Chapter 583 Like a Blue Dragon
Before you know it.
The time has come to January 5th, the 4th year of Xinghe.
Although there have been varying degrees of chaos around the world due to the spread of super monkeypox.
But the internal situation of Sapiens remains as stable and secure as ever.
After a whole year of full-scale construction, the stratospheric railway that connects Southeast Asia to Africa and runs through the east and west sides of the Ocean of Ceylon has been officially completed.
The Ceylon Ocean section of the Stratospheric Railway has a total length of 4,725 kilometers. It is one of the three ocean sections of the Circum-Equatorial Stratospheric Railway and the shortest of the three.
Li Qingye happened to be free recently, so he used a synchronous robot to come to the southern part of Meroe, which happens to be located in the equatorial region.
On the northern shore of Lake Victoria.
You can see a pillar that supports the sky. This is the Lake Victoria Skytrain Station located in the area.
After arriving here through the skytrain, there are dozens of carbon nanotube composite cables above the Lake Victoria Skytrain Station. The cables are located dozens of meters high and reach an altitude of 20,000 meters in the stratosphere.
And in the stratosphere at an altitude of 20,000 meters , there is a large area of "white clouds".
If you look closely, you can see this "white cloud" with various patterns and mechanical parts on it. That is the Stratosphere Station at Lake Victoria.
At this time, Li Qingye's synchronized robot, together with several security personnel, was taking the elevator and quickly heading to the high-altitude stratosphere station.
Through the elevator window, you can overlook the entire Lake Victoria and the surrounding tropical rainforest.
As Sapiens Company comprehensively promotes agricultural industrialization and indoor farming, the scale of Sapiens Company's farms around the world is decreasing.
Especially in tropical rainforest areas, many farms in the rainforest have stopped development and are only temporarily retaining previously developed arable land.
After all, Sapiens' indoor agriculture has now produced 1.86 billion tons of food a year. Combined with the remaining open-air farms and artificial synthetic food, a total of 3.27 billion tons of food was produced last year.
Li Qingye has already ordered to continue to increase the proportion of indoor agriculture and synthetic food, and gradually eliminate some open-air agriculture that does not have much value.
At this time, the tropical rainforests in equatorial Africa are within .
After all, the soil in the tropical rainforest is poor, and deforestation and reclamation can only be used for three or four years. After that, unless organic fertilizer and chemical fertilizer are regularly added, the soil nutrients will be depleted, resulting in the inability of crops to grow normally.
Therefore, Sapiens has decided to withdraw most of the farmland located in the tropical rainforest.
On the one hand, this is to protect wildlife, and on the other hand, it is also to reduce production costs.
Although the one-time investment cost of indoor agriculture is relatively high, once the facilities are built and various genetically modified crops are added, the land utilization rate will increase by dozens of times. Per unit planting area, the production efficiency is almost 4 to 6 times that of open-air agriculture.
Take wheat as an example. In mid- and high-latitude areas, wheat can usually only be grown for one season, and in warmer mid-latitude areas it can only be grown for two seasons at most.
However, indoor agriculture can achieve the production intensity of planting four seasons a year.
Another advantage of indoor farming is that it can reduce genetic contamination. Although the crops grown by Sapiens are grown using genetic recombination technology rather than the old-fashioned genetic modification technology, there is still the possibility of genetic contamination.
Especially for grain crops that are planted over a large area, there are usually wild species of the same family and genus around them.
This can easily lead to genetic drift.
This situation is not something that the Sapiens company is worrying about, but it has actually happened many times.
The reason why Li Qingye is very cautious about genetically modified organisms entering the natural world is that he is worried that the genes of genetically modified organisms will contaminate the genes of wild species.
Indoor farming does not have this hidden danger.
…
Retracting his drifting thoughts, he had already arrived at the Stratosphere Station.
Standing in the waiting hall of the station, he looked at the endless stratospheric railway, which looked like a blue dragon in the sky.
Due to the near-vacuum environment, the train does not generate strong shock waves and noise when traveling at high speed.
Twenty minutes later.
A maglev train stopped in the waiting lane of the station.
"Dear passengers, Train No. 34002 from Africa to Southeast Asia is about to depart. Please follow the crew's instructions and get on board as soon as possible..."
Li Qingye got on the train without saying a word.
Many passengers on the trip looked at Li Qingye with curiosity when they saw him in robot form.
Of course, these passengers are all employees of the company, and they naturally know that the company recently launched a device called a synchronous robot, which can be used for field investigations.
At present, this type of equipment is mostly used in management inspections.
As soon as they saw the synchronous robot, many people guessed which department the management belonged to. Although they were very curious, no one dared to go over and say hello.
Fifteen minutes later, the train started slowly.
When the magnetic levitation and magnetic field propulsion systems are activated together, the train begins to move with uniform acceleration.
This maglev super-high-speed train, carrying 1,500 passengers, accelerates to a maximum speed of 2,400 kilometers per hour in 20 minutes.
Looking at the endless blue sky outside the window, everyone did not feel any discomfort, nor did they notice the terrifying speed of the train at this time.
After all, the view outside the car window was too monotonous and there was no reference at all.
The 4,735- kilometer east-west width of Ceylon was crossed by the train in just about two hours.
The speed is amazing.
If you take a plane, it will take at least three times longer.
Passenger transport is not the core business of stratospheric railways. The core business of stratospheric railways is actually freight and the future ladder to go up and down low-Earth orbit.
Although the Sky Ladder Project may take several years to start, the relevant design team of the Sapiens Company has already been conducting various technical verifications.
Li Qingye learned about some of the progress through internal briefings.
The current difficulty of the Sky Ladder Project lies in how to build the structure near the boundary of the Karman Line.
If it were Venus, this project would not be too difficult. After all, the atmospheric density of Venus' atmosphere is hundreds of times that of the Earth, which means that its buoyancy is also hundreds of times that of the Earth's atmosphere.
But the buoyancy of the Earth's atmosphere is not enough to support such a huge structure.
The design teams of those research institutes also provided relevant solutions.
For example, the rigid arch bridge structure, this plan is to combine the floating platform of the circum-equatorial stratospheric railway through hard materials, and then form an integrated circular ring.
In fact, it is similar to a donut, but this donut is made hard, the higher the strength, the better.
Li Qingye is very aware of the difficulty.
At this stage, Sapiens' demand for extraterrestrial resources is not as high as imagined.
For example, Sapiens is not too keen on mining helium-3 on the moon because the resources on Earth can still support the company's development for decades.
Therefore, the Sky Ladder Project is not a hasty project, but a long-term project.
It is very possible that in the future, the Cloud Palace project on Venus will be completed, but the Ladder project on Earth may not be completed.
Just as he was daydreaming, the train slowly stopped in the eastern part of Sumatra. This station was located not far from Xingdao and was specially set up for Xingdao.
He hasn't been back to Southeast Asia for more than a year. This time, Li Qingye plans to use the synchronous robot to carefully inspect the situation of various branches in Southeast Asia.
