleet.

This is also the reason why Li Qingsong was able to increase the fleet's acceleration by 50%, from 0.04 meters to 0.06 meters per square second.

The fleet continued to accelerate, and the distance from Altair grew farther and farther. Li Qingsong then noticed that the density of matter around him was rapidly decreasing. The asteroids that were almost everywhere gradually became sparse, and then gradually disappeared. Without looking for them, they were no longer visible.

However, Li Qingsong did discover some special asteroids.

These asteroids have extremely flat orbits, which means that their aphelion - the sun here of course refers to Altair - can be extremely far away, and their perihelion can be extremely close.

By observing their orbits, Li Qingsong gradually understood.

This is obviously a small celestial body that was thrown out under the gravitational pull of large planets, Altair and other large celestial bodies.

In the long evolution in the future, their orbits will become larger and larger, and farther and farther away from Altair, and eventually converge into an asteroid belt about 100 billion kilometers away from Altair, just like the Kuiper belt in the solar system.

Some asteroids have even more unique orbits. Simulating the motion of celestial bodies within Altair, Li Qingsong believes that in the distant future, they will have even more distant orbits, perhaps even reaching out to over a light-year away, orbiting Altair.

Moreover, with the evolution of the Altair Galaxy, more internal celestial bodies will be ejected and integrated into the orbits of these two types of asteroids, making them more and more numerous and larger in scale.

By that time, Altair's Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud will be formed, and its interior will become stable, with no longer so many asteroid impacts.

Today’s solar system is tomorrow’s Altair.

However, there are some differences between the two.

The larger the mass of Altair, the faster its fusion burning rate, and the shorter its lifespan. In about three billion years, it will enter the end of its life.

Perhaps until it evolves into a white dwarf, it will not have time to form a mature Oort Cloud. Who can say for sure?

There are so many variables involved that even Li Qingsong cannot be 100% sure.

While carefully observing everything in the Altair Galaxy, he did not miss any opportunity to improve his knowledge and understanding of galaxy evolution, while manipulating the huge fleet to accelerate at full power.

Time passed slowly, and in the blink of an eye, more than six years had passed.

At this time, the speed of Li Qingsong's fleet had increased to 4% of the speed of light, about 1.2 kilometers per second, and the distance from Altair had expanded to more than trillion kilometers.

The apparent magnitude of Altair seen from here is still as high as -10, which is still enough to cast shadows on objects.

If it were the sun, it would still be bright at this distance, but it would no longer be able to cast a shadow.

The speed of 4% of the speed of light is already equal to the highest speed when leaving the solar system before.

But at this moment, Li Qingsong's fleet still did not stop accelerating, and still maintained full power, an acceleration of 0.06 meters per square second.

This continued for another 3.2 years, until the fleet's speed reached 6% of the speed of light, or approximately 1.8 kilometers per second. This was already on par with the speed Li Qingsong had originally set. But at this moment, Li Qingsong still didn't stop accelerating!
The huge fleet continued to increase its speed, which lasted for about 3.2 years.

It was not until the fleet's speed reached 8% of the speed of light, or about 2.4 kilometers per second, that the thrusters, which had been working for more than ten years, were shut down at the same time.

Acceleration stops and coasting begins.

For an electroweak civilization, a speed of 8% of the speed of light is almost unimaginable. Not to mention the problem of particle collisions, the fuel alone would not be enough to support it.

But just in the Altair galaxy, with such a short period of technological development, and in the process of industrial production and quantum supercomputing research and development, Li Qingsong allocated a small part of his brainpower to integrate the conjectures and breakthroughs accumulated during the previous migration of the solar system, which improved the overall performance of the fleet by more than 5%, laying the foundation for accelerating to such a high speed.

Afterwards, 20 times the size of the solar system migration fleet, after removing the fuel, five times the additional supplies carried before laid the material foundation for the fleet.

As for the particle impact problem?

It doesn't matter much.

After entering the inertial navigation state, Li Qingsong immediately dispatched a large number of robots and clones, boarding special spaceships, to take out rolls of "plastic cloth" from the warehouse, and then pasted them on the outer shell of each spaceship like mobile phone screen protectors.

These plastic sheets were specially developed by Li Qingsong. They have extremely high technological content and good anti-radiation properties.

But they are still just some hydrocarbons in the final analysis, and there is nothing wrong with calling them plastic sheets.

Therefore, those interstellar dust particles can only hit these plastic sheets, and any damage they cause will only destroy the structure of the plastic sheets, and will no longer be able to damage the spacecraft's armor.

When these plastic sheets are damaged to a certain extent, they will be removed and recycled, and then new plastic sheets will be pasted on the hull of the spacecraft.

As a result, Li Qingsong transformed the particle collision problem from a scientific and technological problem into a material problem - as long as I bring enough plastic sheets, I don’t have to worry about particle collisions, and the problem is solved.

Li Qingsong had first achieved a speed of 8% of the speed of light, and this type of plastic sheeting was also the first time it was used on a large scale.

During the voyage, Li Qingsong closely observed the changes in the plastic sheets. He noticed that compared to their initial black, tough, and smooth appearance, as time passed, the plastic sheets gradually turned into a variety of mixed colors such as gray, black, red, and green.

Their texture also began to become sparse, porous and fragile.

This process took only five years.

"Can a batch of plastic sheeting last five years? Yes, that's in line with expectations."

After replacing the new plastic sheet, Li Qingsong threw the old plastic sheet into the furnace, where it began to melt and then be reshaped.

So the plastic cloth, which was originally composed of only carbon and oxygen elements, melted into dozens of elements such as gold, silver, copper, iron, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, etc., like a big hodgepodge.

After the first batch of hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic cloth were purified and reshaped, Li Qingsong looked at the gold bar weighing about 150 grams in front of him - the gold element was also one of the impurities, and it was only purified at this moment. He felt quite amused.

"I didn't expect this thing could be used for alchemy, tsk tsk."

(End of this chapter)