Start sweeping the universe by rubbing the CPU with your hands.

Chapter 241 The Vast Galaxy

From the interrogation of ETA scientists, Han Yang learned that this so-called electromagnetic life has another more suitable name.

Stellar virus.

They are a life form that has no entity in the traditional sense. Their life essence is an electromagnetic wave encoded in a special form with special frequency and energy level.

Like light, they have no rest mass, and throughout their lives, even after death, their remains will always keep moving at the speed of light.

The Eta people don't know whether electromagnetic life has intelligence. But it doesn't really matter.

Because Yinmeng's public information shows that carbon-based social intelligent life forms based on cell structures, such as humans or Eta people, have no possibility of communicating with electromagnetic life forms.

One can never reach the speed of light, and the other is always at the speed of light. This alone means that there is a huge difference in the understanding of the universe between the two, and the perception of time, space, energy, etc. are completely different.

Even if electromagnetic life is intelligent, the two cannot communicate with each other. Electromagnetic life cannot understand the world view and logic of actions of gregarious intelligent life, and gregarious intelligent life cannot understand the world view and logic of action of electromagnetic life. In this case, electromagnetic life has Without intelligence, it would be useless to social intelligent life.

Most of the electromagnetic life forms that have been discovered by the Silver Alliance do not pose a threat to social intelligent life forms.

The two parties cannot even perceive each other.

Perhaps during space navigation, a piece of electromagnetic background noise observed by the spacecraft was caused by a group of electromagnetic beings passing by.

Perhaps an interstellar dust cloud with a peculiar magnetic field structure is the home of a group of electromagnetic life forms.

As long as they don't take the initiative to die or are too unlucky, in most cases, everything will be fine between the two parties.

However, a special type of electromagnetic life poses a great threat to social intelligent life. It is this type of electromagnetic life that has been named "stellar virus" by the Silver Alliance.

It has been clearly studied that this type of electromagnetic life prefers to gather on a certain star that is suitable for their survival, and through a certain mechanism, they use the energy of the star to reproduce their offspring - it is not yet known what the electromagnetic life is about this kind of thing. No matter how you look at it, at least in the understanding of social intelligent life forms, electromagnetic life forms are multiplying.

Through the energy of stars, electromagnetic life will achieve an extremely large-scale improvement of the race. In a short period of time, their number and group strength may be tens of trillions of times what they were before they reproduced.

In this way, the existence of electromagnetic life forms will seriously affect the magnetic field of the star itself through electromagnetic interaction.

Stellar magnetic fields play an extremely important role in stellar evolution and maintenance of daily conditions.

Therefore, the reproductive activities of electromagnetic lifeforms indirectly affect stars, and indirectly affect social intelligent lifeforms that rely on star energy to survive and develop.

Yinmeng's public information refers to the reproduction activities of electromagnetic life with the help of star energy as parasitism to stars, just like viruses or germs parasitic life forms.

This is where the name Stellar Virus comes from.

A large-scale explosion of electromagnetic life groups alone will lead to the deterioration of the electromagnetic environment of the "parasitized" star system, affecting all equipment that requires electrical energy.

Everything from a space battleship to a chip will be affected by the deterioration of the electromagnetic environment.

What's even worse is that stars that are severely affected by large-scale explosions of electromagnetic life groups will have a series of problems such as convection disorders and magnetic field disorders, which will lead to a series of violent stellar explosions.

Coronal mass ejections, flares, ultra-strong stellar winds, more violent X-ray and gamma-ray bursts, etc., will turn the entire galaxy into a purgatory.

This is an electric disaster.

Han Yang silently made some calculations and simulated what would happen if an electric disaster broke out in the solar system.

It is not uncommon for solar activity to affect the earth. Aurora is one of the most common examples.

High-energy charged particles released due to solar activity radiate throughout the solar system at extremely high speeds. When they come to the earth, they can create colorful aurora in the sky through interaction with the earth's magnetic field and the earth's atmosphere.

If the solar activity were more intense, it would be more than just auroras.

Large-scale signal interruptions, power grid paralysis and power outages, electronic equipment being burned, and even affecting the operation of satellites, and so on.

But this is just regular stellar activity.

The sun, on the other hand, can only be regarded as an extremely stable and stable existence among stars.

Once electromagnetic life parasitizes the sun on a large scale, causing the sun to become violent, first of all, the electromagnetic environment of the entire solar system will deteriorate extremely, so much so that all satellites, detectors, battleships, spacecraft and other space vehicles that require electric energy that Han Yang owns at this moment will be severely damaged. Malfunction or even unusable.

All communication methods using electromagnetic waves will be interrupted due to excessive interference.

The temperature of the sun will rise a lot, causing the temperature of the earth to be even higher, and the entire biosphere will be completely destroyed.

The Sun will also become a powerful source of X-ray and gamma-ray radiation. Any space station with insufficient protection will greatly increase the cancer rate of life in it, and even healthy offspring will not be born at all.

Because of the powerful denudation effect of stellar winds, the entire Earth's atmosphere will be stripped away, and eventually the Earth will become like Mercury.

The oceans dried up, all life died, and the entire earth fell into complete silence.

Even at the current stage of human civilization that has mastered interstellar navigation technology, only a small number of people who escape to the outer solar system will survive in the end, and everyone else will die.

But...one of the most important factors maintaining the existence of a social intelligent civilization is population.

Without a sufficient population, we can't even pass on knowledge, so how can we talk about maintaining the continuation of civilization?

Reaching that point basically means the demise of civilization.

At least at this stage, human civilization is completely unable to bear the consequences of an electrical disaster.

No, not only human civilization, even the Eta civilization, which is more advanced than human civilization, cannot bear it.

At the same time, the electromagnetic life that caused the outbreak of electric disasters has an even worse nature.

That is, after completing the parasitism of a star, using the energy of the star to achieve a huge explosion of its own population, and because of the huge explosion of its own population, the star fell into an unstable state and destroyed the ecology of the star system. After that, a huge number of electromagnetic life forms will start from that star and spread out in all directions, each looking for the next star that can be parasitized.

Because unstable stars are no longer suitable for the survival and reproduction of electromagnetic life.

Just like locusts that eat the plants in one area, and after their own group expands, they go to look for the next plant.

This is the "electrical disaster spillover" claimed in Yinmeng's public information.

Because of this, after a certain star is confirmed to be parasitized by electromagnetic life, all intelligent life in the surrounding star system will become nervous.

Because once an electric disaster spills over, no one can escape.

The only way is to eliminate stars in their early stages of being parasitized by electromagnetic life and nip them in the bud.

The method of killing an electrical disaster in its infancy is clearly stated in the Silver Alliance's public information, and it is relatively easy to implement. It is easy for low-level civilizations like the Eta Civilization - in the entire Silver Alliance system, the Eta Civilization does not exist at all. There is no doubt that it is a low-level civilization. Of course, human civilization is even more low-level - it can be achieved after paying a certain price.

Electromagnetic life affects stars through the stellar magnetic field, and then affects intelligent life. Then, social intelligent life can also affect electromagnetic life by affecting stars.

For a civilization of the Eta civilization's level, this is an extremely huge project, and it requires the mobilization of the entire civilization to be possible.

However, the minerals produced on icy dwarf planets far away from the star, also known as the so-called "Pluto Development Strategy", are the minerals that the Eta people focus on mining, black jade minerals, because they have the ability to survive in extremely complex and harsh electromagnetic environments. , maintaining good shielding characteristics, has become the most important material to eliminate electric disasters.

Han Yang understood clearly in his heart that this was the truth behind the Eta civilization's depletion of human civilization.

At the same time, Han Yang also learned more about the structure of the Silver Alliance and the division of civilization levels within the galaxy.

For gregarious intelligent civilizations, the popular plan within the Silver Alliance is the six-level division method.

The lowest primitive civilization is classified as a first-level civilization. The highest level of civilization is level six.

What the Eta people currently know is only the classification method of civilizations from one to three levels. As for what kind of technologies and abilities level four or above civilizations have, the Eta people don't know.

Because the Eta civilization is only a second-level civilization. At the same time, human civilization is also a second-level civilization according to this set of division methods.

It's just that within civilizations of the same level, there are high and low levels. Obviously, a civilization that has just been promoted to the second level cannot be compared with a civilization that has already launched an impact on the third level.

In this set of classification methods, from the birth of wisdom to the mastery of large-scale controllable nuclear fusion technology, everything is classified as a first-level civilization.

It is worth mentioning that in order to ensure the diversity of civilizations in the galaxy - or in other words, to explore every possibility for the development of the scientific and technological system, the Silver Alliance has special policies and regulations for first-level civilizations, which strictly prohibit the interference of any advanced civilization and ensure that The independent development route of first-level civilization.

This is the truth that before the controllable nuclear fusion technology was mastered, human civilization basically did not suffer any external influence. As soon as this technology was mastered, the Eta civilization came immediately.

Because the Eta galaxy is relatively close to the solar system, only a dozen light years away, the solar system can probably be regarded as the sphere of influence of the Eta civilization.

Of course, before mastering controllable nuclear fusion technology, Han Yang was quite skeptical as to whether the Eta civilization had secretly violated the Silver Alliance's ban and secretly exerted influence on human civilization. After all, the Silver Alliance is only a relatively loose alliance. Although low-level civilizations dare not violate it openly, it is hard to say how much execution they can do secretly.

After mastering controllable nuclear fusion technology, we will become a second-level civilization.

At the current stage, both human civilization and Eta civilization are in the second-level civilization stage.

At this stage, the large-scale use of controllable nuclear fusion technology and ion thrusters will allow civilization to conduct large-scale interstellar navigation.

Breakthroughs in long-distance communication technology and the development of electromagnetic gun and laser cannon technology have given secondary civilizations strong interstellar combat capabilities.

It can be said that only those who have reached the second level of civilization are truly qualified to talk about interstellar war. If you are less than Level [-], you are not even qualified to enter.

As for the third-level civilization, it is further increased on the basis of the second-level civilization.

They have more universal and efficient nuclear fusion technology - that is, protium fusion technology that can perform large-scale and high-efficiency fusion.

The nuclear fusion technology mastered by the second-level civilization stage is deuterium-tritium fusion.

Deuterium-tritium fusion is the easiest type of fusion to achieve, but it is not the type that releases the most energy.

At the same time, the deuterium and tritium content is low and requires large-scale purification and enrichment before it can be produced.

In the universe, protium, also commonly known as hydrogen, is the most abundant.

At the same time, because it is the lightest element—the atomic nucleus is only one proton, protium per unit mass produces the highest energy after fusion, almost twice as much as the fusion of deuterium and tritium.

However, the difficulty of achieving protium fusion is too high. At this moment, Han Yang had no idea at all to realize it.

The temperature required for deuterium and tritium fusion is only about [-] million degrees, but to achieve protium fusion, even one billion degrees may not be possible. This brings about an almost discontinuous increase in difficulty.

——It should be pointed out that the core temperature of the sun is only about 1500 million degrees Celsius, but the sun can stably perform protium fusion. This is actually not inconsistent with the ultra-difficult environment required for protium fusion, because this is a completely different implementation path.

The sun is too big, the density of material inside is extremely high, and the pressure is also extremely high. Under this situation, two protons, that is, protium nuclei, have an extremely low probability per second based on the quantum tunneling effect, about one in 10^18, that they can overcome the Coulomb barrier and undergo fusion.

But again, the sun is too big. There are about 10^56 free protons in the core of the sun, that is, protium nuclei. Even if the probability of quantum tunneling is so low, there will still be about 3.7*10^38 protons reacting every second. Converted into mass, it is 6.2 million tons per second.

About 400 million tons of this mass was converted into energy.

The ultra-low fusion efficiency of the sun causes the seemingly powerful sun to have extremely low specific power.

You can feel how low the unit power of the sun is through such a comparison: Compared with the energy released by the fusion of solar material of the same volume, compared with a potato, which one has greater external radiation power?
  The answer is potatoes.

That is to say, assuming that potatoes do not change due to mass and pressure, then if many potatoes equivalent to the size of the sun are placed at the position of the sun, the earth will endure much more intense light and heat than it does now.

There would be no life on earth.

Therefore, the stable protium fusion of solar energy does not mean that protium fusion is easy to achieve.

However, Level [-] civilization can perform stable and efficient protium fusion, and can obtain almost twice the energy per unit mass than Level [-] civilization deuterium and tritium fusion.

In addition to energy sources, Level [-] civilizations have several other advanced technologies beyond the imagination of Level [-] civilizations.

One is fluid-free propulsion technology.

It doesn't even need ion propulsion, it is completely free of working fluids. This means that the working fluid that the spacecraft originally needs to carry can be saved to carry other supplies, the efficiency is greatly improved, and it can accelerate for a longer time, even reaching speeds above 80% of the speed of light!

You know, when a second-level civilization develops to the most advanced stage, it can only reach about 50% of the speed of light at most. If it exceeds this speed, it will fall out of the economic range and cannot be applied on a large scale.

The second is energy shield and energy weapon technology.

Han Yang does not know much about these two technologies at this stage, and cannot intuitively understand the power of these two technologies.

But ETA scientists have a very intuitive description.

The warships of the third-level civilization that adopt these two technologies can even achieve a record of more than one to one thousand against the warships of the second-level civilization! Basically it's a crushing!

The warships of the second-level civilization are completely powerless against the warships of the third-level civilization.

As for the fourth-level civilization that is more powerful than the third-level civilization, or what kind of miraculous technology the higher-level civilization has, even the Eta people don't know.

This information made Han Yang couldn't help but sigh.

"I relied on numbers to defeat the Eta civilization's fleet in the solar system. I thought I was already powerful.

However, the entire Eta civilization has tens of thousands of warships of the same level or even higher levels. These warships sent to the solar system are even obsolete or old models.

An Eta civilization is already so powerful, not to mention the third-level civilization that can crush the second-level civilization, or even higher-level civilizations, as well as other types of life that are enough to pose a huge threat to even the top-level civilization...

The vast Milky Way is so vast, and the small solar system is not even comparable to a grain of dust...

However, although the road ahead is long, I have enough courage and confidence to climb to the top. "

By this moment, most of Han Yang's questions had been answered.

Another part of the information that attracted Han Yang's attention was about the Silver Alliance and the so-called Yuanshan Alliance.

The Silver Alliance is actually a relatively loose alliance. There are not many mandatory affiliations between each other, and there is no connection between superiors and subordinates. It is more like a consensus, exchanging intelligence with each other, and fighting against other types of life. An organization that reports to the group for warmth.

Somewhat similar to the United Nations when the earth was not unified - no, even looser than the United Nations.

The key is that the Milky Way is too big and there are too many civilizations. Even the top civilization cannot explore the entire galaxy.

However, if we compare the Silver Alliance to the United Nations, the so-called Yeonsan Alliance is similar to the so-called Warsaw Pact, NATO, XX Cooperation Organization, and the South Asian Alliance of X Countries.

Multiple different civilizations with different technological levels have formed small alliances based on culture, inheritance, region, interests, etc.

Different alliance structures are either loose or tight, some are large, some are small. The large ones include thousands of civilizations and span thousands to tens of thousands of light years. There are even three levels below the secondary alliances. Even the fourth-level alliance may only have two civilizations, spanning only a few light years, and the situation is ever-changing and different.

However, generally speaking, compared to the large and widespread Silver Alliance, there are various smaller regional alliances, and the connections between different civilizations are closer.

There are good and bad relationships between different civilizations, between different alliances, and between different civilizations and alliances. Some cooperate closely, while others have frequent conflicts, and even all-out wars may break out. However, as long as it does not violate the fundamental purpose of the Silver Alliance, the Silver Alliance will not interfere at all and cannot interfere in regional conflicts.

The Yuansan Alliance is such a regional alliance organization.

A certain area in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy is called the Yuanshan Star Field by the Silver Alliance. The origin of the name is the name of the civilization that first became Level [-] in the star field.

About [-] years ago, the Yuanshan Civilization mastered controllable nuclear fusion technology and was promoted to a second-level civilization. The patrol fleet belonging to the Silver Alliance discovered this civilization, and because there are four other civilizations in the area, three of them have the potential to be promoted to the second level, and the other one is in the early stage of civilization, showing a certain tendency of civilization gathering. , so this star field was named Yuanshan Star Field.

The one in the early stage of civilization is obviously the human civilization located in the solar system.

In this way, a total of about 80 stars within a total range of about [-] light years, and a total of five civilizations, formed a small, second-level interstellar civilization alliance under the Silver Alliance, the Yuanshan Alliance.

And because the Eta civilization is the closest to the solar system, only a dozen light-years away, the solar system has become the sphere of influence of the Eta civilization. That is why the Eta civilization has just been promoted to the second level, and the Eta civilization can't wait to colonize it.

After all, for a second-level civilization, if the distance is too far, even coming to colonize is not cost-effective. It's only a dozen light-years away, and a single voyage takes less than 50 years. The benefits can definitely outweigh the cost of colonization.

"Ita Civilization, Electric Disaster, Yuanshan Alliance, Silver Alliance..."

Han Yang silently thought about the key words in the information and the connections between them.

"This vast galaxy is really full of dangers... It is far from being as peaceful as it appears.

Competition between gregarious intelligent civilizations, competition between strange life forms and intelligent civilizations, disasters in the natural environment... any factor may lead to the demise of today's human civilization.

The small human civilization is completely inconspicuous in this vast galaxy and has no special characteristics at all. Even if it dies, it will not cause any waves or attract any attention.

Just like the Eta civilization, it has been a second-level civilization for thousands of years, but in the face of electromagnetic life, if one does not respond well, it may still perish.

In the final analysis, we still need to become stronger as soon as possible..."

Han Yang sighed silently.

(End of this chapter)