Chapter 531 Difficulty
Wise Hernandez arrived at his laboratory cabin.
This experimental cabin is buried under the lunar soil. For safety reasons, the cabins of the Copernicus base are rarely directly exposed to the ground and are all buried under the lunar soil.
When the Copernicus base was being prepared for construction, the Space Division organized a large number of professionals to study various options.
The base cities that looked so high-end in those science fiction movies were eliminated immediately.
The reason is very simple.
This is a real moon base, not a science fiction film, so safety and practicality must be considered.
A base directly exposed to the ground can only rely on its own outer shell to withstand solar wind, high-energy neutrons, high-energy rays and asteroids. This is obviously the stupidest option.
After all, this is the moon, not the empty low-Earth orbit or synchronous orbit.
Since it is the moon, we must adapt to local conditions, make full use of the moon's raw materials, and reduce the proportion of the spacecraft's load on protective facilities to maximize benefits.
Therefore, the first batch of Spark spacecraft launched into the Copernicus crater were all specially modified professional models.
For example: Fire-Digger.
The entire body of the Digger can unfold its mechanical legs and walk like an arthropod like a centipede.
The reason why it is designed as a mechanical foot is mainly because the gravity on the moon is only one-sixth of that on the earth, and it does not have a thick atmosphere.
In this way, the mechanical foot can easily support the entire body and move quickly on various terrains.
However, this is not the core function of the digger. As the name suggests, the digger is an excavation equipment. It can easily dig a channel with a depth of 6 to 7 meters.
Then it was the turn of the Spark-Carrier, a model specially designed to carry other Spark ships.
The transporters carried the landed Fire Seeder spacecraft into the channel, and then the diggers filled the channel back with the excavated sand and soil.
The thickness of the sand layer above each cabin is about 1 to 2 meters, which ensures that high-energy neutrons, high-energy rays, and solar winds cannot disturb the cabin.
The cabin no longer needs to be equipped with a magnetic field shield system.
As for asteroids, the solution of the Copernicus base is to guide their fall. That is, through the monitoring system deployed on the moon, it monitors the asteroids in the surrounding orbits that may fall near the Copernicus crater, and then launches some attitude control engines, attaches to the asteroids, and guides the asteroids to fall in other areas.
Although this plan is a bit troublesome, it is better than using a hydrogen bomb to explode.
The Copernicus base buried underground has reduced many protective facilities, which has greatly increased the ratio of working equipment to living facilities.
At this time, Wise Hernandez was driving in the underground tunnel on an electric car.
His electric car is actually a small electric car similar to Laotoule, and the tunnel is also a small tunnel dug by the diggers.
The reason why the cabins are not connected together is also for safety reasons.
The cabins of the base are arranged in groups of 10, with one group arranged in one area and the distance between each group being about 500 meters.
Passing through this small tunnel, Wise Hernandez arrived at the door of his experimental cabin and first placed the electric car in the underground garage nearby.
He entered the quick cleaning area, cleaned off the dust on his space suit, and then entered the changing area.
The heavy-duty space suit was automatically released, ejecting Wise Hernandez from the suit. He then stood in the experimental protective suit dressing machine. Suddenly, a layer of jelly-like colloid flowed out of the equipment and quickly attached to his biological armor, completing the connection and combination of the two.
The whole person seemed to have gained weight. Although the biological armor had a strong protective power, there were some unknown possibilities in the situation in the laboratory.
According to the Laboratory Safety Management Regulations, anyone entering the laboratory must wear professional laboratory protective clothing. This is a mandatory regulation. If you don’t wear it, you are not allowed to enter.
Wise Hernandez walked into the laboratory cabin and went directly to the storage container of lunar bacteria collected a few hours ago.
He took another look at the professional fully enclosed microbial incubators and found that the growth conditions of the lunar bacteria in the five incubators were different.
The lunar bacteria in incubator No. 3 have occupied a quarter of the culture medium and are the fastest growing of the five incubators.
"Although they are all carbon-based organisms, this thing is a bit like Earth's submarine black chimney bacteria, which have a special liking for sulfur compounds."
As he checked the conditions of each incubator, he recorded the data he found.
The average diameter of this lunar bacteria is very large, reaching 3200 to 3500 nanometers. As a single-cell organism, this diameter is already very large.
Wise-Hernandez speculates that this is because the moon's relatively low gravity allows bacteria to grow very large.
Moreover, the life forms of lunar bacteria are relatively primitive, similar to the early archaea on Earth.
As for why lunar bacteria also have genes, they are still genes with the same spiral structure.
The reason is very simple, because the life forms of carbon-based organisms are similar, especially the spiral gene structure that serves as the underlying logic, which is basically the same template.
This is determined by the basic physical laws of the universe. There is no such thing as a carbon ball genetic structure or a carbon cube genetic structure.
If silicon-based organisms exist under special circumstances, their genes may not be chain-structured.
But carbon-based organisms must have genes with a chain-like spiral structure.
Since both sides are carbon-based organisms, there are conditions for genetic recombination. Wise Hernandez is very clear about the difficulties currently faced by the Copernicus Base.
That is, biosynthesis technology cannot synthesize parts with high precision, which is not conducive to the self-sufficiency of the base.
The root cause of this situation lies in genes.
The biosynthesis technology used by the company is based on the use of various genes from Earth's organisms to transform artificial organisms that can quickly synthesize various materials.
The problem is that the genes of Earth's creatures must have mutated specifically for the Earth's environment.
If these creatures are taken to outer space and other planets, they will naturally suffer from acclimatization problems.
At present, the progress of the space application of biosynthesis technology at the Homo sapiens Space Station is also bumpy.
We encountered many problems, especially that some elements were easily out of control in the microgravity environment of outer space, resulting in very poor quality of the synthesized materials. In addition, the synthesis speed was also reduced.
The same is true on the Moon.
The reason why Sapiens Company attaches so much importance to biosynthesis technology is that its advantages can maximize profits by using minimal manpower and material resources when exploring extraterrestrial space.
It is not too difficult for Sapiens to explore the moon now, after all, the moon is right at our doorstep.
But in the future, we will need to explore Mars, Venus, Jupiter's satellites and the like, as these planets are too far away from Earth.
The distances start at hundreds of millions of kilometers, and there is no way for manned spacecraft to use nuclear explosion propulsion. Even if a mass projector is built on the moon, the speed of future manned spacecraft will hardly break the limit of 50 kilometers per second.
Therefore, the best solution is to use biosynthesis technology to expand the scale of the development base using local materials on alien planets.
If everything had to be transported from the earth, the speed at which humans explore the solar system would drop hundreds of times.
