Epoch of Twilight

Chapter 497: Dyson Sphere

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Although it was the spring festival, many of them volunteered to work. During this period, many suffered as dead bodies were littered everywhere since it was the apocalypse, it was devastating. The standard of living remained unstable even during the reconstruction area period. For survival, intense insecurities still lingered among the people. Even now, the boom in technological advancement had somewhat stabilized society but the thought of going back to how things were was worrisome for most people.

Worrying about this matter was not a bad thing. At the very least, it would drive people to give everything they had in their work and also to give selflessly. This was especially so for the researchers where 60% of them had continued to work and 10% of them did not even go home on the day of the spring festival. That was one of the unique characteristics of humans. In the research industry, detaching oneself from emotions was a basic requirement. Most of them would face ice cold equipment and boring numbers on a daily basis. If one was impatient, he or she would be eliminated immediately. Moreover, to them, even a project that was far from breakthrough could motivate them to spend all their time and effort in pursuing it. During that period of time, even family had to play second fiddle to work.

Even Luo Yuan, who held the highest position did not have a minute to slack off. On the third day of festivities, a mail regarding the Glassians came from the extraterrestrial information department. The department directly reported to Luo Yuan's foreign information organisation and was the most important part of the spaceship military forces as they were responsible to collect information on the nearby planets. This included and is not limited to capturing signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, planning of safe routes as well as detecting the existence of nearby planets in preparation for their future voyages. However, the most important mission at the moment was collecting all the information they could about Glassians and the analysis of their technology.

…

In the spaceship control room.

"Mayor, we have limited documents on the Glassian artificial intelligence system. This is the only video clip we've managed to find on the ship's artificial intelligence system." The extraterrestrial information department director, Wu Xinfan, played the video clip on the three-dimensional screen on the ship's control room. He used to be a professor of astronomy at a university and since the university had been established, he was assigned as the director.

In reality, many of the people in the department were the same. Without a strong sense of professionalism and certain academic abilities, one would not be able to work there. Most of them were academics which specialized in mathematics, astronomy, and biology. Perhaps, calling it a special research organization would be more accurate in describing it.

Luo Yuan looked at it patiently and saw a video clip of Glassians boarding the spaceship. It was full of Glassians and he could imagine their enthusiasm. To the Glassians, this expedition was paramount to them as the first leap forward in the progress of their civilization. It represented the first step in their progress towards an intergalactic civilization and was also the first declaration of war. However, the ending did not seem too good for them.

The video focused on one Glassian. Luo Yuan could not recognize which was the main character after watching for some time. Even with his ridiculously good memory, the aliens looked the same to him. The main character was one of the Glassians he killed and seeing as the rest were cheering it on, he should be the captain.

However, Luo Yuan was not paying attention at all. The location it was filmed at was obviously not from earth and through the transparent wall that was seemingly made of glass, Luo Yuan noticed a dark, empty space outside.

"This is a space port! Look at the dots!" Wu Xinfan exclaimed. Pointing at the insignificant dots on the corners of the screen, he said, "Those are the spaceships that were going to dock, that would mean that they have already achieved interstellar travel." Luo Yuan nodded but he was not surprised. He had seen many scenes of the Glassian social structure in the alien's dream. They had a prosperous civilization with advanced technology and interstellar travel was a common means of transport for them. Why else would they have built a spaceship out of the blue? Just like humans, before they traveled out to the deep ocean, they would first sail on shallow waters.

Wu Xinfan pointed at the screen and continued, "Fortunately for us, the video was taken at a good angle and the images are clear. We can see a star not far away, the Glassians' sun.

Perhaps he had been a teacher for way too long that when he tried to explain something, he was detailed. However, Luo Yuan did not rush him as it sounded as if he was going to explain something of utmost importance.

"We can see that the star was far brighter. From what is observed, it seems to be 1.3 times brighter than our sun."

Wu Xinfan then changed the video clip to an image, "This is the image of the galaxy where the Glassian planet is located. After some adjustments, we've basically perfected the images."

Luo Yuan then noticed that there were three blue and white planets in the image that looked similar to the earth. He then interrupted, "Which of these planets are Glassian?"

Though he was not familiar with astronomy, he could tell from the colors. The planets in blue had stable weather, temperature and a massive amount of water.

"We still can't tell as of now but three of the planets are habitable. Glassians already possess the ability to terraform a planet." Wu Xinfan explained and enlarged the images of one of the planets. Luo Yuan could see that there were many black dots floating outside the planet. He could also see that there were terrain surfaces on the planet with signs of artificial development.

"Can you enlarge the image any further?"

Wu Xinfan shook his head and explained, "Mayor, it's no use even if we do enlarge it. The distance between us and that planet is close to 30 light years. The exact distance is 28.5 light years. No matter how big an object was, even a planet would seem smaller than a needle head at such a distance. To top it off, the planet did not have as much light than the stars and even with advanced optical detection systems on the spaceship, the captured images would seem worse than what it actually was. The images we are looking at are modified images. The more we enlarge them, the more inaccurate they would become."

Luo Yuan nodded and Wu Xinfan continued with his explanation, "That being said, if we compare the video and the image we have, we'll see something crucial. The true brightness of the planet is slightly brighter than what we initially thought it was. We didn't bother at first because it was so far away and it would be inaccurate at times. Even with the editing from the optical detection system's editing, the amount of light would not be perfect. It wasn't until recently that we compared the images we took a year ago and confirmed this."

Luo Yuan frowned, "So what do you think caused that?"

"There are many things that can cause this. A star could be sparkling when we took the image or the last image we took could probably be blocked by an asteroid. Those are the possible scenarios but the most likely one would be that the star was partly covered."

"Are you talking about a Dyson sphere?" Luo Yuan's mind was sharp and he thought of a popular theory.

"That's very likely and we've found proof that it might be the case!" Wu Xinfan enlarged the two images taken a year apart.

Luo Yuan took a closer look and saw the same black spot in both images. If it was only present in one image, then an asteroid or a sunspot would be a more plausible explanation but since the spot was present in both images, taken a year apart, it was obvious.

Moreover, compared to the image they took recently, the black spot was slightly bigger than before.

…

The Dyson sphere was a theory by Freeman J. Dyson back in 1960. The theory spoke of planets like the earth having a limited energy source which was insufficient to fully support the development of a civilization to the peak potential. The star in the planetary system which supplied most of its energy source however, exhausted most of its energy to space. The sun released 28600 billion megawatts of energy per second. At the rate the humans were consuming energy before the apocalypse which was 70 billion megawatts, the sun could provide for humanity for as long as 270,000 years. The scale of time was beyond imagination and merely one second of energy from the sun could already power humans beyond existing human history. The amount of energy the sun released would be terrifying if it was calculated by a day or a year.

The theory indicated that a developed civilization would require the ability to encase the star in a gigantic sphere to harness the immense energy from the sun to maintain and progress the civilization as well as obtaining sufficient light. Since the inception of the theory, many scientists have voiced their agreement for it as venturing beyond their star system was necessary for civilization to progress. However, all this was just a hypothesis and human technology had yet to progress to a stage where they could verify what was actually there. Luo Yuan did not even expect to see it himself at this moment.

Although the black spot was not big and was only 1/50 of the cross-section of the image, it was far from being a complete Dyson sphere. However, the star was 28.5 light years from earth and the image they now saw was an image of the star 28.5 years ago. The black spot should no longer look like this. The production and consumption of energy by a civilization reflects the amount of progress in its technology and civilization. An example would be the industrial revolution where coal was the main source of energy to the era of electricity and now, to an era of nuclear fusion, the production and consumption of energy seemed to grow exponentially.

Although the Dyson sphere close to the Glassian star was incomplete and the energy produced was disappointing, its capacity was much bigger than what the spaceship could produce. Perhaps, what they saw was just 1/10,000 of its true ability. This deeply affected Luo Yuan who was still thinking of revenge on the Glassians

"Conduct further investigation into the Dyson sphere. We won't be needing this now but we'll definitely need one in the near future." Luo Yuan said in all seriousness before he left.