The stars, but they become the gray wind

.........

"We need someone to represent the Soviet Space Agency to go to Houston to complete the final handover negotiations." After the meeting, the new director of the Soviet Space Agency, who was said to be from the intelligence and security department, stopped Magao.

"I agree. I will do my best to help the representatives prepare for the trip and provide relevant technical advice."

"President Korshenko and I would like you to serve as our negotiating representative."

"what?"

"You will have diplomatic immunity while you are in the United States. They cannot arrest you or do anything to you."

"No, this won't work, will it?"

"You know I can't go back. That's part of our agreement, right?"

"The content of the agreement needs to change, and it is imperative that we send the most capable, professional and experienced people as negotiators."

"The only reason Korchenko wanted me to go back was because it would be a slap in the face of that Gore guy."

"But it's still a wise move to accept the request, isn't it?"

…………

"This bastard lied to me! He kept asking about Magao. He didn't mention anything about asteroids!"

In Aleida's home, except for Aleida herself, her husband, son, and daughter were almost all watching Aleida angrily scolding the host in public during a TV interview with a suppressed smile on their faces.

[Our exclusive interview today is with Aleida Rosales, who now works at Helios Aerospace and worked closely with Margo Madison, who many in the country call one of the biggest traitors in American history…]

[Do you know how I feel about you right now? You're such a good reporter, but you're such a piece of shit! Makes me want to kick your stinky mouth!] Seeing herself on TV cursing at the rude host and spewing profanity, as if she had just witnessed some dark history, Aleida quickly picked up the remote and turned off the TV.

"Uh, maybe the interview wasn't so bad?"

"My good friend texted me saying he particularly liked the scene where you gave that annoying host the middle finger when you left."

"He also said that the images and sounds of that scene were all blurred out, making it look particularly funny."

"You know? At first I was so happy because I knew she was still alive and didn't die in the explosion. I felt like I was dreaming... But now she's coming back, I'm even starting to think it's better for her to be dead." Aleida has complicated feelings towards her former mentor.

"Perhaps... we can imitate what those workers on Mars did and oppose and resist?"

"Whether it's for yourself or for her, maybe you should just speak your mind."

…………

At the same time, in the medical room of the Mars base, the doctor was conducting a physical examination on Alex, the first baby born on Mars in human history, who had just arrived.

"Okay, breathe in, and then breathe out slowly... Very good, very good."

"You know what? Son, I've been colleagues here with your grandfather and father for several years. They love playing games. They find all kinds of objects, nuts and bolts, even leftover candy wrappers, and use them as chess pieces."

"I'm good at chess."

"Maybe we can find time to play a game?" The doctor said with a smile to the boy sitting on the bed.

.........

"OK, he's in excellent health. Mars' gravity is only one-third of Earth's, which greatly reduces the pressure on his body's blood oxygen supply. Compared to his physical examination report on Earth, his blood pressure, breathing, and other physical parameters are all better. He feels more comfortable on Mars than on Earth, and has even adapted better."

"Thank you, Dr. Dimi." Kelly expressed her gratitude to the doctor who saved her life that year.

"I'm also glad to see you two again on Mars."

At the same time, several astronauts, covered in water and dust, finally crawled out of the main water pipeline connecting the base and the fuel plant, and began to try to restart the fuel production equipment of the fuel plant.

"If they transported the asteroid to Earth, it would become a dead end, like the McMurdoch research base in Antarctica, and human exploration would come to a halt for a considerable period of time."

"This place could have been much more prosperous, instead of being like McMurdock Station, with only five or six researchers in white coats and one or two cleaners. This could even be a springboard for mankind to truly reach the starry sky, a home! Kelly!" In the dormitory, the Martian elder told his daughter that he didn't want to see mankind's pace of outward exploration stop on this red planet for the rest of his life.

.........

On the other side, inside the fuel plant

"Strange, the intake pipe doesn't seem to have any empty gas from the storage tank?"

"I'll go check it out."

"The main gas flow regulator seems to be missing!"

"I'll try running the gas through the sub-regulator."

"Hey, you can't just skip the regulator, it's such a crucial step!"

"Don't be nervous, this is my hometown. It's normal for mechanical equipment to have defective parts. We just need to make some adjustments." Just like that, with a lack of professional knowledge and operating experience, the production equipment of the fuel plant was restarted.

"Commander! The pressure readings in the fuel plant's pipelines have reached dangerous levels!"

"Make them shut it down immediately, quick!"

"Go press the emergency stop button!"

However, it was too late. As a methane pipeline exceeded its design limit, the leaked methane gas caused a small electric spark due to a short circuit in the power supply equipment in the fuel plant, directly causing a powerful explosion in the fuel plant. All the people working in the fuel plant were directly blown to the ground by the shock wave generated by the explosion. The first production safety accident on Mars in human history that resulted in casualties occurred in this way.

.........

"Thank you for your kind reminder, but I will not let the CIA impose martial law on Mars." Eli was so angry that he managed not to curse the guy in front of him directly.

"We must regain control of the base to prevent this terrorist attack from happening!"

"Terrorism? Are you serious? You call a legitimate workers' strike terrorism? Enough is enough!"

Eli was speechless at the unscrupulous politician who tried to suppress the striking workers on Mars as terrorists. As a negotiating representative with workers from large unions of many companies, even though he was a layman in the aerospace field, Eli knew that the reasons and demands of the workers' strike on Mars were legitimate and reasonable to a certain extent. However, the unscrupulous politician in front of him obviously did not regard these workers as human beings, and put all the responsibility for the tragic casualties on the striking workers. This was the typical way of shirking responsibility and using unscrupulous solutions by these high-minded but incompetent politicians. He had to come up with a more moderate solution, otherwise this bunch of stupid, bad and unscrupulous politicians and senior government officials would not be able to end this matter with the least loss.

"This... to be honest, I'm a little speechless..." Yuki sat on Dave's deserted private beach on Earth, his brain, which was like a supercomputer, processing information from all directions at the same time.

"What's wrong?" The purple-haired girl wearing a hood was playing with a stone she picked up on the beach. After being washed by the sea water for a long time, the stone had become quite round.

"This... the difference is too great. Over here, they're planning a stellar astronomical project for the long-term future of their utopian society, while over here, they're still fighting for an asteroid. A bunch of unscrupulous people who love to use politics and all sorts of excuses are full of high righteousness, but they spend their days oppressing and exploiting the grassroots. And when the grassroots rebel out of dissatisfaction, they'll simply shift the blame for causing social instability onto the very people they've exploited. How many times has this kind of scene happened in human history?"

"Countless times..."

"That's why humanity is trapped in this cyclical pattern, unable to escape. Without changing our inertial thinking and our model of civilizational development, how can we possibly reach for the stars? Even if we do reach for the stars, it will only be a replay of the tragedy that has happened to us countless times, on a larger scale."

"In the final analysis, we give them opportunities. Whether they can seize them depends on themselves."

"If you can't move towards the stars in a healthier and more sustainable way, then die in the cradle." The purple-haired girl crushed the hard, round stone in her hand.

…………

The star gate under construction in the Tianda General Six Star System

"The structural disintegration of civilization?" Zao Chiqi thought as he stared at the artificial star gate that was forming a perfect circle.

"Huh? What did you say?" asked a glass eel that was on the bridge with it.

"It's nothing. I was just thinking about a topic Chi Chengsan mentioned to me before. Just like the structural unemployment that will follow the emergence of true super artificial intelligence, civilizations like ours, after entering the interstellar civilization stage, will no longer need to rely on population growth to ensure their development. Then, when highly advanced technology allows a single individual to support an entire civilization-level industrial system based on a von Neumann self-replicating machine, our society will likely regress to small communities of only a few thousand or even single individuals, where the social structure is no longer necessary."

"It seems like there's such a topic on the galaxy network, but after all, that kind of thing won't have any negative impact on us, right? Anyway, no matter how far apart we are, through advanced technology, we can always stay as one." The glass eel pointed to his head.

"Our brains and minds are interconnected at the level of consciousness. The nano-symbiotic machinery in our bodies prevents our bodies from aging and dying. Our minds and consciousness can be fully interconnected when necessary, and we completely trust each other. Even if we are tens of millions of light years apart, we can still be united as one."

The social management artificial intelligence of the Theia civilization discovered an anomaly, that is, it did not receive the regular signals sent back by the unmanned exploration ship heading to the red dwarf companion star one light-year away. It began to mobilize the large-aperture survey mirror array outside the star system to try to observe the current position of the unmanned research ship. However, due to the limitation of the speed of light, what it observed must be the status of the unmanned research ship nearly a year ago. And because of this distance, the social and economic management general strong artificial intelligence of the Theia civilization can only set the research ship to regularly send status information towards the mother star through high-power lasers at regular intervals.

[We haven't received the information regularly sent back by the research vessel. We are missing key information... We can't make any judgment...]

[Based on the calculated voyage time and position, it is roughly confirmed that contact was lost during the deceleration phase of docking into the target star.]

[Continuous observation and monitoring will be carried out on the target star and the possible location of the research vessel.]

While monitoring the red dwarf star one light-year away, the social management artificial intelligence of the Theia civilization was also paying attention to the giant supercomputing data center it had built on the satellite of the first gas giant planet in the Tianda General Six star system. Now, this computing center, which cost a lot of resources, is only

Huge server cabinets already occupy an area on the surface of this 4000-kilometer-diameter satellite, equivalent to the size of a city with a population of tens of millions. On the outskirts of this giant server city, various industrial equipment are still continuously mining the resources on the planet and turning them into new supercomputer hosts, fusion reactors for power supply, solar arrays, huge radiator arrays, etc. after a series of complex process procedures. At the equator of the satellite, dozens of mass accelerators and space elevator ground base stations that are still under construction are rising from the ground. They will become the starting point of the Theia civilization's large-scale Dyson Cloud project.

Chapter 185: How Capitalists Disrupt Workers' Unity (6000 words)

“磐石”号掠过了巨大的自由电子激光阵列，这座直径210公里的硬X射线波段自由电子激光阵列由一万多台口径20米的X射线波段自由电子激光器组成，高达2500太瓦（TW）功率的激光束足以将装备了激光帆的恒星际无人探测船加速到1/10光速。

This giant free electron laser array is also one of the largest space buildings of the Dantia civilization. In order to power the more than 10,000 free electron lasers in this array, the entire laser array also has a complete set of huge deuterium-deuterium fusion reactor generators and a vacuum radiation radiator that is almost the same size as the laser array.

There are four main types of mainstream fusion reactors used by the Theia civilization. They are deuterium-tritium fusion and deuterium-deuterium fusion reactors, which are mainly used for power generation in ground and fixed space stations or space facilities; deuterium-helium tri-fusion and pure helium tri-fusion, which are mainly used for propulsion of spacecraft and spacecraft. The former will produce a large number of neutrons during nuclear fusion reactions, thereby causing damage to the inner wall of the fusion reactor, and is not suitable as a spacecraft reactor and propulsion power. The latter two produce very few neutrons during fusion reactions, or simply do not produce neutron radiation. Therefore, they are widely used by the Theia civilization as power for various types of torch spacecraft.

As a fortunate civilization born in a star system with four gas giants, the helium-3 fuel needed for the Theia civilization's fusion technology mainly comes from the gas giant planet Tiandajiangjun 6d orbiting its parent star. Through mature atmospheric ramjet shovels and high-performance unmanned SSTO aerospace platforms that can enter and exit the atmosphere of gas giants, the Theia civilization is able to overcome the enormous gravity and extremely high escape velocity of the gas giants and obtain the almost inexhaustible hydrogen isotopes and helium-3 fuel in the gas giants.

While driving the Torch Ship towards Planet One, Moia Rock noticed that there were no less than a dozen giant Torch Ships that were much larger and tonnage larger than his own on this route and were also heading towards Planet One. Based on his observation of the tonnage and appearance of those ships, Moia confirmed that these spaceships and these large cargo ships were container ships responsible for transporting equipment for the construction of Dyson Cloud Engineering to the various satellites of Planet One. These ships were transporting several key industrial mother machine production lines for the von Neumann self-replicating machine.

"I wonder when the space elevator on the satellite of Planet No. 1 will be completed?" Feeling the slight pressure brought by the 1.5G acceleration, Moia took some effort to raise his hand and tap on the screen, calling up the image of the planetary supercomputing center that was still under construction.

"Isn't there information about that thing on the intergalactic communication network? Didn't you see it?"

"It seems they're planning to use an asteroid with a diameter of 1.5 kilometers as a counterweight for the space elevator. Furthermore, the celestial body on which the space elevator is being built has low gravity and an extremely thin atmosphere. This space elevator will be much smaller than the 25000-kilometer-high space elevator like the one at Teylar, with a total altitude of approximately 10000 kilometers."

"Anyway, this is our civilization's second space elevator, so it's quite commemorative."

"Speaking of which, have you heard something? We seem to have lost contact with the probe heading to the red dwarf star in our solar system?"

"Maybe it's just a communication system malfunction?"

After all, no one can guarantee that interstellar travel won't lead to unexpected events. A communication system failure could also cause the unmanned probe to fail to send back information on time."

"After all, even multiple layers of Whipple shields can't guarantee the safety of the entire spacecraft, right? If a micrometeoroid or something else were to strike from an angle beyond the Whipple shield's reach and hit a communications antenna, it wouldn't be surprising if the entire spacecraft lost contact, right?"

"Not to mention that our current interstellar navigation technology is immature. That probe ship was a miracle of sheer force, accelerating to 1/10 the speed of light thanks to the power provided by that terrifyingly high-powered free-electron laser array. It's said that when it was first built, there was a lot of skepticism about whether it was necessary to expend so many resources just to build a laser transmitter to power an unmanned interstellar probe."

"But wasn't this a preliminary experimental project for a stellar-class Dyson cloud laser device?"

"It does have that purpose, but back then it was primarily built as a scientific device, just like those particle accelerators of old that required a huge amount of resources to build."

"As for its other functions, those were expanded later, such as using this giant high-power laser array to transmit electricity or conduct interstellar communications. The current concept and plan is that this giant laser array will be used together with other Dyson Cloud modules as part of the Dyson Cloud laser transmitter array to provide power for future interstellar sublight-speed spacecraft."

"Although its power seems quite outrageous to us today, compared to the Dyson cloud laser, which can reach 3% to 5% of the total output of a star, this thing seems dwarfed and not worth mentioning."

"Speaking of which... I came across a science fiction novel by a famous anonymous author who's active on our galaxy's communication network. The novel's plot is about our civilization being invaded by someone from another star system. In the novel, our civilization uses this giant free electron laser array to severely damage the enemy's fleet of torch ships that invaded our star system."

"I've read that novel, too. It's quite well written, but some people question whether a civilization with a fleet of torch ships capable of definitive interstellar travel could really be harmed by a mere 2000-plus terawatt laser."

"The torch ships used by the invading alien civilization in that novel are powered by the same nuclear fusion as ours, but the efficiency of their fusion torch engines and spacecraft has approached the theoretical limit. Their spacecraft mainly use deuterium-helium fusion for propulsion, and the exhaust speed reaches 9% of the speed of light. Combined with the laser sails carried by laser propulsion spacecraft with greater power than ours, the spacecraft is accelerated to 14% of the speed of light. Although it is not theoretically impossible, it is basically impossible for engineering to reach this theoretical limit, unless you have those magical materials." Moiya complained about the content of the novel.

"The efficiency of fusion engines is limited at best. Interstellar travel is technically immature for us at this stage, and even for a considerable period of time in the future. I think we'll have to solve the mass production of antimatter before interstellar travel can be relatively reliable."

"But aren't we already able to produce a considerable amount of antimatter to a certain extent?"

"Haha, how much can those equatorial accelerators on our home planet produce? It took nearly ten years, and they've barely managed to produce about 600 grams of antihydrogen. At this rate, how long will it take to produce enough antimatter fuel for interstellar spacecraft?"

"If we want to mass-produce antimatter, we must build a larger-scale particle accelerator. At least the current few equatorial particle accelerators are definitely not enough."

"As for the planetary synchronous orbit particle accelerator, we want to build an artificial ring around the entire planet. The materials required for this project are obviously too difficult for us. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a true space elevator on our home planet so far."

"The equatorial region of our home planet has a considerable number of high mountains and mountain ranges due to the gravitational influence of the gas giants. However, due to insufficient materials technology, we can only rely on mass accelerators and sky hooks, and cannot build a true space elevator on our home planet."

"We're still stuck at this stage of materials science. If we want to truly conduct reliable and safe interstellar travel, do we really have to wait until the Dyson Cloud is built?"

"Not necessarily. There are relatively reliable interstellar travel options at this stage, but they present some difficult engineering challenges. Alternatively, if you can accept that, you could build a giant cylindrical space station and install less efficient fusion torch thrusters. It would take several years, or even more than a decade, to reach maximum speed. After approaching the target star system, it would take the same amount of time to decelerate. Furthermore, your entire ship would likely weigh over 100 million tons, not counting the weight of various additional components and equipment."

"Forget it? It would be better to wait until the antimatter mass production is stabilized and the technology emerges before conducting interstellar travel."

"In short, the efficiency of fusion flare ships for interstellar travel is so poor that even if we are space travel enthusiasts, we would not be so crazy as to build a fusion interstellar flare ship and run off to other desolate star systems.

.........

In the orbit of Tianda Jiangjun 6A No. 1 planet, an asteroid with a diameter of 1.5 kilometers has been pushed into a synchronous orbit. A large number of unmanned construction machinery are working on the surface of the asteroid, mining the minerals on the surface of the asteroid and radiating the von Neumann self-replicator factory on the surface of the asteroid. The collected minerals will be smelted and processed and used as related parts for the manufacture and construction of space elevators. At the same time, there are also groups of huge heat sinks on the surface of the asteroid, which emit waste heat outward by radiation.

The Theian civilization's artificial intelligence, which manages the entire project and fine-tunes it, is an AGI general-purpose strong artificial intelligence. Its computing power is still insufficient to become a true ASI. Even if a city-sized server cluster has been built on this celestial body with a diameter of 4000 kilometers, it is within the definition of Theian civilization. Because its computing power limit has not expanded beyond the level of cognition, by Theian civilization's standards, it is still an AGI, not an ASI. According to Theian civilization's judgment criteria, only after it has truly built and begun to utilize the computing power provided by this planet-sized giant server can it be considered a true ASI.

If humans 44 light years away knew this, they would probably be in tears. According to human standards, the Theia civilization's social management artificial intelligence is worthy of being called an ASIA, but according to their own definition, it can only be regarded as a general artificial intelligence.

However, due to the long distance between Planets 1 and 4, which is at the level of astronomical units, and the speed of light, the server arrays located in the mother star system cannot provide any computing power assistance for the Dyson cloud project on Planet 1. Therefore, in order to provide sufficient computing power assistance for the subsequent interstellar civilization project, it is necessary to build a giant supercomputing center in the satellite system of Planet 1 near the construction area.

"Elena, you are so cute." Luoyang said as he hugged Elena from behind.

"What's wrong? Do you suddenly want to flirt with me?"

Elena didn't hide it and turned around to kiss Luoying on the face.

"Do you want to do it? Right here."

"Well, this is your bedroom anyway, right?"

Just as their lips were getting closer and closer, about to touch, a communication alert sound rang out at an inopportune time.

"I'm sorry to bother you two, but I still need to talk to you about this matter." The red-haired cat appeared on the holographic projection of the communicator in the room.

"Sister Salem, what's going on?"

"To be more precise, I'm looking for Miss Luoying. Your friends would like to invite you to visit the Earth they discovered in the new parallel universe. They've been observing it for quite some time. Lately, they and Zao Chiqi have been assigned to observe the Earth, while Zao Chiqi and Li Yan are in charge of observing the Teia civilization."

"The Earth in the parallel universe that had humans landed on Mars in 1995?"

"Hmm... I'm actually quite interested. Elena, can you lend me the Runner?"