The stars, but they become the gray wind

"For example, all the cells that make up this seed are relatively primitive and early versions of nanomachines that I isolated. Once it is planted and grows to the point where it develops self-awareness, it can use its nanomechanical cells to rapidly control the environment of the entire planet and achieve things that ordinary creatures wouldn't even dare to imagine."

"Create a perfect utopian environment for your creations. Since you've already fallen in love with them due to your excessive emotional investment, prepare the best environment for them."

"How is it, Cabot?" Ms. Grey Wind tilted her head and asked with a smile to the girl in black combat uniform and with long flaxen hair.

"I see. In that case, let's give her a name."

"Tree of Life, how about this name?"

"It just so happens that in my design, one of the branches is an elf, which will definitely match this tree."

"The Tree of Life, that's a very fitting name indeed. Does it provide a highly stable and suitable environment for life on the entire planet?"

"This is the planet I chose for their birth and growth. I call it Sky Star." A flaxen-haired girl in a black combat uniform held a holographic projection of a planet in her palm. The azure ocean covered most of the surface of the planet. Only sparse islands and a small continent were scattered at the equator, while the North and South Poles were completely covered by ice sheets.

"With this seed, I believe this planet will become a true Garden of Eden."

Chapter 198: How Cabot and Lady Greywind Created a Race

Aze opened her eyes drowsily, and she felt as if the back of her head was resting on something soft.

"Wow... what am I doing?"

"Angel sister, are you awake?" Mary's slightly childish face appeared in his sight.

"Ah... Sorry, I was so comfortable basking in the sun that I accidentally fell asleep."

"Hey...are you awake? That part of your dream was pretty interesting, wasn't it?" Cabot said.

"So… it wasn't a dream at all, was it? But a memory or some form of historical record?"

"That seed... is 'her', right?" Aze pointed to the giant tree that reached the sky and the earth in the distance behind him.

"Yes, but that happened before she was born. Because she was still an imperfect seed without intelligence at that time, she herself has no memory of it, nor is it possible for her to have any memory of it."

"So what did I see?"

"Of course, it's the memory of one of the people involved. She wanted to know how she was born through you and me, so she scanned your brains and body memories and created a scene that completely replicated the laboratory scene back then. This is why you suddenly had a dream."

"These memories were originally stored not only in Ms. Grey Wind herself, but also in the data files of Grey Wind's individual, Level IV. Normally, it would be impossible to find them unless one deliberately searches for them."

"Then how is it?"

"The Tree of Life is curious about this past that it is unaware of. After all, it is also curious about what kind of existence created itself at the initial microscopic level."

"Thus, this memory of yours, which had been buried deep within, emerged to the upper mind, allowing you and the third-party programmer, the Tree of Life, to read it in the form of a dream."

"Is that so? Are there any other details I should know besides what I just saw?"

"The details..." Cabot recalled the scene when he first created the tree.

.........

"The seeds and nanomachines are highly integrated, and there is no rejection reaction. Currently, the original cells of the Tree of Life seeds are being perfectly replaced by artificial cells synthesized by nanomachines."

"These nanomachines can be adjusted. They're countless generations behind me today, but the first generation of nanomachines created by the original gate builders, who didn't go through iterations, definitely couldn't achieve their full potential. Some of the things I can do now are things like adjusting the quark arrangement of matter and creating color-core materials."

"However, this level of von Neumann self-replicator is quite impressive for a newly born civilization. Even a nanoscale von Neumann self-replicator at the macromolecular scale would be enough to cause a whole interstellar civilization considerable distress."

"Not to mention, even this initial version of the nanomachine, which hasn't been iterated or optimized, is smaller than a DNA sequence and is more than enough to meet the needs of civilization's first three industrial revolutions." A girl with long gray hair and a pair of emerald green eyes helped Cabot further optimize the genetic structure of the Tree of Life seed in front of the holographic experimental table.

"The Tree of Life, after all, is only part of this plan. This natural biological super-AI functions more like a nanny. Beyond that, I hope it can truly connect with them on a conscious and emotional level, so that both parties can personally experience the other's thoughts, feelings, and ways of thinking."

"Speaking of thoughts and emotions, it seems they have absolutely no connection to those sub-dimensional realms, huh?"

"Of course. While those sub-dimensions can grant intelligent life forms some powerful strength and wisdom, they are ultimately uncontrollable."

"Just for that little bit of uncontrollable and uncertain power and wisdom, they accepted the gift from the secondary dimension."

"These sub-dimensions often have many names, such as the Warp Supreme Heaven, the Void Realm, and some universes, for various reasons. Fourth, sub-space is often not clean. The sub-space we were born into is extremely rare, even unique, and can sustain its existence in the material world for a long time. We are essentially very similar to those sub-space creatures that covet the material universe, even identical. However, as beings who also come from a place very similar to the Warp, we act as completely benevolent ocean elves, rather than demons who are addicted to all the extreme emotions of intelligent life like drugs."

"Our need for the emotions of intelligent life in the material universe seems to be moving in another direction?"

"Do you mean collecting figurines? Or, like now, creating a figurine and life that satisfies you?"

"I don't deny that we are very selfish in this regard. I don't want to see them make the common mistakes of wisdom and life during their development."

"Many mistakes made by intelligent life are inherently stupid, so I have to be a little selfish in this regard."

"Since we've already created them, we might as well just go all the way and completely interfere."

"I have to think about how to edit their life forms?"

"What they want is a society without pain, or without death?"

"And they lack any connection to any sub-dimensional space in the universe where impure things might exist. They need to find a way to compensate for this. They are completely unaffected by anything from the sub-dimensional space. Of course, correspondingly, they are completely unable to utilize any power that the sub-dimensional space bestows on intelligent life forms."

"They also need a shared mental perception network that allows them to perceive each other's thoughts and feelings, so that each individual can personally experience the feelings of other individuals, preventing them from harboring any form of malice or harm towards their own kind, and naturally oppression will no longer exist."

"I don't want my creations to reproduce the bizarre social conditions that are necessary for natural life to be maintained by oppressing and exploiting some of its own kind."

"What they need is a utopia and a valley of ideas, not a class society built on an unhealthy and pathological capital system."

"I will give some hints within the Tree of Life's memories and thoughts, allowing it to execute these instructions that remain in the depths of its mind in an unclear manner."

"For the future Sky Star people, some technologies will be difficult to develop under this development model. Therefore, in order to ensure their comprehensiveness in technological development, we must use methods such as subconscious influence to ensure that they achieve perfection based on all technological development paths."

"What about those parts about the sub-space? That kind of thing would bring uncontrollable variables, right?"

Gray Wind stroked his chin, thoughtfully.

"As for those uncontrollable variables from the sub-space, I will allow them to use the corresponding technology without being affected, but they will not be threatened by the sub-space. Another guarantee is that the sub-space in the universe they will live in in the future is highly clean."

"Just like the original Ocean of Souls, before it was polluted by the death and destruction caused by the War in Heaven, it was a pure secondary mirror dimension that contrasted with the macroscopic material universe."

"Furthermore, the life forms in that universe are pitifully few, and they are unable to cause any interference in these sub-spaces. The lack of connection means that they are completely unaware of the existence of those magnetic spaces, and naturally they will not use these sub-spaces to carry out dangerous interstellar superluminal travel."

"In the universe they're destined to grow up in, the speed of light is the upper limit for all civilizations. To break this limit, the laws of causality in space and time would cease to exist. This is essentially impossible given the technological capabilities and perspectives of this universe. Therefore, we must give them some way to break this iron law of the universe."

"By exceeding the speed of light, we can create a closed time-like curve, so that they can never deviate from the set development path?"

"Hmm...it's best if there aren't anything like the photon bird in the universe that could cause large-scale changes in the fundamental lengths and physical laws of the universe on long timescales."

"After all, dark matter is extremely difficult for normal life to control and influence. It's best not to have such a form of existence in this universe. Dark matter life is too bizarre. Even nanomechanical aggregates rely on matter to exist. The total amount of normal matter compared to dark matter is naturally a huge, unbridgeable gap."

"I would suppress the possibility that dark matter and dark energy in that universe could spontaneously form life under extreme coincidence."

"And since faster-than-light technology in this universe violates the law of causality, I need to give them something that defies common sense."

"Things like naked singularities, and the possibility of replicating the Boulder ring on a smaller scale in this universe."

"Through the central singular ring of the Kerr black hole?"

"After all, unlike us who can use extradimensional matter to cheat and arbitrarily modify the laws of the universe, they can be considered like daughters, but after all, they are not us. We still have to rely on more common sense methods to solve this problem."

"Otherwise, the total amount of matter in a single universe is finite, and I don't want this stumbling block to occur."

"If it's a small-scale space-time bridge to other universes, it only needs to use a black hole with a mass close to that at the center of the Milky Way. The naked guide ring created by the black hole's high-speed rotation can become a much smaller channel."

"After all, this passage isn't like the ones created by some Baryon Lords, which are intended to serve as an escape hatch for all civilizations in the universe."

"If it's just a channel for yourself and your neighbors, a black hole of the mass of the Milky Way's center would be enough."

"And the most important point is that the environment of the parent star, parent galaxy, and surrounding galaxies, where many civilizations are born, often has a very sparse distribution of matter."

"The environment they need for survival and expansion cannot be like the sparsely populated local bubble created by a supernova explosion. The distribution of matter within the galaxy and the entire region of the Sky Star galaxy must be re-adjusted. The distribution of various types of matter and the ratio of heavy elements in the local universe must be readjusted. Got it? This area is the one."

"The star density in this area is relatively high, and many of the stars are red giants, making them very suitable for producing supernovae. If there were a large number of neutron stars and white dwarfs, perhaps it would be more conducive to their development into a Type II civilization specializing in stellar astronomical engineering within the speed of light limit."

"The parameters of the stellar nuclear fusion rate and the rate at which it consumes fuel must be adjusted. Furthermore, these modifications must ensure that the basic parameters of the star remain similar to the original, making them undetectable by intelligent life and interstellar civilizations."

"This is quite difficult. It means that we need to make some adjustments to the superstring layer at the bottom of the universe." Ms. Gray Wind shook her head.

"It is better to tamper with the superstring layer without civilization noticing it than to blatantly modify the fundamental parameters of the universe and cause extremely negative and drastic impacts on civilization."

"Using superstring layers to modify a civilization's understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe is truly no simple matter."

"Yes, we have to make extremely subtle modifications to the laws of the universe, and we have to imply subtle changes to the cognition of all civilizations in the universe. We can ensure the smooth progress of the entire process."

"Let me handle this. Your poor design and operational capabilities are well-known throughout the alliance."

"For example, the Reverse Sun-class dreadnought, which was slowly dismissed by most of our compatriots as ugly and impractical."

"No, I personally think my design skills are pretty good."

"Come on, right? That thing is so useless even within the Union that almost no one wants to use it. Who would string millions of reactors together to solve a problem with a single, decisive strike? Except for the honor guard."

"But it seems even the honor guard has reported that this thing isn't very useful. After all, who would design a spacecraft so large?"

"The honor guard is there to be an examiner, not to use their own steamroller to crush the examinees into shattered ice with their own spaceship, which is larger than the Milky Way."

"Modify the stellar parameters and normal physical laws of the region they live in. Leave these issues to me, okay?"

"Well, this is indeed a job that requires some precision. Maybe I'm not very good at it?"

…………

"So all the unnatural phenomena that occurred during the development of Sky Star civilization originated from you and Ms. Grey Wind?"

“Basically, all of them, but some things are indeed unexpected.”

"What accident?"

"That thing in the Large Magellanic Cloud, I thought it was just a small problem, but it almost turned into a tumor."

"But fortunately, the tumor was precisely removed before it grew too large."

"And another surprise: the glass eels in the center of the Milky Way. My initial help to them was purely unintentional, but it seems I did get a very unexpected little surprise."

"For example, this desolate and silent Milky Way galaxy could actually give birth to a second Type II civilization besides my creation."

"Furthermore, civilizations living on planets near neutron stars are rare to begin with, and glass eels play an irreplaceable role in this regard."

"Furthermore, these aquatic creatures, like you, lack certain biological defects and innate traits. This is why you are destined to follow a completely different path from the civilization formed by normal, naturally evolved intelligent life."

"A society based on the idea of ​​maintaining the existence of individuals within a civilization."

"Actually, my original goal for the Sky Star civilization was to try to construct and simulate a species with a more perfect evolutionary and developmental process. However... I invested too much energy and attention in it. Furthermore, the basic genetics and appearance template I designed for the Sky Star people are so similar to our own. This made it easy for us to become overly emotionally involved, developing feelings for them beyond just viewing them as an objective experiment. For example... I developed a love for them like a lover and a daughter."

"According to what you said, this kind of thing is not uncommon within the Union, right?"

"It's not just a few cases... If there's one important lesson we've learned in this area, it's that... if the experimental subject is too similar to your own creation, it's inevitable that they'll develop feelings for it after spending enough time with it."

"For this reason, we have also specially opened a whitelist to provide these species that we created for various reasons with a guarantee of safety as our dependents."

Moia Rock? Looking down from space, there was a silver-gray patchy area on the surface that was constantly expanding. Moia knew that it was the giant crooked von Neumann self-replicating unit that was constantly multiplying. Near the automated factory clusters and supercomputer arrays that had expanded to the population of several tens of millions of cities, the temperature of the atmosphere in some local areas of the surface had even risen by several degrees due to the waste heat generated by industrial production and massive computing.

When passing the terminus of the space elevator in synchronous orbit, a huge shadow covered the spacecraft. It was a prototype reflector with a diameter of 120 kilometers. Of the 36 reflectors, 12 have been completed and the remaining 2/3 are under construction. Moia Rock saw a large number of drones and engineering spacecraft laying highly reflective mirror materials on the surface of the mirrors whose skeletons had been completed.

Compared with the giant reflector with a single body diameter of more than 120 kilometers, the Panshi's hull, which is only more than 100 meters long, is as small as a mouse.

Near the asteroid, the terminal station at the top of the space elevator, the wakes of several torch engines, as bright as the sun, are rapidly moving away. This small torch fleet will change the orbits of several other asteroids that are about to pass by the orbit of the massive satellite, so that they will eventually weaken the orbit of the massive satellite and provide natural counterweights and balance hammers to save construction time for the subsequent second and third space elevator projects.

On the first space elevator that has been built, multiple guide rails that continue to descend from the asteroid and approach the atmosphere below are also increasing almost every day. On the side of the asteroid close to the planet, a huge centrifugal wheel with a diameter of more than one thousand meters has been built. This centrifugal wheel is not built for industrial production or to meet computing power needs. In the future, a large number of Theians plan to come to live in the space habitat near Planet No. 1. Then this orbital elevator space station with centrifugal wheel facilities can provide them with a more comfortable living and travel environment.

On the other hand, a series of soft X-ray band free electron laser propulsion arrays have been built on this synchronous orbit space station to propel a large number of Dyson cloud photovoltaic films that will be launched here in the future into circumstellar orbits. When necessary, these lasers can also serve as defense measures for the space station to burn any high-speed micrometeoroids or other threats approaching the space station to ensure the safety of the entire space elevator and synchronous orbit space station facilities.

Moia Rock felt that their civilization seemed to have a special liking for the laser technology route. Whether it was the interstellar unmanned exploration ship that lost contact some time ago and whose cause of loss of contact has not been confirmed until now, the transportation of some less time-sensitive goods and payloads within the star system, or the construction of the Dyson Cloud Project in front of them, the Theia civilization seemed to have some kind of unusual enthusiasm for the laser sail propulsion technology route. The giant free electron laser array in the hard X-ray band with a diameter of more than 200 kilometers that is now floating at the Lagrange point is the best proof of this.

Moia is naturally very clear about the advantages of light sail spacecraft and spacecraft - without pursuing high acceleration, there is no need to carry too much fuel and working fluid for acceleration. The fuel it carries only needs to be enough for deceleration when approaching the destination, which can greatly reduce the total mass and dead weight of the spacecraft. Of course, the light sail spacecraft is indeed too obvious. The low acceleration requires an extremely long distance to accelerate the spacecraft to the maximum speed, and it must rely on external laser propulsion to provide power. This is also a disadvantage that cannot be ignored.

"Ultimately, it's because our Torch Ship production capacity is insufficient, so a large number of intra-galactic cargo spacecraft need to use light sails."

"At present, if the production capacity of our torch ship can be increased by about 20 times, the construction time of the Dyson Cloud can be shortened to half or even one-third of the original time." During lunch, a friend of Moia, who owns the spacecraft, talked about this while chewing on his favorite silicon wafer snack.

"Completing the Dyson Cloud within a single lifetime, this progress is a bit too outrageous, isn't it?"

"Don't underestimate the exponential growth rate of the von Neumann self-replicator. Our current problem is that the initial scale of the von Neumann self-replicator is too small. It will take time for it to grow exponentially to a scale capable of dismantling an entire planet. But if our Torch Ship transport fleet is large enough and has sufficient capacity, I can easily deploy a larger number of initial von Neumann self-replicator seed factories onto the surface of one or more planets. After the first self-replication cycle begins, it will be a larger scale of 4+4, 8+8, or even 16+16, rather than a single self-replication cycle of 1+1."

"If the number of initial seed factories that serve as von Neumann self-replicators is large enough, it is not impossible to compress the completion time of the entire Dyson cloud project into a single generation."

Chapter 199 Korolev Crater Research Station

For the Theian civilization, stellar celestial engineering is a long-term generational project. Even with a von Neumann self-replicator system that can achieve exponential growth, it will take more than hundreds of years to dismantle several planets and millions of asteroids. For the Theians, this still means that they may have to wait at least two to three generations before they can see the full completion of the Dyson cloud project.

The current Teian people already have relatively basic brain-computer interface technology. This type of brain-computer interface can even realize the ability to input rich and complex information into the brain, but this type of brain-computer interface cannot truly realize the function of digitally uploading the brain and consciousness of a normal Teian person. However, if they want to achieve immortality at the level of consciousness, the Teian people do have a relatively special method, which is to cut the entire brain into 50-nanometer-thick slices and then scan all the nerve structures slice by slice with a cryo-electron microscope, and reconstruct them on a computer. The reconstructed whole-brain simulated personality consciousness model is the same as the original individual in behavior, thinking, personality, and memory, which can be fully called digital consciousness uploading.

This technology was realized about 150 years ago. Although the whole-brain simulation of a Teian individual was initially difficult to achieve in engineering, because unlike various less intelligent animals used in whole-brain simulation experiments, the Teians are extremely intelligent creatures with extremely many synapses in their brains, it requires a large amount of computing power to achieve the whole-brain simulation of an individual after digital uploading.

Moreover, regarding this technology, there has indeed been a lot of debate among the Theians. That is the Ship of Theseus-like question of whether the individual after digital upload is still the original individual. The answer given by the Theian social management general strong artificial intelligence to this question is: as long as you are willing to regard the digital whole-brain simulation program that has exactly the same neural connections, memories, thinking methods, and personality as yourself, then it is the original you.

Regarding this, there have been many doubts in the Teian community. The main question is whether the digital consciousness uploaded in this way is related to the original individual consciousness. Is the uploaded whole-brain digital simulation consciousness the original Teian individual, or a digitized AI that is exactly the same as the original individual?

Some Teians believe that such a full-brain simulation is not the original self no matter how close it is to themselves, while some Teians believe that this cut-and-done uploading of consciousness and brain is equivalent to the original self.

And this technology also brings a problem, that is

A digitally uploaded Theian is essentially a general strong artificial intelligence (AGI) with original thinking patterns. The amount of information it contains is bound to be completely different from the previous brain made up of a lump of organic matter. Whole-brain simulation requires a method that is as close as possible to the original brain in the real world. A virtual brain neural network is rebuilt on the computer through the brain's neural data. However, this method consumes a huge amount of computing power to maintain the consciousness of a large number of individuals in the computer. The current computing power of the Theian civilization is not enough to upload all individuals into the virtual world simulated by the computer. Due to the characteristics of this technology, the process of scanning and uploading the entire brain will inevitably lead to the death of the original individual. Therefore, only when a Theian is inevitably heading towards death due to uncontrollable external forces, such as incurable diseases, aging, accidental injuries and other factors, will they be allowed to use this technology to digitally upload their brain and consciousness.