Chapter 598 Beyond Deep Space
May 1, Xinghe year 4.
Solar System, edge of the Kuiper Belt.
A spacecraft, whose speed has soared to 570 kilometers per second, is rushing towards the vast starry sky.
The spacecraft is called the Cicada-class spacecraft and belongs to the Interstellar Exploration Office of the Space Division of Sapiens.
This type of spacecraft is about twice as large as the Spark class, with a total mass of 14,000 tons when it departs from lunar orbit.
However, the core of the Cicada-class spacecraft is a large number of miniature firefly hydrogen bombs. It is precisely with the help of so many miniature hydrogen bombs that the Cicada-class spacecraft was able to fly from the moon to the edge of the Kuiper belt in 11 months and increase its speed to 570 kilometers per second.
At this time, miniature hydrogen bombs were still being ejected from the back of the Cicada-class spacecraft.
Then with a flash of light, the propulsion pot cover at the back of the spacecraft exploded, and the spacecraft's speed increased by several kilometers per second.
If you lock onto this Cicada-class spacecraft through an astronomical telescope, you can see a series of light spots following it, and then it flies out of the solar system at a high speed.
Currently, Sapiens has launched a total of six Cicada-class spacecraft, flying in six directions: east, south, west, north, up and down, out of the solar system.
The Cicada-class spacecraft is equipped with a synchronous robot and a magnetic monopole crystal synchronous communication system.
In the current tests, the communication delay of the magnetic monopole crystal has not changed and is still 0.034 nanoseconds as before.
The communication effect is very powerful.
For deep space probes, the first challenge is speed, and the second is communication delay.
Sapiens used the violent method of nuclear explosion propulsion to violently increase the speed of the Cicada-class spacecraft to its current level, solving the speed bottleneck of previous probes.
The synchronous communication of magnetic monopole crystals solves the communication problem in deep space exploration.
After all, electromagnetic wave communication is not too obvious within a radius of 300,000 kilometers, but once the communication distance exceeds 300,000 kilometers, the obvious delay will become more and more serious.
This is also the reason why the various forces on Earth, in the process of exploring outer space, previously needed relatively advanced artificial intelligence to assist spacecraft as long as they left the Earth-Moon system, otherwise problems would easily arise.
Only after solving the two problems of speed and communication did the Homo sapiens company dare to launch a probe spacecraft outside the solar system.
At this time, the five pilots driving Cicada-class No. 001 were also busy in the cockpit through synchronized robots.
The destination of this Cicada-class spacecraft is the Proxima Centauri system, an old neighbor of the solar system.
However, the distance between the two sides is 4.2 light years. Even if the Cicada-class spacecraft uses up all of its hydrogen bombs for propulsion, its maximum speed can only reach about 1,200 kilometers per second, which is 0.4% of the speed of light.
This speed is fast, and it is indeed very fast.
But compared with the distance between planetary systems, it seems insignificant.
If we fly to Proxima Centauri at this speed, it will take 1050 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
Obviously, this time is really bad.
Sapiens certainly did not aim too high. After all, the service life of magnetic monopole crystals is limited and can only be used for about 15 years at most.
Therefore, the mission of the Cicada-class spacecraft is to explore deep interstellar space along the way and lay the foundation for more in-depth exploration in the future.
Humans still know too little about the deep space beyond the Kuiper Belt of the solar system, which is not conducive to humans' future expansion beyond the solar system.
What's more, Sapiens Company no longer has many real rivals on Earth. Unless the sun suddenly explodes one day, it is impossible to wipe out human civilization in the solar system.
The Sun is still in its prime, and it is unlikely that any major problems will occur in the next several hundred million years or so.
Therefore, the most likely danger that the Sapiens company will encounter at present can only come from outside the solar system.
Of course, this danger is not necessarily an alien civilization. It could also be a gamma-ray burst that happens to pass through the solar system, or a rogue planet hidden in deep space.
First of all, the probability of alien civilizations encountering human civilization is not high.
After all, the solar system is not in the central region of the Milky Way, but on the spiral arm. The other planetary systems around it are very far away. Even for the nearest Proxima Centauri, it would be extremely difficult to fly to the solar system.
If the other party has invented superluminal transportation technology, it would basically be in the category of a second-level civilization. There would be no need to embarrass a quasi-first-level civilization.
Therefore, the future crises facing Homo Sapiens can only come from gamma-ray bursts and rogue planets in interstellar space.
The former is the product of a supernova explosion. Since the speed of gamma rays is the speed of light, it is basically impossible to defend against them for previous human civilizations. If you are really unlucky enough to encounter gamma rays, you can only leave it to fate.
The solution now adopted by Sapiens is to deploy some early warning detectors in the void at the edge of the solar system. Magnetic monopole crystal communicators will be installed on the detectors to ensure that messages can be fed back to the Earth headquarters in a timely manner.
Without the synchronous communication of the magnetic monopole crystals, gamma rays would have no way of knowing the situation in advance.
As for rogue planets, this is not nonsense. In the dark interstellar space, there are indeed quite a few rogue planets.
The origins of these wandering planets are that many of them are the result of the collision or fusion of planetary systems, which throw some planets into interstellar space, thus forming wandering planets.
Since this kind of planet abandoned by its parent planetary system does not emit light itself, naturally there will be no obvious signal traces in astronomical telescopes.
There may be fewer planetary-level wandering planets, but there are many asteroid-level ones.
The six Cicada-class spacecraft discovered many asteroids in the Kuiper Belt during their flight.
These unknown asteroids often appear and disappear mysteriously, and it is really difficult to lock onto them without a magnetic field detector.
It is precisely because of the hidden nature of wandering asteroids that Sapiens needs to know the situation outside the Kuiper Belt to avoid being in a hurry when the time comes.
Don't think these asteroids are not dangerous, in fact they are very dangerous.
Among them, large asteroids or rogue planets are extremely dangerous to the solar system.
Once a wandering asteroid or planet enters the inner solar system, it is very likely to cause abnormalities in the major planets within the solar system.
In the early days of the solar system, asteroids and rocky planets collided with each other, otherwise where did the moon get those pockmarks?
Venus' axis and rotation direction were shifted by other planets in ancient times, causing it to rotate extremely slowly.
The slow rotation of the planet results in insufficient strength of the geomagnetic field, which is unable to withstand the erosion of solar storms, and finally Venus becomes the terrible appearance it is today.
Sapiens does not want the Earth to repeat the same mistakes, so in the future it needs to gradually improve the monitoring of the outer solar system to avoid the occurrence of emergencies.
Right at this moment.
Cicada 004 has been flying above the solar system for more than ten months.
Inside the cockpit of the spacecraft, several pilots were looking at various monitoring data, hoping to find useful data.
It’s a pity that the void above the solar system is so desolate.
Not to mention planets, even ice asteroids are very rare in size, and Cicada-class 004 has not discovered any large targets so far.
However, during this boring flight, the alarm inside the cockpit immediately sounded.
Everyone looked at the alarm and suddenly they couldn't help but feel ecstatic, because in front of this spaceship, about 240,000 kilometers away...
