The mind is stronger than things, transcending the ordinary and becoming holy

Chapter 147 146. The form of life

Fountain of life!

Chen Shibo looked at the projection representing the fountain of life in the imaginary number space, and suddenly understood.

He seemed to understand something.

The Proxima Centauri star system does not only have one planet, Proxima Centauri b. In fact, there are several slightly smaller planets, but these planets are dry and there is no trace of the fountain of life.

So why is there only a fountain of life in the core of Proxima Centauri b?

The answer is self-evident.

Perhaps, there is no fountain of life on a planet itself, but if an alien life dies here, then the other person's soul will be integrated into the planet, thus giving birth to the fountain of life.

For example, now, under the nurturing of the interior of the planet, this spring of life is growing little by little. Perhaps in tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years, these springs of life will grow to a certain extent, and eventually the entire planet will be Give birth to life.

In other words, perhaps the first life on the home planet Terra was born in this way.

But there is a flaw in this speculation. If life on the planet requires the spring of life as a seed, how did the earliest life come into being?

With this question, Chen Shibo did not let the imaginary number space swallow up the spring of life, but planned to let it grow and try to find the answer in the future.

So he returned to the Great Spoke. This time, he looked at the star map and finally pointed out a direction.

Pleiades.

Chen Shibo said calmly.

He planned to take a walk on the Orion cantilever first, and then drive towards the center of the Milky Way. Although the human people still don't know whether aliens exist, but he does know.

Various Terra information has already shown that aliens do exist, and there are more than one.

The alien civilization that humans have come into contact with is called the Ada people, and the direction from which they entered the solar system is also the direction of the Pleiades star cluster.

At the same time, the Pleiades star cluster, which has been mysterious since ancient times, has also embellished endless reveries for human civilization.

The Pleiades star cluster is one of the closest and brightest open star clusters to humans. It contains more than 3,000 stars in total and spans 13 light-years. When viewed from the ground, it is what people call the Taurus constellation.

So next, Chen Shibo was almost in a state of complete silence. Interstellar navigation must be able to endure loneliness. With the eternal stars and the silence of time and space, interstellar navigation is like a journey that will never end. When traveling, no matter how beautiful and prosperous the world is, it is just a trace of embellishment on the road, and only loneliness is eternal.

The Pleiades star cluster is about 380 light years away from the solar system, which is about the distance from Proxima Centauri to one hundred Terras. It only takes about a hundred days to travel from Proxima Centauri. When more than a hundred days passed, Chen Shibo arrived at Pleiades. Within the scope of the star cluster.

Then, he visited stars one after another, focusing on looking for these planets that were obscured by the stars. However, to his disappointment, there was no life on these planets, and they were all primitive and bare planets.

After visiting the Pleiades star cluster, Chen Shibo continued to drive toward the distance firmly. Time began to become blurry to him. He could spend several days in a daze, and he could spend it thinking about just one question. After a few years, the scale of time began to shrink in his mind.

When he noticed this scene, Chen Shibo was a little surprised.

He knew that he was evolving towards the state of cosmic immortality.

Back then, he fused the Ouroboros virus, and then through psychic transformation, he improved the virus on a large scale. Then he experienced the baptism of Jenova cells and Mako, and his body had almost reached the carbon-based level. The ultimate in biology.

Obviously, Jenova is a life that travels across the stars, so strictly speaking, the corresponding genetic sequence is also hidden in Chen Shibo's genes.

But now that he has been in space for a long time, this gene has been suddenly activated.

This situation seems to be a kind of protection for the mind. Long-term loneliness can easily erode the soul and turn people into soulless zombies. So humans have invented hibernation technology to deal with it, and those species that can themselves carry out interstellar travel Naturally, there are similar methods, and obviously this method of shrinking the time scale is one of them.

In fact, Chen Shibo also knows that the entire universe may not only have carbon-based life. For example, the silicon-based life in science fiction novels may indeed exist. Therefore, Chen Shibo is searching for aliens by searching for carbon-based life. Very soon May pass by other life forms.

However, he has no intention of searching for alternative life, because he can be sure that the proportion of carbon-based life in the entire universe is at least 99%.

This data is not Yelang's arrogance, but a scientific and rational reasoning.

According to the definition of modern science: a piece of information that is not assimilated by the environment, can reproduce itself, and actively adapts to the environment can be considered life. Chen Shibo has always used this standard to explore aliens.

Some people always believe that the life forms in the universe are not limited to carbon-based life, so there must be other types of life. For example, in any video that explores the form of aliens, the barrage and comment area will always be filled with comments such as: Why should we search for aliens based on human standards? Who stipulated that aliens must be carbon-based? How do we know what aliens are made of? Humanity is too arrogant. Why is the universe infinite? Can humans define the form of life? and other rhetorical questions, especially many people will cite the most well-known concept of silicon-based life.

In fact, when it comes to this concept, we have to mention the famous Fermi Paradox.

In 1950, when North American physicist Fermi was discussing the issue of flying saucers and aliens with someone, he once asked: Those aliens, where are they?

This question, to ordinary people, is just a curiosity about the unknown and an imagination about the vast universe. However, in the mind of this Nobel Prize winner, it presents a reality that is terrifying to think about.

Looking at the data of the entire universe, the range of the universe that humans can observe is 12.7 billion light-years, and the age of the universe is 13.62 billion years (an error of 120). There are more than 100 billion outer galaxies in the entire universe, and the Milky Way is only the home of all living beings. First, it is like a grain of sand on a beach, or even worse.

On such a macro scale and in the long river of time, why have we humans not discovered other alien life?

This question may be a bit general, so after research, scientists decided to refine the problem more precisely. First, they considered the unbreakable nature of the speed of light, and the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is 3 million light-years away, so it was not considered. The existence of life in outer river systems.

Secondly, some people always believe that the life forms in the universe are not limited to carbon-based life, so other types of life may exist, but humans are not aware of it. In particular, many people will give examples of the most commonly known silicon-based life This example.

However, judging from the fact that life is at least a complex individual that selectively exchanges matter with the surrounding environment, and the entire universe does not have an environment other than basic physics, that is to say, the basic laws of the entire universe are unified by the four elements. The large fundamental force, as well as the composition of atoms, protons, electrons, etc., are also arranged in the same periodic table. Therefore, the only element that can give birth to life is the most stable carbon element.

The carbon element has a structure of 4 electrons in the outermost layer, which is equivalent to having four hands. Each hand can grab another atom, and can even hold hands with other carbon atoms to form four stable covalent bonds. This It is already the limit of the number of elements that can form chemical bonds.

It is true that silicon is the easiest element to give birth to life in the entire universe, except for carbon. However, silicon atoms have one more extra-nuclear electron layers than carbon atoms, and the electromagnetic force is weaker. In terms of competitiveness for the birth of life, it is basically impossible. Not as good as carbon-based life.

Carbon is like a courtesan, attracting various atoms to combine with it, and the types of compounds it can form with other elements are almost unlimited.

Therefore, it can be said that if there are indeed other forms of life in the universe besides humans, then 90% of them are carbon-based, 9% are silicon-based, and the remaining 1% are other forms of life.

Therefore, after compressing the problem of life in the universe to the scale of the Milky Way and the carbon base, we will get such data - the Milky Way is about 12.5 billion years old, 2,000 light-years thick, 160,000 light-years in diameter, and has approximately 100 billion sun-like stars, and countless planets.

If the emergence of human beings is a miracle in the universe, then no matter how small the data of this miracle is, it will be surprisingly large when placed in a star with the scale of the Milky Way.

Based on the current knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology and sociology, scientists believe that at the rate of development of human science and technology, if there is an alien civilization that is only 10,000 years earlier than the development of the earth, then its traces will now be The Milky Way should have been filled with it a long time ago. In fact, the Milky Way today should have been filled with interstellar civilizations that are colonizing everywhere.

But the fact is that except for some rumors, humans can't find any strong evidence of the existence of aliens on the earth today. Even radio telescopes can't find the slightest trace of alien spacecraft or alien projects...

So, this goes back to Fermi’s previous question, where are those aliens? This question has become the classic Fermi Paradox and is still talked about in the scientific community.

Chen Shibo recalled the explanation of the Fermi Paradox. If it can be determined that at least most of the civilizations in the universe are in the form of carbon-based life, then in order to answer the question of the Fermi Paradox, there was a man named Robin Hood. Sen's economists developed the so-called Great Filter Theory.

Because intelligent life in the universe is very rare and precious, they must go through many challenges and crises before they can reach or surpass our current level.

If the development process of life is divided into nine stages, from suitable star systems, self-replicating molecules, multi-cellular life, to intelligent creatures using tools, to interstellar colonization, at least one of these stages is almost impossible , or a big filter.

If this big filter is in our past, then we are the first or last batch of lucky people to pass the screening. If this big filter is in our future, then we may be facing the end, or we may be facing the end of the world. Come to a turning point.

But now looking back at the past with Chen Shibo's hundreds of years of eyesight, he almost understood.

Yes, the Great Filter exists.

Today's human science and technology has reached a very advanced level, but it is still stagnant in the solar system. Although it is possible for a spacecraft to fly out of the solar system at a cost of hundreds or even thousands of years, the cost is too tragic and it is almost not a routine. civilized means.

In other words, human development is blocked by an invisible big filter, and this filter is hyperspace technology.

In fact, hundreds of years ago, United Aerospace Airlines had hoped to break this bottleneck, but by chance, the other party actually detected the existence of the imaginary number space, so Chen Shibo had to take action to remove that bottleneck. The threat was wiped out.

This resulted in the current phenomenon. The development of human hyperspace science was strangled to death by Chen Shibo.

Today's human activities are still trapped in the solar system, and have been trapped for hundreds of years. Perhaps in the next few hundred years, there will be people with ambitions to enter the hyperspace technology again to seek a new future for mankind, and it may also be possible. Before it was developed, mankind would fall into some kind of self-destruction.

But all this has little to do with Chen Shibo.

In the following decades, Chen Shibo visited many planets suspected of having life, but most of them returned disappointed. There are many planets with atmospheres, and even more planets with liquid liquids. But so far, , he found no signs of life.

However, the more this happened, the more Chen Shibo expected to discover new life, because he knew that during this trip, he had only explored one billionth of the planet in the entire Orion cantilever. This kind of exploration range could It’s strange to discover life.

In the end, he finally left the Orion cantilever where humans are located and began to enter the scope of the Milky Way's center.

We are currently located in the center of the Milky Way, about 10,000 light-years away from our parent solar system.

A driver reported that his voice woke up Chen Shibo, who was in a daze, and brought Chen Shibo's consciousness back from a slow running state.

Have you traveled such a long distance?

Chen Shibo rubbed his sleepy head. These years almost flew by for him. He only remembered that he was just in a daze, or took a nap before arriving on a new planet, and then he I went straight down to explore, take a look at the alien scenery, and then came back again. Before I knew it, I had sailed so far.

Yes.

The pilot replied, We have left our home planet Terra for more than fifty years. It is normal to sail more than ten thousand light years at our speed.

Well, wait...

Just as Chen Shibo was about to say something, his expression suddenly froze, because he unexpectedly noticed that in the imaginary space where his consciousness had long been lost, familiar light spots appeared again.

Those light points are not the projection of human consciousness, but they are brighter than the projection of human consciousness. Each one is like a pulsar, emitting surging light!

Is this...is there life nearby?