Age of Cosmic Exploration

This was the fourth day after the first space vessel exploded. Compared to the relative peace earlier, the public, which had been given notice of the situation, spent their days in veritable hell. There was no crueller punishment, having your heart at your throat all the time, anxious that the aliens would rush into the Hope at any minute.

The fourth day had passed and there was still no sign of the aliens. The Hope was silent. Even though the wait was still there, most had breathed a sigh of relief.

Early in the morning, Yao Yuan was awakened by the knocking on his door. Subconsciously, he went to click on the light switch beside his bed before realizing he had fallen asleep in the captain’s room. He quickly sat up and said, "Come in."

Seconds later, Guang Zhen strode into the room. He sighed when he saw Yao Yuan slowly crawl out of his military-use sleeping bag. "I’ll take over the night duties tomorrow, you need a good night’s sleep."

Yao Yuan shook his head. "No can do. I have to do this because I have the Diviner’s power to sense danger; I’ll be the first to know to press the self-destruct button."

Guang Zhen sighed yet again, but he didn’t deny Yao Yuan’s claim. He pulled out a chair and sat down. "The morning patrol is over; there is nothing unusual. The Hope is operating just fine; every piece of equipment is functioning perfectly. The external shield seems to be working fine as well. As long as the theoretical basis for creator’s particle is sound, then I’m sure there is no leakage of information, so you don’t need to worry about that."

Yao Yuan was using the bathroom in the captain’s room to wash his face. After he returned to his chair, he said, "Of course I won’t worry if it’s you leading the team. Regardless, it’s good news that everything’s fine, but I still cannot brush away the worry that the aliens are just toying with us... How’s Eva? Still sleepy?"

Guang Zhen’s sigh turned into a deep frown. He said, after a long pause, "That’s right. Due to overexertion of the Sage power, even though there wasn’t severe corruption, she spent her waking hours half asleep. The doctors couldn’t find any fault with her body. The poor girl, she’s suffered the most during these few days."

They then contemplated into silence. After some time, as the both of them were going to continue, someone knocked on the door, and after Yao Yuan gave his permission, Xiao Niao sauntered in while still yawning.

Xiao Niao planted himself on one of the chairs and said through his yawn, "There is still no trace of ZERO. From the schedule, she’ll need another 10 to 15 days before she reappears, but I did what you asked and stayed up until the early morning every day just in case she appears when I’m asleep, so I didn’t even close my computer."

Yao Yuan knew Xiao Niao had done his best, but ZERO was simply too elusive; no one could tell for sure where she was. Therefore, Yao Yuan didn’t blame him, but he suddenly asked, "Since you’re already here, I have something to ask you... Do you think this alien civilization is here because they’re also moving towards the Noah One?"

Xiao Niao was surprised before sitting up straight to reply, "Why would you think that? This alien civilization is at least at the 5th revolution, and this solar system we’re in has many terrestrial planets and gas giants. These are all valuable resources, so why couldn’t they be here for them?"

Yao Yuan pressed a button on his table and a constellation chart suddenly appeared on the wall. The chart showed the solar system the Hope was in. There were a few blinking red stars on the chart. Those were the locations the central mainframe predicted the Noah One would be. In other words, those were their destination.

"Xiao Niao, as you can see, these are the locations we’ve predicted where Noah One can be... You know about all of these, right? In space travel, the importance of suns, even for high level space civilizations that have achieved the technology of star gate, is still very great. They still depend on the star path anchored by the sun to navigate their journey," Yao Yuan explained, pointing at the chart. Xiao Niao nodded.

In fact, this information was given by the alien merchants, details about space travel.

This sort of information was brand new to humanity at the time. After all, human beings had left Earth when they were still too young a civilization. Theoretically speaking, they wouldn’t have the technology to leave the solar system, much less know about the intricacies of space travelling.

The cosmos was gigantic, so even if the surveillance caught the presence of sun or planets, going there physically would require several thousand years even if one was travelling at light speed. This was an unimaginable distance. For space-venturing civilizations, moving from one coordinate to the next was different from how one moved within a planet. They couldn’t keep on moving simply because the general direction was correct. So how would one travel in space?

First, one needed to secure a destination, and for that, one needed to have a reference. For example, if you’re looking for an apple on top of a table, in relation to the apple, the table would be the reference. You could use it to determine the direction. The apple was on top of the table, but how about space? One couldn’t possibly use emptiness as a reference. Due to the limitations of distance, after a celestial body was far enough away, it wouldn’t be observable. The only exception would be light-giving suns. For example, if one looked at our solar system from far away in space, Earth would become an indiscernible rock, while one would easily be able to spot the burning sun.

Therefore, for space travel, the key was to obtain a navigational chart, and the things that made up these charts were the different suns. They aligned to create star paths. For space civilizations, travelling was from one sun to the next, and travelling from an empty space to another empty space was impossible. Civilizations that did that would only find themselves utterly lost in the directionless cosmos.

On the other hand, for civilizations that hadn’t mastered the warp drive technology, moving from one sun to the next would require a time as long as several hundred generations. For a level 3 space civilization that had warp drive technology, the travel time would be greatly reduced to the unit of years. However, this didn’t mean that warp drive was perfect, its biggest weakness being the absolute silence during warp.

Indeed, the spaceship during warp drive wouldn’t be able to receive information from its surroundings, not even through light surveillance. This was because the spaceship was within a state of ‘super’ light speed, and the limitations for transference of information was light speed. In other words, a spaceship under such situation was akin to a blind person. Unless it was like how the Hope stumbled across the alien merchants and had already set the creator’s particle beforehand. When the spaceship passed through the creator’s particle, they would know of their existence and exit the warp drive state, then they would be able to survey their surroundings normally.

Therefore, even for space civilizations with warp drive, they couldn’t skip the distance of several suns and go beyond that, because that would be too dangerous. The most common travelling method was to warp to the nearest sun and then from there start another analysis and calculation to adjust the difference in data before reinitiating another warp drive. This would be repeated until they reached their destination.

Yao Yuan’s explanation of the star path was mostly for Guang Zhen’s sake. Then he moved on to say, "These days I’ve been using the central mainframe to calculate the distance between this solar system we’re in and other surrounding solar systems, as well as our location in reference to known star paths. The result was astounding... This solar system is not suitable to be a pit stop, because it is far away from other known solar systems. It is only a part of one particular star path..." Yao Yuan pressed a few more buttons on his table and soon the congested suns disappeared from the screen. Finally, a silver line appeared to join several remaining suns together, signifying a star path. At the end of the path was a blinking red dot, one of the predicted locations where the Noah One could be!

Xiao Niao was stunned. After a long time, he said, "In this case, it’s not so bad that we stumbled across this space civilization here now..."

Guang Zhen asked hurriedly, "How is that not a bad thing? We’re like at the tip of the knife; we might perish the next second! You know that, right? Ol’ Yao has practically moved into the captain’s room just in case the aliens rush into the Hope. He was preparing to self-destruct the Hope!"

Yao Yuan waved for Guang Zhen to stop, but he nodded in agreement. "Indeed, if this civilization’s goal is really to reach the Noah One... Then it is not a bad thing we met them here. At least we’ve learned some things about them now. It’s better than them suddenly appearing when we’re in the middle of saving the Noah One...

"Other than that, I have another thing I’m also worried about."

Yao Yuan looked at the both of them and said, "If we’ve already stumbled across a level 3 space civilization here, then...

"What are the chances that more space civilizations will appear when we’re closer to the Noah One? Will there be more level 3 space civilizations, or beyond that?"