The stars, but they become the gray wind

"No problem. You're one of my wife and girlfriend anyway. You can drive the Runner anytime you want."

"I don't think that's necessary." The red-haired cat girl interrupted the two people's invisible display of affection.

"Kellias himself is planning to go there, so you just need to follow the Salem. Besides, they haven't built a complete artificial stargate in the solar system over there."

"What's going on? They've been observing that world's Earth for three months, right? And they still haven't built the stargate in three months? Are they slacking off?"

"You know what, Miss Luoying, your three friends have been really slacking off these past few months. All the preparations for the artificial stargate in the solar system over there are already complete. All it takes is the push of a button."

"Then what are they doing? They're only one step away from success, why haven't they pressed the button yet?"

"They all said they wanted to continue observing the humans in this world for a while to see if they could move in a better direction."

"If possible, consider this star the key to their future."

"What if I can't?"

"It's part of the tombstone and grave of a civilization that died in its cradle."

"These are the exact words of your friends." The red-haired cat girl stated calmly.

Dave was pacing in his cabin, thinking carefully about how to use peaceful means to properly resolve the problem of the workers' strike. He knew the nature of the upper echelons of various countries. When it comes to workers' strikes, they will always think of suppressing the voices of workers by means of repression. What's more, at this time when the huge interests of the asteroid are at stake, the leaders of the M7 countries will definitely force the progress of the entire project, thus completely disregarding the feelings of those workers. Dave knew that once such a tear between the upper and lower levels occurs, the consequences will be disastrous. After the catastrophic accident at the fuel plant, the top leaders of the M7 countries have begun to implement martial law on the Mars base for the huge wealth of this asteroid. The security team has been searching the workers' dormitories endlessly, and there have even been several incidents of physical conflicts between security team members and dissatisfied Martian workers.

Therefore, as the CEO and president of Helios, he must consider ways to resolve the workers' strike through appropriate peaceful means, while at the same time trying to compensate the Martian workers whose interests have been harmed by the asteroid incident.

After thinking it over, Dave decided to go to the workers' gathering place and have a good talk with them. Many times, violent suppression cannot fundamentally solve the problem, and the problem is solved at the negotiating table.

But before he walked out the door, he noticed the bag of laundry detergent placed in the corner of his room, so Dave picked up the unopened bag of laundry detergent and went to the loading and unloading warehouse where the workers were gathering.

…………

In the loading and unloading warehouse of the Mars base, the gathered Martian workers debated what to do next.

"I think we should just keep doing things as usual and keep putting pressure on the higher-ups!"

"Pressure, but Jennings is dead!"

"This is too much!"

"But that's not our fault. It was they who skipped several important steps and acted recklessly, which led to the accident!"

"Everyone, okay, listen to me!" At this time, a voice came from behind the crowd who were arguing together. Dave took the bag of laundry detergent that had just been opened and sprinkled the laundry detergent on the ground, forming a line of white powder.

"I admire you all very much. Your negotiation objectives and conditions are clear and powerful."

"And I admire your unwavering determination even more..."

"But the fact is... unless we solve this problem today, repair the fuel plant and start producing enough liquid argon to allow us to capture one of the most precious objects known to the solar system, we will fail, for all of us."

"Then agree to our request and transport Goldilocks to Mars."

"Listen, I wish I could agree to your request, but the reality is that the nations of Earth will never sit back and watch their wealth slip away. They will never agree to ship asteroids to Mars."

"Because it's not in their economic interest, and space is a business, at least for now. The focus is on resources, profit and loss settlement, and profit!"

"Fuck your profits!" a worker in the crowd roared in dissatisfaction.

"But at the end of the day, you're striking for profit, aren't you?"

"You, the frontline workers who I will personally work with, also want to be paid and want a piece of the pie."

"All we want is compensation and better treatment!"

"Yes, you are here to make money, to change the lives of you and your families, but what you are asking for is to change the destination of the asteroid, which is absolutely impossible."

"Both the US and Soviet space agencies have agreed to your poor work environment and treatment. As the president and CEO of Helios, I will increase your pension and life insurance contributions by 40%!"

After Dave said this, the expressions of the workers on the scene changed.

"Better health insurance and improved working conditions, plus more shares and income for all of you in Helios."

"Don't believe a word this man says, he's just a damn oil salesman!" Ed in the crowd also realized what Dave was going to do, and stared at Dave with a tense expression.

"I will also ensure that all those who participated in this strike will be pardoned for all their actions during the negotiation period in a few days. The first 100 people who cross this line will receive four times the salary!" Dave pointed to the line he drew on the ground with scattered laundry detergent.

"That's more than $100 million per person." When Dave said this, the workers were already in an uproar, and some of them couldn't help but want to give it a try.

"Can't you see his purpose? He wants to bribe us! And destroy our unity!" Shan, the initiator of the strike, pointed at Dave and said to the people behind him.

"If we stick together, we can still win!"

"Of course, you can do that, but you have to ask yourself a question first: what is the most important thing?"

"Is it just some abstract solidarity, or your family back home, and a better life?"

"What's more important, a better life for your children, parents, and yourself, or a piece of rock floating in space?"

"I'm sorry, Sam... I... I have to think about my family back on Earth."

Finally, under Dave's continuous persuasion, the first worker crossed the line. After the first leader appeared, more and more workers could not resist the temptation and finally chose to cross the line.

"Hey, you can't do this, we should stand our ground!"

"I'm sorry, but I joined the strike to give my family and me a better life."

"Sorry." The worker bowed to the mountain with an apologetic and guilty look on his face, and chose to cross the line.

In the end, only a few people, including Ed and Sam, remained here and insisted on striking.

"Well done, Dave. You bastard just killed the future of the Mars base!" Ed said to Dave almost with tears in his eyes.

Chapter 186 What is the Nature of Earth and Alien Life? (6000 words)

"What is the nature of life? Is biological evolution essentially a self-replicating von Neumann machine that frequently makes mistakes?"

Kelly felt as if she was sitting in a lecture hall. At the podium in front of her, a professor with a white beard and a bald head was writing and drawing on the blackboard.

"These self-replicating von Neumann machines, which often make mistakes, give rise to even more diverse von Neumann machines. These different types of von Neumann machines, based on their own interactions with their surroundings, produce rules that, under objective definitions, do not exist, such as 'civilization'."

"But if we trace back to the source, aren't intelligent creatures and civilizations themselves the result of some random factors?" The old professor with a white beard and chalk in his hand supported the podium as he spoke about his views on life to Kelly and other students sitting at the front desks.

"From another abstract perspective, the current industrial system of mankind can also be seen as a giant von Neumann self-replicating machine.

This von Neumann self-replicator, if large enough and complete enough, can build larger structures, just as millions of individual cells make up organisms and countless humans build cities.

"The strict definition, universal properties and highly abstract mathematical model of the von Neumann self-replicating machine can be extended to any self-replicating or developable system." The old professor at the podium circled the words self-replication and developable on the blackboard with chalk.

"Besides being an expansion machine created in a natural or artificial environment, there is also external interference, such as information interference, command, and even rewriting of the initial instructions. This is the biggest difference between artificially created von Neumann self-replicators, such as civilization, and naturally developed self-replicating and developable systems."

"A Type 0.7 civilization capable of mobilizing billions of tons of material for any form of large-scale engineering and warfare, to create or destroy, is itself a ready-made von Neumann self-replicator system."

"Obviously, the technical difficulty and complexity of von Neumann self-replicators created in different environments vary greatly."

"For example, human civilization is currently a von Neumann self-replicating machine that is based on self-replication and value-added instructions, which is relatively inefficient.

"Today, humanity's annual economic growth rate is around 3 to 5 percent. This is indeed not very efficient for a von Neumann self-replicator, which is supposed to be semi-permanently or permanently exponentially self-replicating. Moreover, human civilization itself is a von Neumann self-replicator, and errors often occur during the process of self-replication. For example, the frequent industrial accidents that cause serious casualties are a manifestation of these errors."

"Most of the time, civilizations gain the ability to transform the natural environment by expanding their scale. This scale growth often depends on the environment, and only when the environment allows can it achieve relatively stable exponential growth. However, it is obvious that this long-term exponential growth is often unsustainable in the process of civilization development, due to the instability of the intelligent creatures that constitute the civilization itself due to various factors."

The old professor with a white beard paused here because he saw a student sitting behind Kelly raised his hand.

"Professor, let me ask you, since human civilization is a not-so-efficient von Neumann self-replicator, its exponential growth is unstable and unsustainable. So, assuming there are more advanced von Neumann self-replicators in the universe, is it possible for their growth rate to continue exponentially until they fill the entire universe?"

"This student asked a very good question. At least from our real-life example, if we assume there's another von Neumann self-replicator system in the universe similar to human civilization, then this system is likely to experience the same unstable and unsustainable growth as human civilization. However, if they truly created a more efficient von Neumann self-replicator based on themselves, and if this artificially created von Neumann self-replicator could truly achieve permanent exponential self-replication and growth, then even if its expansion rate was only 1% of the speed of light, within a million years at most, such a self-replicator could potentially occupy the entire Milky Way. This is also an explanation for the Fermi Paradox and extraterrestrial life."

However, if such self-replicating machines really do exist in the universe, even if they only appeared a hundred thousand years earlier than humans, a negligible amount of time on a cosmological scale, then we humans should have long observed traces of the existence of such von Neumann self-replicating machines. Of course, some even believe that we ourselves are the products of such von Neumann self-replicating machines. On this question, no one can give a truly definitive answer.

Some of my colleagues and colleagues in this field believe that perhaps the Earth's biosphere and human beings themselves are like a seed factory, and human civilization is a complete factory with a complete set of self-replicating industrial systems built by this original seed factory.

As an intelligent creature, humans' first seed factory is incomplete.

This seed factory will gain more and more complete capabilities as it expands and continues to self-replicate, but most of the time it cannot master all of its capabilities due to the limitations of its own functions.

Even before the Industrial Revolution, without the help of systematic science and technology, as a civilization, we could have done more in many cases simply by expanding our scale, such as the construction of huge projects like the pyramids.

"From the most basic definition, anything that can replicate and evolve is a Fengji, even if it's inefficient or even lacks intelligence."

"But in reality, to achieve proliferation and expansion on the scale of a star system or even the Milky Way, a sufficiently powerful level of intelligence is essential."

Another student raised his hand in the audience.

"Professor, assuming that this type of von Neumann self-replicator specialized for galactic expansion really exists, do we need to create a special category specifically for this type of von Neumann machine that reproduces in the harsh alien environment of space?"

"Although this thing is called a von Neumann self-replicator, is it more similar to a superintelligence that can be considered as a whole, or is it like the Gaia Gestalt civilization consciousness in the Foundation series of science fiction novels?"

"It's just that the individual elements that make up this civilization don't have the same fixed unit form as humans, nor are they industrial systems like humans, where a large number of similar machines are combined in a certain form."

The only similarity between it and humans may be that it can plan and build new factories or other facilities according to actual needs and environment, and build many other structural systems.

But these structures also include structures that are highly similar to itself, or even almost exactly the same?"

"Yes, if I simply pursue efficient self-replication and the utilization of environmental resources as close to 100%, then a structure similar to that of human civilization is obviously unacceptable in terms of efficiency.

"The biggest challenge in artificially creating a von Neumann self-replicating machine is how to further integrate and improve the efficiency of the process from resource collection to the ultimate creation of a self-replicating machine as complex as itself, and to manufacture even more complex products."

In Kelly's sight, the face of the old professor with white beard seemed to gradually become blurred. I felt someone shaking me, and then I woke up.

"I... fell asleep?" Kelly raised her head from the table in her dormitory.

"Boss, uh... I'm sorry to disturb your rest, but I have debugged the robots and we will soon be able to set off for the Korolev Crater for field experiments." The person who just woke Kelly up was a young graduate student in her team who had just joined her team for less than half a year and was in charge of equipment debugging.

"Thank you. I'll pack up. I have something to take care of before I leave. Please let everyone wait for a moment."

"Okay, boss." After agreeing, he left Kelly's room.

Kelly yawned and rubbed her head. She had just dreamed that she was back in the university classroom. The bald old professor with a white beard was a scholar in her university who had made great achievements in many fields. This old professor was proficient in biology and astronomy. At the beginning, Kelly herself couldn't figure out how this old professor could achieve such a level in two completely unrelated subjects at the same time. This also became a starting point for her to join the space agency and work on the extraterrestrial life exploration project in the future. Biology and astronomy, two subjects that may have been unrelated, perhaps should have been integrated. Biology revealed to Kelly the possible existence forms of extraterrestrial life, while astronomy provided countless actual samples that may exist in the universe.

"The essence of life is a von Neumann self-replicator, no matter what it's made of. Carbon-based, silicon-based, boron-based, sulfur-based, the forms of life, a von Neumann self-replicator, may exist in more forms than we can imagine. Don't limit your thinking to Earth's carbon-based biosphere. The number of celestial bodies in the universe that could harbor life is practically infinite. Given this enormous number, any low-probability event becomes inevitable."

Kelly still remembers what the professor said during the first class to students including herself. This sentence became her motivation to persist on this path for 15 years. Although the old professor passed away many years ago, this sentence he said during his lifetime left a deep impression on Kelly.

Tomorrow, Kelly will lead the team to the Korolev Crater on Mars, more than 6000 kilometers away from the Happy Valley base, to look for any possible traces of alien microorganisms.

Moia Rock used a raspberry to knock off a piece of ice from under its feet. It grabbed the inconspicuous piece of ice with its gloved hands. In the distance, the bucket wheel excavator rumbled, collecting the water ice resources on this ice field.

Moia? The place where the rock is now located is the surface of the massive satellite of Planet One where a planetary computing center is being built. 60% of the surface of this satellite is covered by oceans. However, due to the thin atmosphere and extremely low temperatures, the oceans on the surface of this satellite exist in a solid form. The extremely low temperature of more than 140 degrees below zero has frozen the entire ocean. Moia weighed the ice in the tower's hand. The ice that it had just knocked off with a pickaxe may have a history of more than millions of years. Even through the thick space suit, it could still feel the coldness from the ice and the biting wind around it.

The ground beneath its feet suddenly shook, and in the distance, a column of water shot up from the ground. It knew that it was an ice volcano, a unique scenery at the poles of this satellite. Unlike the various high-temperature magmas erupted from normal volcanoes, the ice volcanoes erupted water vapor in the form of steam and methane or ammonia in liquid form. It was now located close to the planet's Arctic region, and there were several ice volcanoes nearby that were quite famous on this satellite.

In addition to these ice volcanoes, this is also the main water ice resource mining area on this satellite, covering 60% of the solid ocean on the surface of the entire celestial body. For the Theia civilization, this is an inexhaustible treasure trove of water ice resources. By utilizing the water resources here, a large amount of methane and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen can be obtained and synthesized, which are the necessary propulsion fuels and working fluids for interstellar navigation. At the same time, hydrogen isotopes extracted from water are also used in dozens of large deuterium-deuterium fusion reactors on the surface of the planet.

Every day, hundreds of millions of tons of ice ore are sent to processing plants and, under the action of the fully automatic von Neumann self-replicating industrial system, are melted, refined, separated, processed, and synthesized into thousands of tons of basic resources such as deuterium isotopes, liquid hydrogen, methane, liquid oxygen, etc., and are consumed in the infrastructure construction of planetary supercomputing centers.

Moia Rock put the ice in his hand into an insulated container, intending to take it back as a souvenir. Behind him, a friend who came with him had already boarded the enclosed all-terrain vehicle. One of them stood on the steps and waved to him, urging him to enter the airlock as soon as possible.

Moia agreed, closed the lid of the thermal container in his hand, hung the container back around his waist, turned around and trotted towards the airlock entrance of the all-terrain vehicle.

The crust and mantle plates with a diameter and thickness of more than tens of thousands of kilometers, and even a part of the core, were neatly torn off from this planet that was nearly the size of the Earth. Then, the electromagnetic force, one of the three basic forces between particles that ensured the intact existence of this planetary fragment with a total mass of more than 20 trillion tons, disappeared. The planetary plates thrown into space instantly disintegrated into countless atoms, and under the action of the anti-gravitational field, they were sucked into the composite colony ship above, which had already deployed its own planetary cracking device.

"The planetary pyrolysis mining module is operating normally, and the electromagnetic disruption device is in good condition."

"What a waste..." On the panoramic observation deck below the colony ship, Anna shook her head as she looked at the planet below, one-third of which had been completely torn apart, revealing the molten core inside.

"The resource loss rate is 3.45%, which is still within an acceptable range."

"About 3% of the matter was lost to the vacuum of space during the last round of electromagnetic force disruption, and wasn't able to be retrieved by the tractor beam in time."

Xiao You was clearly quite satisfied with the result. This was a routine mining operation for a massive composite colony ship, capable of dismantling every celestial body in a solar system in a short period of time. Under the influence of a tractor beam powerful enough to shred an entire planet, the entire planet's crust, mantle, and even a portion of its core would be directly ripped out by the tractor beam and pulled into space. Under the influence of the amplified Gaussian fission beam, the electromagnetic force that holds matter together would vanish, and the entire planetary plate would crumble into a pile of atoms. Then, under the influence of the tractor beam's anti-gravitational field, these atoms would be collected in the expanded cargo hold of the colony ship and compressed into an extremely high-density material for storage. An Earth-sized planet would only require three to five such fission mining operations to be completely mined. Only a small number of discrete heavy metal atoms would remain in their original orbit around the star. These heavy metal atoms drifting into the vacuum of space were the inevitable losses incurred during the entire process.

Inside the deployed dock module of the composite colony ship named Veuve, the skeleton of a colony of the same size has been laid. After the construction of this colony ship is completed, it will also travel to the surrounding galaxies, smash and collect the resources of the entire planet, then replicate itself, create more colony ships of the same model, and use the resources of the dismantled planets in the galaxy to build stellar celestial projects.

Each colony ship of this type is equipped with an anti-gravitational tractor beam powered by negative-mass exotic matter. It can tear apart an Earth-sized planet and completely reduce it to atoms under the traction of an average of 3 to 5 pulsed fragmentation modes. The only drawback is that this mode can only be used when the colony ship is gravitationally anchored and deployed. The entire colony will also be in a fixed position during the process of planetary fragmentation and crushing.

The reason why Anna is here is very simple. She wants to see what this violent way of dismantling a planet looks like.

For Sky Star, dismantling the entire planet in this way is a relatively wasteful way of sacrificing resource utilization for efficiency. Although compared with the stars that occupy the vast majority of the mass in the entire star system, even if all the planets in the galaxy are dismantled, it is only a drop in the bucket for the stars themselves. This does not mean that the Sky Star civilization does not like the ultimate pursuit of resource utilization. On this point, the glass eels who suffered from the bloated old glass eel era and the overly inefficient resource utilization that eventually led to the failure of the entire stellar celestial engineering plan also deeply agree with this.

…………

On the other side, in the Tiandajiangjun Six Star System, a spacecraft with a very out-of-place style arrived at the hangar of the Glass Eel's spaceship. Compared with the surrounding spaceships whose shells were made of color force materials or stable zero-element matter and were driven by inertia-free engines, this spacecraft with a very backward-looking style seemed extremely out of place.

"Let me see. A reactor and a liquid droplet radiator made of superconducting material coils? Not bad. A high-temperature superconducting material that can maintain superconducting properties at just 230 Kelvin (about -43.15 degrees Celsius). While it doesn't seem to be a true room-temperature superconducting material, the level of technology already proves that these Theia Stone People are quite advanced in the field of superconductivity."

A glass eel lay beside the radiator of the unmanned exploration ship they captured, conducting material analysis on the radiator.

"A deuterium-helium fusion reactor? A pure helium-triple fusion reactor that sacrifices the lack of neutron radiation for exhaust speed, minimizing damage to the reactor's inner shielding and making it more suitable for interstellar travel?"

"Well, that's understandable. After all, the interstellar voyage required is only about one light-year. At this distance from the deuterium-helium fusion reactor, the damage caused by neutron radiation is still within an acceptable range."

"But this payload is too pitiful, isn't it? Without the fins, the payload is less than 50 tons?"

"Although it is indeed more than enough for an unmanned spacecraft to be equipped with scientific research equipment such as probes, it is still too early to engage in interstellar travel under the current technical conditions, isn't it?" The glass eel, which was lying on this spacecraft that was out of place in the painting style, raised one of the tentacle supporting its body and knocked on the unmanned exploration ship below.

"Just to propel this less than 50-ton payload, maintain an exhaust velocity over 8% of the speed of light, and achieve accelerations of up to 5G in emergency high-thrust mode, the weight of this thing would soar to tens of millions of tons. To achieve these indicators, you have to use all your might to achieve miracles. Fusion torch ships are really not reliable for interstellar travel, are they?"

.........

On the bridge, Zao Chiqi pressed the start button of the stargate, and a neutrino jet close to the speed of light and a large number of high-energy particles ejected from the slowly expanding wormhole interface in the center of the stargate. After the wormhole interface filled and expanded the entire inner side of the stargate, the stargate was officially connected to the glass eel's own wormhole hub - the slow domain.