Chapter 82: Signals from outer space

Just when the great era of technological blowout had just begun, something unexpected happened ...

This is the Oort Nebula, the outermost part of the solar system.

Astronomers generally believe that the Oort Cloud is the remnant of material that formed the Sun and its planets five billion years ago and surrounds the solar system. The Oort Nebula is the birthplace of comets. It is about 50,000 to 100,000 astronomical units away from the Sun, which is almost equal to one light year, or one quarter of the distance between the Sun and Proxima.

The Sun's light is already very faint at this distance, not as bright as that of Sirius, and is truly an ordinary member of the countless stars.

The fastest light, coming from the Sun here, would have to travel for more than a year. Therefore, it takes millions of years for the comets here to go around the sun, and they can only be seen when they run to a distance of several hundred million kilometers from the sun.

At this moment, a huge spaceship with a diameter of about one hundred and fifty kilometers is passing by here, and if a human scientist stands inside the spaceship, he will be surprised to find that its speed exceeds the speed of light!

Its surface is wrapped in a bubble-like film, and a strange bending phenomenon occurs when light shines on the ship. It is flying towards the solar system at a speed far beyond the speed of light!

This FTL movement does not violate any known laws of physics, and is best explained as "curvature navigation".

Curvature navigation, by changing the curvature of space to let the object forward, its essence is the movement of space. Just like a person standing on a carpet, when the carpet is jerked, the person will also follow the "movement". But the motion of space is more abstract and more complex, wrapped in the movement of space is almost stationary, and does not violate the relativistic effect, so the curvature of navigation can theoretically reach any speed, even - beyond the speed of light!

This has been the human fantasy of space technology, but in this ship completely realized. If human scientists see it, it will certainly trigger a wave of crazy research!

FTL is the best way to avoid danger for interstellar civilizations, because it brings a lot of confusion in information.

Observing FTL ships from all angles would lead to different conclusions.

If the FTL ship is observed from directly behind the direction of travel, one would be surprised to find that it is still moving away from the speed of light. However, at this point there is a severe Doppler effect, where all signals become larger in wavelength and lower in frequency, i.e., the observed ship will be very dim.

If observed from the side in the direction of motion, depending on the angle, the situation would be even more bizarre: the ship is pulled into a strange long strip, and it gets longer and longer, like a long spaghetti.

If the speed of the ship is much greater than the speed of light, one will see one discontinuous point after another, and then these points slowly join together to form a long spaghetti.

According to the first and last points, this is the only possible case of "seeing" FTL motion. However, this phenomenon requires a very high angle of the observer.

If the observer is standing directly in front of the direction of the ship's movement, one ... will not see any image of the ship! Because its speed is so fast that it leaves all light behind!

Only after a period of time, the ship swept past here a moment, people will see a ship from the immediate past, away at the speed of light. At the same time, another backward image was created, which looked like a video played backwards, and one would see the ship flying back again at the speed of light!

This situation looks incredible, but it is not a time rewind, but, in essence, a parallax illusion created by FTL. All the observations, people see not the ship itself, but an image formed by light.

Because the speed of the ship exceeds the speed of light, it is only after the ship has swept past the observer for some time that the most recently emitted photons reach the human eye, then the light a little later, then the light a little later, and the whole succession of images looks as if the ship is going backwards.

All kinds of strange observations make the FTL object just a ghost phenomenon, and all light-based observations are lagging and inaccurate.

Therefore, this information on the error, but the best umbrella for interstellar civilization! Because you simply don't know where the FTL ship has flown, unless ... has a faster-than-light means of observation!

The massive ship continued its voyage through the Oort Nebula for a significant distance before it broke out of its FTL flight and flew at a sublight speed.

It was then that its true appearance could be dimly seen, a massive black ellipsoid with a pitted surface that occasionally produced a large number of electric sparks ... and even, the moment it broke out of FTL, a violent explosion!

Or because of this, it flew firmly into the solar system ...

This is the solar system, Mars.

Professor Thomson, who was in charge of astronomical observation, suddenly detected a little unusual fluctuation.

It was a burst of radio waves with some kind of regularity, very faint, and he examined it with a frown, wondering somewhat whether this burst of waves was sent by human civilization. Because it is too regular, it does not seem to come from the universe garbled code ...

"Astronomy" as the key support project of the Noah, also received a lot of resources to care. The humans even plan to build a kilometer diameter radio telescope in the Noah! But because of the lack of manpower, for the time being, only in the planning, not yet implemented.

Of course, small radio telescopes have long been available, brought from the moon base, Professor Thomson is the general responsibility of this astronomy laboratory.

He carefully pondered the burst of radio waves, not very long, but with obvious traces of intelligent civilization, six of the fluctuations are consistent, and two repeated bands, looks like a string of information code?

Thomson and his student Thomas kept experimenting, they tried various human decoding methods, but found no solution at all can not be solved.

"There is no such code, strange? Is it a string of garbled codes, and encrypted?" Professor Thomson muttered, this string of garbled code seems to be from space?

Suddenly, his student Thomas shouted, "Teacher, it appeared again, it appeared again!" At the end of the sentence, Thomas's two eyes were wide and seemed frozen in place.

Thomson hurriedly looked up at the screen, only to see that the radio telescope had detected a large number of information codes! This time it wasn't just a few paragraphs like last time, but a dense ... seventy-three pages!

Seventy-three pages!

The two men were simply stunned, what is this?!

Thomson's fingers tapped the keyboard quickly, although there was no way to locate the source for the emission of this radio wave. But with the current information, he could be sure that it came from beyond Pluto!

Radio waves from beyond Pluto, and with logic? What does this mean?

Both of their hearts instantly beat wildly, and Thomas said with a pale face, "Are the aliens coming for revenge?"

"Don't talk nonsense!" Thomson cursed and typed a short report with trembling hands, with an "extreme urgency" sign attached to it!

...

The moment Oliver received the report, his heart suddenly "thumped", a dizzy brain. In this moment, he thought of countless bad possibilities, sweat dripping down from his forehead ...

What does this signal represent? Is it an alien civilization, or a spacecraft of an alien civilization?

Oliver bit his lips tightly for a moment before he barely regained his composure. Nowadays, although the human race has developed technology peacefully for most of the year, but the digested alien technology is not even one percent. When humans encounter a real interstellar civilization, it is bound to be a hanged situation!

Or ... with the dismantled alien weapons, can barely fight back so one or two times, and then become defenseless lambs to the slaughter.

"Call an emergency meeting!" He hurriedly pressed the button in the captain's room. At the same time, he gave several orders at once.

"Turn on the astronomical observation equipment to the maximum!"

"Turn off all radio and visible signals, and recall all robots! And ... ask all cryptologists to be present and make sure to decode this code!"

"... Get Calvin here too!"