Chapter 307: Barrier

What "Scorpio b" brings to mankind is not just a home that can support hundreds of billions of people.

In the second fifty years of the Age of Discovery, the action to colonize "Scorpio b" has begun in full swing, and the transformation of "Scorpio a" has also begun. According to the plan, in the next fifty years, humans will colonize 20 billion people on these two terrestrial planets.

Large-scale colonial actions have brought countless benefits to mankind and have also caused new troubles.

The advantage is that "Scorpio b" has extremely rich natural resources, especially the metal minerals on its satellites, which are the raw materials for building adventure spacecraft. Therefore, you can directly build adventure spacecraft on "Scorpio b" and continue to explore the surrounding space without having to dispatch adventure spacecraft from the solar system.

If you continue to move forward, it means that the adventure distance is shortened by forty-two light years.

Of course, this is a very short distance on the cosmic scale. However, for humans, at least before mastering superluminal flight technology, this is still a very long distance.

The most important significance is not to shorten the adventure distance.

In a sense, large-scale colonization and development operations on "Scorpio b" are equivalent to improving the safety factor of the solar system.

To put it simply, if the expedition spacecraft starts from "Scorpio b" and encounters advanced civilizations during the expedition, the one who is attacked is also "Scorpio b", not the birthplace of human beings. It is undeniable that this is equivalent to putting everyone who colonized "Scorpio b" in danger, but it is nothing compared to threatening trillions of people in the solar system, losing tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of people is nothing.

Obviously, politicians will only consider the issue of probability, rather than considering tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.

It is also true that humans' colonization activities of "Scorpio b" are to build this Earth-like planet according to the standards of "Second Home" and prepare to develop it into the fifth quadrant of human beings (in the era of the universe's great navigation, human beings divided the universe into eight quadrants with the solar system as the center. "Scorpio b" is located in the fifth quadrant, and it is the closest colony to the solar system in this quadrant) for exploration, exploration, colonization and development, and even the frontier base of cosmic wars, making it a barrier to the solar system.

With this purpose, in the next hundred years, that is, the second hundred years of the Age of Discovery in the Universe, the resources spent on this planet far exceeded those spent in the solar system. It can even be said that more than half of the humans were serving the colonization of "Scorpio b".

By the third century of the human universe, a hundred years after the colonial activities on "Scorpio b", the transformation of this planet had been completed. Although the permanent residents of "Scorpio b" at that time were only about 20 billion, less than a fraction of the earth's population, "Scorpio b" had become a perfect frontier base, and a large number of adventure spacecraft set off from here and flew to the vast universe.

According to records, in the first fifty years after "Scorpio B" became a frontier base for adventure activities, more than 10,000 expedition spacecraft departed from here.

All of these adventure spacecraft are privately owned, and most of the explorers are descendants of the first colonists.

At that time, the colonists of "Scorpio b" were definitely the most exploratory part of human civilization and the most courageous part.

Some explorers even drove small spacecraft less than 10,000 tons into deep space.

What is this concept?

On the scale of the universe, a 10,000-ton spacecraft is probably equivalent to a small windsurfing plate with a displacement of only ten tons in the age of human navigation. Explorers drove a 10,000-ton spacecraft into the universe, just like the navigator who drove a 10,000-ton spacecraft into the Atlantic Ocean.

In fact, many explorers died on the road of exploration.

According to records, less than one thousand explorers who can find terrestrial planets in the vast universe and have enough resources to return. Most explorers are lost in the universe. Even if some find terrestrial planets, because the spacecraft is too small, the remaining resources are insufficient to return.

Of course, the gains from any major discovery are extremely rich.

In order to encourage exploration, the human political system in the universe has overturned the previous "star sales contract". The rich people who had purchased the planet only received the right to name, and all the resources on the planet belong to the explorers who arrived first. The human political system in the universe has shared the interests with the explorers in accordance with the peace agreement.

To put it bluntly, if anyone finds a terrestrial planet similar to "Scorpio b", he can become the richest man among trillions of people overnight. Even if he just finds a terrestrial planet similar to "Scorpio a", he can become a rich man overnight.

The pursuit of wealth is the driving force for exploration.

It is this pursuit that drives generations of explorers to drive simple adventure spacecraft to unknown areas in the vast universe.

Among these explorers, there are descendants of some heroes in human history.

For example, among the descendants of Tong Shaoyun, who commanded the Chinese fleet in World War III, dozens of cosmic explorers emerged.

While these explorers realize their personal ideals, they are also constantly expanding the living space of human civilization.

However, as the scope of cosmic adventures grew, two very prominent problems rose to the surface.

The first problem is that the speed of the adventure spacecraft is too slow and can only reach the speed of light at most, and it will take decades or even hundreds of years to fly away from the galaxy.

Obviously, what arises are not only technical issues, but also ethical and moral issues.

Although spacecraft that is propelled by gravity field technology does not have the problem of time stagnation, during the long voyage, the explorer is in a state of frozen feinting death for a long time, and the biological clock is slowed down by 10,000 times compared to normal, that is, the day of the explorer is equivalent to thirty years for ordinary people.

This has caused an extremely serious social and ethical problem.

To put it simply, when some explorers return to their hometown hundreds of years later, they are greeted by great-grandchildren who are older than themselves, and even fifth-generation descendants.

As a result, a very strange phenomenon emerged, that is, many explorers never return to their hometowns.

Most of the time, explorers settle down wherever they go. Some explorers even live on adventure spacecraft all their lives, constantly flying from one galaxy to another, and their natural lifespan is greatly extended due to constant freezing.

More than a million years after the human universe, some explorers are still active on the edge of the Milky Way.

At that time, some human descendants even found these explorers and found that the technology mastered by explorers was far behind.

In fact, this is also a problem.

To put it simply, when explorers struggled to discover a planet with development value, countless planets that they had abandoned before became valuable, and all became valuable because the progress made by humans in science and technology expanded the scope of living space.

The problem arises: those planets abandoned by explorers already have masters, but later generations cannot contact their masters.

At that time, the human politics in the universe adopted the method of development first and then negotiation.

Fortunately, this is just a legal issue, because there are not many legal disputes in property rights.

However, other problems caused by this are not that simple.

For example, many explorers get married and have children during the adventure. Their descendants have never been to the solar system, or even to human colonies in other galaxies. They have very little knowledge of human civilization, so they are not willing to obey the orders of human politics.

In the universe, these people have extremely special identities.

Later, the descendants of these explorers brought a lot of trouble to human civilization. It can even be said that several civil wars of human civilization were related to the descendants of explorers.

In a sense, this explosive development of the universe has laid the root of disaster for the internal breakup of mankind.

Of course, ultimately, technology is still the biggest obstacle.

Affected by this, most people realize that human universe development will eventually stagnate due to backward technology, and human beings will eventually perish.

You should know that if you cannot continue to expand your living space, humans will sooner or later use up resources in the galaxy.

And, this is an imminent question.

For example, in the fifth century of the universe, the resources on the earth were already very small, and the hydrogen elements in the ocean were reduced by 50%. At that time, in order to prevent the destruction of the birthplace of human beings, the human government in the universe issued a coercive order, demarcating the earth as a common protection zone for human beings. This was also the first protected area for human beings in the universe. Then, most people living on the earth began to force the vast majority of people to go to colonies of the outer galaxy. Less than one billion people were allowed to settle on the earth, and the main work of these billion people was to maintain the ecological environment of the earth. In order to restore the earth's original appearance, the human government in the universe even dispatched spacecraft to capture hundreds of ice comets, and then let these comets disintegrate near the earth, allowing the ice in the comet to fall into the atmosphere, and replenish the water lost by the earth due to transition development.

It can be seen from this that technological progress is the basis for human survival.

The so-called living space is just a condition that only appears under the limitations of technology.

So, can technology make major breakthroughs?

It is undeniable that in the era of the universe, human technology has been improving and at a very fast speed, especially the technologies related to space have developed rapidly. However, in terms of the most basic technology, the obstacles encountered by humans are not so easy to break through.

In a sense, humans encountered an almost insurmountable technological barrier at that time.

This is, based on gravity field theory and quantum theory, no technology mastered by humans is enough to break through the speed of light!

Could it be that the speed of light is the only cosmic criterion?
Chapter completed!