Chapter 245: Civilizations Passing By_1

Jiang Yu continued to press, "If time travel cannot change history, then doesn't your current action amount to changing history?"

In Jiang Yu's mind, JK15 responded, "Most of the answers to that question are inexplicable, but a part can be answered. The answerable part requires sixty million Deception Points, may I ask if you are willing to pay?"

Jiang Yu winced at the thought, he couldn't spend all his remaining Deception Points here! He still had more important things to do!

After much thought, Jiang Yu said, "Jiang Shiliu did not communicate with me directly and chose to do so through you.

"I guess you must be a product that cheated around some rules, or leveraged some loopholes to communicate with me, right?

"As long as both of us follow the main rules, we won't bring about disastrous consequences and can still give me a heads-up on some critical issues, correct?"

JK15's voice remained devoid of emotional fluctuation, "The answer to your question requires thirty million Deception Points, may I ask if you are willing to pay?"

Jiang Yu said, "No payment."

Seeing the change in the cost of Deception Points for these two questions, Jiang Yu guessed that the direction of his speculation was correct. It might not be entirely right, or he might still be missing some critical information.

However, this information was not what he urgently needed at the moment, so he decided not to waste his money on it.

Jiang Yu also realized why the Wallfacer's Shop had been of little use for a long time; it had to follow extremely strict rules.

Without meeting the trigger conditions, it simply could not provide any further assistance.

Even if it could offer assistance, it would only be supportive, as it could not directly answer many questions.

It could, at most, provide some intelligence. It was still up to Jiang Yu to strategize and implement actions regarding the issues he encountered.

But this was still very good; humanity in the Trisolaran Universe was very ignorant, as most intelligent beings in the cosmos, afraid to communicate, were as ignorant as frogs at the bottom of a well.

With the intelligence from JK15, humanity would no longer perish due to extreme ignorance.

Jiang Yu had many questions, but he was not in a rush to ask them. Good steel should be used on the blade's edge, and he had other uses for his remaining Deception Points.

As for information regarding Jiang Shiliu's future, Jiang Yu had no intention of discussing it with a second person, not even Jiang Shiliu herself.

First of all, there was insufficient evidence to convince others, and secondly, it could potentially create a mental dilemma for Jiang Shiliu, which would be more trouble than it's worth.

It was enough that Jiang Yu was clear about this issue in his own mind.

Now, Jiang Yu was very interested in the third item on offer. He exited JK15's page and hastily unlocked the item with ten million Deception Points.

To Jiang Yu's surprise, the item was immediately usable upon unlocking.

The item was named: Two-dimensional foil strike countdown!

Following that was the countdown: 185 years, 6 months, 9 days, 6 hours, 51 minutes, 32 seconds.

The last number was the seconds count, and as Jiang Yu stared at the countdown in a daze, 32 turned to 31, then to 30.

For the first time, Jiang Yu felt such a direct perception of humanity's doomsday; he always thought that there would be periods such as the Intimidation Era, Broadcasting Era, and so on, as if there was still time to spare.

But together, these periods amounted to less than two centuries!

This made Jiang Yu value even more the Plan Number Nine he was about to implement; even if his plans failed in the future, humanity would still have Plan Number Nine as a safety net.

As Jiang Yu was weighed down by these thoughts, Number Three sent him the data he had requested a moment ago.

Jiang Yu opened the file and reviewed it, realizing that humanity knew far too little about the planetary systems surrounding the Solar System.

It's not that people don't want to focus on this area, but the distance from Earth is so great that optical telescopes can't make out the specifics of these planetary systems.

For instance, humanity's understanding of Bernard Star is limited to the knowledge that it is a red dwarf.

Once Jiang Yu was certain that the intelligence from Wallfacer's Shop was so important, he made a decision on the spot to purchase the profile of the Luhman 16 star system.

This time Wallfacer's Shop did not display its deceptive nature, and the overview of the third planetary system still required twenty million Deception Points.

Jiang Yu purchased the intelligence for both the Wolf 359 and the Lalande 21185 planetary systems in one go.

Immediately following that, the profile for Sirius required forty million Deception Points. Jiang Yu hesitated briefly but still spent the last forty million Deception Points.

Now that he had detailed intelligence on five planetary systems, Jiang Yu read them carefully and began to summarize.

It wasn't realistic or practical to buy the intelligence on all the surrounding planetary systems from the "Shop," nor was there time to amass so many Deception Points again.

Therefore, Jiang Yu thought of using the intelligence on these five planetary systems to summarize the conditions of other planetary systems at large.

Such summaries were unprecedented since, apart from the Three-Body Star System, humanity did not have detailed intelligence on other star systems.

Moreover, the situation in the Three-Body Star System was somewhat extreme and not representative, so up until now, humanity's knowledge of other star systems wasn't extensive.

Although it's presumptuous to say that planetary systems within 300,000 light-years of the Solar System would conform to the profiles summarized from these five star systems, they shouldn't be too far off.

Through the summary, Jiang Yu found that every planetary system had an abundant supply of nuclear propulsion fuel as well as the metal ore needed for industry.

Even the rare binary brown dwarf planetary system of Luhman 16, with both main stars being larger than Jupiter but not quite meeting the standards of a star, were natural nuclear propulsion fuels.

The difference when compared with Jupiter was that the gravity of these two main stars was much greater, and because there were two of them, the gravitational field was more disturbed than Jupiter's alone.

A spaceship operating solo in this kind of environment would likely find it challenging to harvest fuel from brown dwarfs.

However, there was a terrestrial planet that orbited one of the brown dwarfs, and two terrestrial planets that orbited both brown dwarfs.

The binary star system was relatively stable and did not exhibit the Chaotic Era like the Three-Body Star System.

On these three terrestrial planets, as well as their surrounding areas, there are many ice deposits. Collecting and melting this ice into water and extracting hydrogen from it to further distill deuterium for fuel was feasible.

Though the steps were more complicated and the process of finding ice more troublesome, nuclear propulsion fuel could be obtained from these ice deposits.

Theoretically, with the current level of human technology, it was possible to establish new colonies in any planetary system or use these systems as stepping stones for further actions.

Additionally, out of these five star systems, two had once had civilizations, while the remaining three did not have conditions suitable for the formation of civilizations; at most, they may have some multicellular organisms.

Based on these ratios, the likelihood of civilizations arising in star systems seemed quite high.

Moreover, star systems that were previously conducive to the evolution of life forms would almost always evolve intelligent creatures, teetering on the edge of celestial coincidence.

If a star system lacked such an environment, it might never see the rise of a civilization.

Time caused civilizations in different star systems to merely brush past one another. Whether those two civilizations had perished or had fled to distant realms, aside from the Three-Body Star System, the surroundings of the Solar System were either ruins or untouched wilderness.

Jiang Yu then compared the intelligence bought from the "Shop" with the data sent by Number Three.

Nowadays, astronomers' understanding of the surrounding planetary systems was basically limited to the conditions of the stars, with the occasional lucky glimpse of one or two planets.

As for the status of stars, except for a slight discrepancy in distance, the data held by astronomers were still quite reliable, at least enough to serve as navigational targets for spacecraft.