The Jueling Cluster, a certain three-dimensional static universe.
The Orion spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, Earth stars of the Solar System.
In a super metropolis.
On the crowded street, Mu Cang, dressed in pure white clothes, was walking slowly and leisurely.
As he walked, he kept observing the various people passing by with great interest.
The reason why he was interested was because Mu Cang discovered that the intelligent life in this cluster... actually had no soul.
"It is indeed a purely materialistic world. It doesn't even have a soul. There is only spiritual consciousness based on the network of material brain neuron systems, and..."
Mu Cang walked slowly and chuckled, "The root spirituality hidden deep in the consciousness."
Without a soul, there are no ghosts.
When a person dies, he dies, and everything becomes empty.
At least this is true for all intelligent creatures in all time and space in the universe that Mu Cang can observe.
The rules of this cluster...are indeed a bit strict.
"...now broadcast a piece of news..."
"...[Guanghan Palace] Yuexing Base has been successfully completed, which means that Longhua Aerospace has entered a new era..."
"...The rich helium-3 resources contained in the soil on the surface of the moon are enough to support mankind's use of nuclear fusion energy for 100,000 years..."
Mu Cang raised his head and glanced at the huge display screen on the building opposite, where a beautiful female host was broadcasting the evening news with a smile.
The content described in the news broadcast is that the mortal country named [Longhua] under Mu Cang's feet is already ahead of more than two hundred other countries in the world, and has established a research and development base just a few miles away.
On the moon, a planet 380,000 kilometers away.
Putting aside the so-called national distinctions that existed in the surface era, this news can completely represent that carbon-based intelligent life on this planet has entered a new stage in aerospace technology.
Therefore, in general, it seems that this carbon-based ethnic group can be regarded as an Earth-like intelligent civilization that has great development potential and is moving towards the era of stars and seas visible to the naked eye.
Unfortunately...it only seems to have potential.
Because through the eyes of God that can almost 100% 'see' through the future, Mu Cang, who is standing at this moment, already knows it.
In just thirty years, around 2100 AD, this planet will fall into a huge war due to various reasons such as competition for interests among countries and shifting hegemony.
That war with a huge scope and extremely high intensity will greatly damage or even destroy the industrial and scientific research foundation of the entire human society on Earth and planet, and then lead to a substantial civilizational regression of the entire human race.
At the same time, the severe environmental damage caused by this war, as well as the great shortage of natural resources and population resources also caused by the war, will also make the reconstruction of civilization on this planet very difficult.
It will take nearly six centuries before the technological level of human civilization on this planet can be restored to the current era.
At that time, this carbon-based intelligent group will have the opportunity to once again set foot in the stars and develop aerospace.
Regrettably, on the long road to a true interstellar civilization, the war that swept the world and the subsequent regression of civilization were only the smallest 'levels' that this earth-star race would face.
They will face many more difficult difficulties in the future.
For example, energy issues.
In this vast three-dimensional universe, all intelligent civilizations that have entered the atomic energy age will sooner or later discover that the seemingly beautiful cold nuclear fusion cannot be realized in reality.
The so-called cold fusion actually refers to the nuclear fusion reaction that occurs at normal temperature and pressure and can be used as an energy source, rather than the kind of thermonuclear fusion that occurs inside stars, hydrogen bombs, nuclear weapons, and magnetic confinement fusion reactors.
This fusion method is not only clean, clean and safe, but is also extremely convenient and simple in operation and maintenance.
It sounds amazing, and it feels very suitable for use as an intelligent civilization in the sub-interstellar era.
Unfortunately, cold fusion is a beautiful idea that can only exist on paper.
In this universe, unless there are advanced civilizations that have broken through the technological singularity and entered the stage of superhuman changes, they will take action.
Otherwise, under normal circumstances, there is no physical principle that can support this kind of cold fusion reaction.
Therefore, for people at this stage of Earth-Star civilization, nuclear fusion can only take the difficult path of thermonuclear energy.
However, this also leads to many problems such as the miniaturization, stabilization, and safety of thermonuclear fusion energy, which will be difficult problems that all intelligent civilizations, including the earth and the stars, must solve.
It is very difficult to overcome this difficulty.
But there are still many, many, many difficulties like this.
Each of these difficulties will be like a series of huge filters, stubbornly blocking the steps of all intelligent civilizations to move deeper into the starry sky and move towards higher levels of technology.
For example, in addition to energy issues, there are also human health issues in the space age and the speed of spacecraft.
Although eight centuries later, the human race on the Earth and Star will be able to perfectly implement mature and cheap space travel between the Earth and the Moon, and then be able to make full use of the abundant helium-3 resources on the Moon's surface to promote the development of their own civilization.
But this can only be considered the beginning.
If Earthlings want to quickly and safely travel to more distant planets and colonize them, they need to continue to optimize and improve spaceflight technology, and... themselves.
Because Earth planet humans, this group of intelligent primate creatures born on the surface of the earth, none of their body functions evolved to adapt to the weightless environment of space.
Therefore, long-term space travel will inevitably bring a large number of serious health problems to Earth and planet astronauts.
The first problem is that various damages caused by long-term gravity abnormalities will continue to occur at the cellular level of human beings on Earth, thus continuously reducing their physical fitness.
Eventually, it will cause cancer in various organs and tissues, deformed necrosis in large areas of the neuronal system, and infertility.
If humans on Earth want to simulate artificial gravity...
Unfortunately, Mu Cang could clearly 'see' that it would take at least another thirty-five centuries for humans on Earth to do this initially experimentally.
Moreover, at that time, they only used various other complex force field technologies to build an artificial simulated gravity field, rather than a true twisting and interfering gravitation field.
In the thousands of years before the technology of artificial gravity was available, humans on Earth and planet could only rely on rotating cabins to simulate the gravity field. At the same time, they constantly optimized the overall structure and facilities of the spacecraft, trying their best to reduce the weightlessness of space.
minimize the hazards.
But even so, in the first few centuries, there were many astronauts who suffered from various illnesses throughout their lives while making great contributions to human spaceflight.
It will not be until mature gene screening and regulation technologies become available that this tragic situation will be significantly changed.
However, this so-called "gene ascension" path, despite all efforts of human civilization on Earth and planet, can only advance to the level of extending life span for thousands of years, enhancing functions, increasing intelligence, and being free from all diseases.
If you go any further, there will be no way forward.
Because technological development can carry out various more controllable genetic engineering, allowing humans to artificially evolve more effectively, such as increasing the beneficial heritable traits of the population, or the combination of beneficial heritable traits, etc.
However, no matter how much protein is manipulated, it will only be a fragile thing that will permanently change its chemical properties when exposed to high temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius.
It will never turn into diamond, and it will never be able to compare its strength and melting point with titanium alloys.
Therefore, we want to rely on the so-called genetic modification technology to 'create' fantasy superhuman beings such as Wolverine, Vampire, and Hulk who do not follow the laws of conservation of mass and energy and other physical rules at all.
It is better to hope that one day an alien daddy will suddenly come to the earth and be kind enough to help mankind around the world ascend collectively.
It can only be said that the rules of this universe are too strict.
It is so strict that there is no shortcut that allows human beings to achieve various extraordinary miracles, and there is no basic rule 'soil' for the stable existence of such extraordinary miracles.
Therefore, in Mu Cang's view, the only path that the human species on this tiny planet can take smoothly in the future is the integration of humans and machines - mechanical ascension.
At the same time, a more important issue than energy and health is the development and evolution of sublight-speed aerospace technology.
Mu Cang could 'see' that in the future, humans on earth and planet would make countless arduous efforts to push the spacecraft's flight speed to 10% or more of the speed of light in vacuum.
They first used large space lasers to accelerate the light sail aircraft.
Its overall structure is somewhat similar to the Dyson Harrop solar wind power satellite once launched by Mu Cang's "hometown" Blue Star Lighthouse.
Of course, it must be much more sophisticated and powerful in terms of structure and power.
Subsequently, on this basis, humans on Earth and the planet also added unconventional lasers such as solar pump lasers and nuclear explosion pump lasers to this long-lasting aerospace project to enhance the propulsion of the spacecraft.
Unfortunately, this series of technologies can only propel the spacecraft to 20% of the speed of light in a vacuum.
This speed is the absolute limit, and there is no way forward.
Even after many centuries, the human civilization on Earth and the planet has developed sufficiently mature and powerful plasma-free propulsion technology, it can only push the speed of a spacecraft to 30% of the speed of light in a vacuum, and it will be completely impossible to do anything further.
arrive.
It is as if there is an invisible threshold blocking the way forward for humans on Earth and Planet.
At this point, there is only one way left for mankind to go.
That path is curvature engine technology.
But this technology requires a crucial ‘thing’—strange matter. (For details on the general principles of warp navigation technology and the setting of strange matter, see Chapters 164 and 181)
Unfortunately, for this kind of extraordinary material that only exists in the core of neutron stars and inside wormholes, humans trapped in the solar system can only look at it with dismay.
Because human civilization, which only possesses 30% of the vacuum light-speed space technology, is simply unable to reach the depths of the vast universe across thousands of light-years to complete the feat of exploring wormholes and excavating neutron stars.
Therefore, humans on earth and planet can only helplessly fall silent and turn the direction of development and research to the solar system and themselves.
And about seventy centuries later, the civilization of the Earth and the stars, which had been conducting in-depth internal development and scientific research for nearly two thousand years, suddenly embarked on the road of mechanical ascension under the premise that the development of aerospace technology was almost dead.
.
They have researched and developed a mature set of consciousness uploading technologies, and resolutely mechanized their entire race from top to bottom.
It is a kind of nano-neuron technology, which looks like a tube of cyan medicine and can be slowly implanted into the human cerebral cortex through regular injection.
This kind of nanomechanical neuron that can be controlled remotely will, by default, gradually dismantle the brain cells and neurons in the human brain one by one.
And on the premise of retaining the information related to the synaptic connections of the brain cells' neurons and the original cell structure, it gradually replaces the various functions of the original neurons and slowly optimizes them.
At the same time, the entire process of nanoneurons gradually replacing all brain cells in the human brain will also undergo extremely gentle whole-brain replacement in days.
Although this is essentially a kind of chronic suicide, because when a person's last neuron cell is completely replaced, then he is completely dead at the biological level.
But during this neuron replacement process that lasted for decades, the continuity of this person's consciousness was never interrupted.
So from this perspective, his overall consciousness has not changed, but the carrier of consciousness has changed and has become stronger.
Perhaps it is for this reason that the spirituality of humans who have undergone whole-brain nanomechanical transformation has not been lost, but continues to exist normally.
In other words, this path of mechanical ascension for humans on earth and planet... is on the right track.
They have not lost their inspiration and creativity.
On the contrary, it is precisely because this whole-brain replacement process is completed.
Precisely because the functions of myelin, axons and other neural tissues in the brain have been completely replaced by nanomachines.
Therefore, the neural reaction speed of human beings, which was only a few hundred meters per second, has suddenly jumped to the sublight speed of hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second.
Under this terrifying neurological reaction speed, humans will be able to completely control their reaction speed to the passage of time in a subjective sense.
A minute in the old era can become as long as a century for humans in the new era.
Moreover, in humans who have undergone whole-brain replacement, subtle changes in their nano-synapses and mechanical brain structures at every moment can be remotely synchronized with the cloud backup consciousness of the central intelligence system.
In this way, in the event of any accidental physical damage, this new human will be able to load files and be resurrected.
It is a true resurrection at the level of spiritual consciousness, rather than a simple reproduction of a data template.
At this point, Earth Star civilization has entered a truly new era.
They have become a new human race far beyond the past.
