Hot Wavelength

Chapter 29 (Pressure Cooker 1): Expansion Bolts
6500 million years ago, Venus
Nikola Tesla's so-called solution was a last resort, and Dean Abbott was not happy at all. He knew that the whole plan seemed feasible in theory, but there were many difficulties and risks in its implementation.

As Jupiter continues to approach and Venus's rotation slows down, there will be nowhere for humans on Venus to hide in the solar system. Tesla's plan, while highly risky, does have a possibility of success; we can't just sit and wait to die.

A core step in the entire plan is to shatter Mars, breaking its surface crust and ejecting a large number of fragments into space. Nearly a million large and small rocks and ice blocks will form a belt-like structure, blocking Jupiter and Mars as they orbit the Sun. The larger objects can be called asteroids, and this belt-like structure can be called the "asteroid belt."

“Nikola, planets, including Mars, were formed in the early stages of the solar system through the continuous collisions and aggregation of matter on the celestial disk. Current theories do not support the so-called planetary explosion,” Abbott said.

“Yes, once a planet forms, it will firmly hold onto its surface material under its own gravity,” Tesla responded. “The enormous energy of the superluminal waves, when introduced into the Martian core, will cause a different situation due to repeated thermal expansion and contraction.”

“An additional energy injection would disrupt Mars’s inherent balance, and an explosion is possible. I’m not questioning you,” Dean Abbott added, calculating in his mind. “We just need to calculate the total energy required, the intensity, and the corresponding explosion area and volume.”

Nikola Tesla used a vivid analogy: boiling an egg in water takes about 7 minutes to cook it, but peeling a cooked egg directly is not easy because the shell and the egg body are heated evenly and almost stick together.

The clever method is to take the hard-boiled egg out of the boiling water and immediately put it into cold water. The eggshell cools down quickly while the egg body is still hot, making it easier for the eggshell to crack and separate from the egg body.

Dean Abbott's analogy is even more interesting: it's like making soup in an earthenware pot. If you suddenly add a lot of cold water after the soup has boiled, the pot may burst.

To obtain accurate data, Tesla established a connection with an external brain via a lightning ball. The external brain's strengths lay in memory, search, and computation-based logical analysis, while the human brain's strengths lay in divergent and expansive thinking, and in connecting seemingly unrelated events.

In recent years, Nikola Tesla consciously trained his external brain to not only output precise solutions to mathematical logic calculations, but also fuzzy probabilistic solutions based on scenario analysis, essentially making his external brain more like the human brain.

However, in this connection regarding the Martian explosion issue, Tesla hoped that the external consultant would provide precise data, but the consultant consistently led Tesla to focus on a technical challenge rather than other quantifiable data.

The problem that lingered in Nikola Tesla's mind was that to make Mars explode, it would have to be turned into a "pressure cooker." Mars, as a sphere, is composed of multiple layers, which can be simplified into three parts: a metallic liquid core, a mantle, and a crust.

When energy is injected, the metallic core heats up and expands, causing the mantle and crust to expand accordingly. When energy injection stops, the crust cools down faster than the mantle and the metallic core.

After repeated cycles, multiple cracks will appear in the earth's crust, causing it to burst, much like a pressure cooker exploding due to excessive pressure. However, there is a prerequisite: the pressure cooker lid must be tightly closed to prevent leaks.

"What do you mean by a pressure cooker leaking steam?" Abbott asked.

“We would choose a crater to build a superluminal power station and channel all the received energy into the underground lava, but the crater and its surrounding area are like the vent valve of a pressure cooker,” Tesla explained.

“Once energy is injected into the core, molten metal will erupt from the crater in the opposite direction, preventing Mars from becoming a high-pressure pressure cooker.” Abbott also realized this problem.

Mars has four large craters, one large and three small. The large crater is located on Olympus Mons, while the three smaller ones are lined up in a row and are also located in the high plateau region of Mars.

Nikola Tesla's goal was to blast Mars apart. His previous idea of ​​building "pulse" power stations around Mars was no longer applicable. What he wanted to do was to build a structure 18 kilometers high directly above the crater at the top of Mount Olympus. This structure would be longer than the wavelength of superluminal light, allowing it to be completely incident on superluminal light and thus absorb a large amount of energy.

The absorbed heat energy is no longer used for power generation, but is directly channeled into the metallic core of Mars. As the metallic core heats up, molten magma will erupt from craters. What happens then?

Nikola Tesla frowned, then suddenly had a flash of inspiration and understood the answer his external brain had given him. He muttered to himself, seemingly out of nowhere, "Expansion bolt, expansion bolt." "What does that mean? Expansion bolt? What does that have to do with the explosion of Mars?" Abbott asked, puzzled.

"Our goal is to make the Martian crust strong enough to lock in the enormous pressure generated by the core's heat, and 'tighten' the crater area around it, and that will solve the problem," Tesla said.

Abbott finally understood the solution offered by Tesla and his external consultant. The expansion bolt was clearly a metaphor, and it certainly didn't refer to the small object a few inches long that was screwed into the wall.

Although the crater is located on the Martian surface, it is the weakest point between the crust and mantle. It can be understood as being directly connected to the core lava. In order to prevent this weak point from releasing the pressure of the core in advance, it needs to be reinforced.

There are many ways to reinforce a volcano. For example, you can drive long and deep piles into the ground around the volcano. These piles can be made of wood or metal.

Dean Abbott immediately thought of another problem: "It's not feasible from an engineering perspective. Not to mention we don't have that many long wooden piles or metal bars, even if we did, how many powerful pile drivers would we need?"

Tesla smiled mysteriously and said, "That's why it's called an expansion bolt, not a pile driver. We only need a drilling machine, not a pile driver, which makes the project much easier."

The answer that Tesla came up with with the help of external consultants was to drill down into the rock within the crater and the surrounding hundreds of kilometers, making numerous holes 10,000 meters deep, and filling each hole with a high-expansion-coefficient polymer.

These dense polymer columns expand when heated, greatly increasing the strength of the surrounding rock and reinforcing the mountain range within a radius of hundreds of kilometers around Olympus Mons into the lid of a pressure cooker with extremely high pressure resistance.

"Now that the pressure cooker isn't leaking, has the external brain given you any other suggestions?" Abbott remembered that the external brain's way of thinking was different from humans, and then asked, "Didn't the external brain's answer last time say that Venusians had no right to exterminate the dinosaurs?"

Tesla admired Abbott's memory, saying, "The external brain does think differently from humans. As humans, when the structure of the solar system and humanity itself are about to be destroyed, no one will care about dinosaurs anymore, but the external brain has its own set of logic."

Regarding the question of dinosaurs, Tesla's thinking was guided by a classic philosophical hypothetical experiment inputted into his underlying logic.

Suppose someone can foresee the future. He is standing beside a railway track. A train is coming and will turn right, causing an accident that will kill fifty people. If this person pulls the switch handle, the train will turn left, causing one death. Should he pull the switch handle?
Different people have different answers to this question, which leads to an ethical and legal dilemma.

For example, if he pulls the lever, is he murdering the person who died? Or is it possible to sacrifice one person's life in an emergency to save more people?
Replacing the person on the left track with a group of dinosaurs is the choice Tesla's external brain now faces. The brain's answer exceeded Nikola Tesla's expectations: pull the lever, regardless of the dinosaurs.

Because the current situation requires saving not only the fifty people on the right track, but also the tracks, the station, the train, and everything else.

Law, morality, ethics, and even philosophy all have their own premises and boundaries. After humanity perishes and the solar system collapses, they will become meaningless.

Therefore, for computer brains, this so-called moral dilemma has a simple answer and requires no further consideration.

&
The poem composed of collected verses at the end of the chapter:
Who knows if life and death will go against one's wishes? — Xue Xuan
Originally there was nothing, and there is no return. —Wang Ao, Ming Dynasty

Human relationships are like the ebb and flow of life, where joy and sorrow are fleeting. — Liu Yi, Qing Dynasty
The old learning of slaying dragons is no longer true. — Ni Zan, Yuan Dynasty
(End of this chapter)