Cat and Rose - Cat & Rose - Chapter 63 - Fermi Paradox (2)

Chapter 63 – Fermi Paradox (2)

After saying goodbye to Su Ting, Ling Yi received a message from Area 5. They planned to send a few people to the Expeditioner to debug Lucia on the spot, so they could conveniently go together with Ling Yi.

They did not come before because Area 6 was still uncertain regarding the infection mechanism and infection ability of the virus, so there was a risk in rushing to the ship. Now that they figured it out, as long as the necessary protection was done, the possibility of infection could be eliminated.

At the same time, the materials applied by the laboratory were also prepared and were to be sent on this spacecraft.

As they boarded the spacecraft, Tang Ning was naturally among the few people, but unexpectedly, Zheng Shu also came.

“I’m going to see Lin Si. After all, we haven’t seen each other for eight years,” smiled Zheng Shu. “Of course, I’m here to see you too.”

“Little Lingling~” Adelaide suddenly appeared out of nowhere giggling, hugging Ling Yi from the back. “I also want to see my darling baby Lin Si.”

Zheng Shu said, “Be serious.”

“I’ve always been a serious person.” Adelaide shot him a look. “Anyways, Mr Zheng Shu, I’m going to single you out and criticise you today.”

“Oh?” said Zheng Shu.

“Over the years, you completely forgot about your good friend, your roommate—even Lin Si knew to occasionally send me messages, but it’s like I’ve completely lost contact with you.” Adelaide condemned him.

Zheng Shu nodded. “That’s true.”

He spoke to Adelaide in a more relaxed way than usual, and even made a joke. “But now isn’t the time after class every day where we discuss where to eat. You should really find other things to do.”

“What kind of things can I even do there?” Adelaide sat down and said lazily. “I really wanna go back to our student days—last night I dreamed about when I was young, that time the three of us pulled an all-nighter watching esports competitions in the living room, with the table full of snacks and beer bottles.”

Zheng Shu sat beside him. “I remember.”

Tang Ning sat with Ling Yi. He was a famous night owl, and today especially, two dark circles hung under his eyes. At a glance, one could immediately tell he stayed up all night debugging again. The moment the spacecraft activated, he fell asleep on Ling Yi’s shoulder. Ling Yi noticed he missed a button on his shirt, and quietly buttoned it up for him.

—It seemed that over the past few years, Tang Ning’s self-care ability did not improve at all.

The voices of the two people in front gradually lowered and could not be heard clearly. Adelaide seemed a little sentimental, putting his arm across over his eyes to block the light. Zheng Shu was comforting him.

Ling Yi knew they were good friends, even though they did not communicate much usually. Many years ago when they were students, Lin Si, Adelaide and Zheng Shu rented an apartment together and spent most of their school days together too. Adelaide and Lin Si were the same age, while Zheng Shu was a little older, so he always took care of the other two.

Ling Yi was observing Zheng Shu.

Su Ting said he stopped her from pursuing the truth of that year. Then how much did he know?

Among all the people who loved their fiancées deeply, Zheng Shu was one who held particularly deep affection. People like him never lacked admirers, but he never developed any new feelings towards anyone. On his desk were Ling Jing’s photos, hidden in the bookcases were Ling Jing’s notes, the cat grass he planted was always a glossy jade green. Nobody ever doubted his loyalty. Ling Yi did not believe that a person who loved his fiancée this much would give up on investigating the cause of Ling Jing’s strange death.

That was why, when it came.to investigating the past events, they needed Zheng Shu’s help. If he rejected helping Su Ting, he did not know if he would reject helping Lin Si too.

At the end of the two-hour voyage, the two small spacecrafts docked, and the staff boarded the ship to count the supplies. Zheng Shu and his party put on protective clothing and went to the master control room to check and repair Lucia.

The operation to overcome the virus was at a critical juncture, Lin Si was nowhere to be seen either. Ling Yi and Adelaide went to pass the time on their own. After thumping around in the room for a while, they decided to go see Lucia too.

“A very deep logical error.” Tang Ning scanned swiftly.

“It appears when the judgement program is running.” Zheng Shu nodded.

Tang Ning quickly entered some codes. “It’s actually very easy to fix, but I don’t know why the problem occurred.”

“Can’t find it?” Zheng Shu looked at his operation.

“There’s nothing wrong with my code.” Tang Ning frowned. “It’s impossible for this kind of error to occur.”

“The key suspicion is that it was manually modified,” said Zheng Shu.

“What about the hardware?” said another person on the side.

“I don’t know hardware,” said Tang Ning. “Hardware has no effect on the program.”

“Leave the hardware inspection to me.” Zheng Shu intercepted the job.

Tang Ning nodded. This was originally Zheng Shu’s field anyway.

They split up to work on their own. After watching for a while, Adelaide yawned in boredom.

“I heard Area 6 had already started quarrelling over the types of species on that purple planet,” he said with great interest. “I heard that you actually fished some creatures back?”

“Yeah,” said Ling Yi. “Do you want to see?”

Adelaide was very willing.

In addition to biological samples, Ling Yi also had a lot of video data that had not been widely circulated on the Voyager.

White clouds swayed, floating on the purple firmament, the crystalline plants glowed with amethyst-like lustre. The strange shapes were intertwined, suspended and bent, breaking through the boundaries of imagination, as if they originated from the depths of the ocean, causing one’s senses to feel on the verge of suffocation. .

“I think they’re quite beautiful,” Adelaide babbled praise. “Very artistic.”

Ling Yi looked completely serious. “Really.”

Adelaide nodded.

When the door of the cold storage opened, Ling Yi did not enter. “I’ll wait for you here.”

The disgust and horror of those two things are indescribable—anyhow, he refused to look at them.

The psychiatrist was full of curiosity. He looked at the two creatures frozen in the centre.

In an instant, his face paled and he steadied himself with the doorframe. “Ling Yi, you’ve turned bad.”

Ling Yi laughed. “Didn’t you say it was artistic?”

“This kind of art makes me want to vomit.” Adelaide made a gesture of hitting him.

“What are you doing?” A voice rang out from the depths of the cold storage, very quiet and ethereal.

???

The two, who were still wrestling a moment ago, stopped instantly.

“Who said that?” said Adelaide fearfully.

Ling Yi shook his head.

Footsteps rang out. Adelaide shivered.

Ling Yi listened. “Lin Si?”

Adelaide: “…”

Lin Si walked out from behind the large freezing cabin that held the two things. “Why are you here?”

The open and empty freezing area created a special echo, and he was also in the depths at first, so the two did not recognise the familiarity of his voice.

Adelaide shrugged. “To visit my good friend.”

LIn Si made an “oh” sound. “Those two things?”

Adelaide did not want to speak anymore.

Lin Si turned around and looked at the two things, his thoughts indecipherable.

Ling Yi asked, “Why are you here?”

“To record the patients’ conditions, and look at these two things too,” said Lin Si. “Let’s talk inside.”

Ling Yi and Adelaide entered with great difficulty.

“You can actually look straight at them,” said Adelaide.

“They’re alright.” Lin Si walked back and continued to check the occupied freezing cabins at the back, checking their data and vital signs one by one.

Adelaide took a deep breath, then looked in the direction of those two things again.

“Sure enough, a form that completely clashes with one’s existing cognitive structures is the most frightening.” His voice sounded a little weak.

On the two huge translucent blocks of black and purple flesh, dense black spots gathered on the surface. Its skin was not smooth, but rather there were numerous protruding tentacle-like spines crowded together, which made one feel suffocated.

“Sudden changes in familiar forms can be frightening too,” Lin Si added. “Before on Earth, people living outside the cities were not protected. As they lived directly under nuclear radiation, there were many unimaginable mutations that created a similar effect as those two things.”

“So your nerves have been trained.” Adelaide regained his balance.

“The places outside the cities are hell on earth,” said Lin Si flatly.

“We’re not discussing that,” said Adelaide.

There was no doubt that Earth was the homeland they missed, but on Earth, the areas outside the cities were in such terrible conditions.

“Area 6 has been tearing itself apart because of these two things.” Adelaide moved a few chairs over, raising his brow. “Dr Lin, care to share your thoughts?”

“No matter what they are, we’re not optimistic,” said Lin Si.

“Mm-hm,” said Adelaide.

“Why?” Ling Yi felt like he was stupid and could not keep up with their brain circuits.

“Come.” Lin Si curved his lips in a smile. “I’ll tell you a story.”

Ling Yi sat down obediently.

“A long, long time ago…”

Adelaide let out a “pfft” laugh.

Lin Si glanced at him coolly, then continued, “There was once a scientist named Fermi, who discussed with his friends about a vision of the entire universe, its aliens, or alien civilizations. In the end, he looked up at the stars and asked a question. “

Adelaide’s expression turned serious. He said quietly, “Where are they?”

“If alien life existed, where would they be? This question has since become the ultimate question of the universe.” Adelaide lowered his eyes. “From the approach of this question, many conjectures about the universe appeared, and these conjectures were all, without exception, very dark. “

Ling Yi did not understand. “Why is it the ultimate question?”

“Technology grows exponentially. It’ll only become more and more incredible.” Lin Si drew an exponential curve of the explosive technological growth with time.

“In the observable universe, there are seven quadrillion stars, and the number of planets is uncountable. Among these countless planets, if there is even one intelligent civilization that appeared a thousand years earlier than Earth, or ten thousand years—that’s a very short time within the history of the universe, like a second to us—then, their technology will far exceed ours. They would possess unimaginable detection and navigation capabilities, and develop into a colonial rule of the galaxy. What’s more, it would be impossible for only one planet to have life—countless planets would also contain life. If we put it this way, those advanced civilizations should’ve already ruled the universe and governed every star in existence.”

LIn Si paused, then said, “But where are they? Why is the universe still so desolate? Why haven’t we caught even a single trace of a foreign signal?”

Ling Yi widened his eyes.

Yes, the universe was truly so desolate. Desolate to the point of deathly stillness.

During such a long voyage, they did not discover even a single trace or a single speck of life.

“The universe shouldn’t be so desolate, yet we are indeed very lonely. This is the Fermi Paradox.” Lin Si wrote down its name.

“But now, we’ve discovered the purple planet, and life exists on it,” Lin Si drew two circles, one representing Earth and the other representing the purple planet.

“What kind of structure and social formation does the purple creature exist in? Does it have intelligence? If so, how much more than us? We have captured two individuals, have they already caught up to us? Are they already watching us out of sight?” Lin Si drew a line between the two planets. “These problems are questions of life and death, and will affect our survival.”

Ling Yi was a little frightened, wrapping his coat tightly around himself.

Seeing his appearance, Adelaide finally found an opportunity to take revenge, and said with a snicker, “But the Fermi Paradox is far from being this simple.”

Seeing his wicked smile, Ling Yi wanted to run.

Lin Si placed his hand on Ling Yi’s and gave it a pat.

Ling Yi swiftly used his other hand to grab Lin Si’s hand, pulling it gently and did not release it.

Lin Si also had no intention to withdraw his hands, and continued to speak. “In order to solve the Fermi paradox, we thought of many hypotheses, one of which was widely recognised as the Great Filter. This hypothesis believed that there was an insurmountable obstacle in the progress of evolution. This barrier could be the appearance of simple life in an inorganic environment, or the evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life. It could exist at any stage in the evolutionary process, and no planet has crossed this stage, except for us… Or, we simply haven’t experienced it yet and it’s just in front of us—a Great Filter between planetary civilizations and interstellar civilizations, where all civilizations that attempted to travel far have perished, which is why the universe is so barren.”

“But there’s life on the purple planet, we’re no longer the only ones,” said Ling Yi.

“That’s right…another kind of life has emerged, so it’s very likely that the Great Filter didn’t exist at the beginning of life, and that we haven’t experienced it yet and it’s right in front of us.”

In this dark hypothesis, the evolution of civilization was like a soap bubble rising in a dark room, hitting that ceiling with an unknown height at an unknown moment, then gently bursting in its demise.

Amidst the wide and empty cold storage with silver walls and ceilings, in front of that huge cabin that froze indescribable terrifying creatures, Lin Si’s tone was gentle, like an inorganic substance that was flowing past them: “So, how far is the Great Filter from us? And how will we move towards our destruction?”

“Or, this Great Filter is some kind of technology, such as nuclear weapons, or genetic modification. When the Berlin laboratory started to modify human DNA, it flipped on some kind of switch in the void—there’s always some mutation that’s going to happen in the experiment, and so the Berlin virus appeared and wiped out Earth’s civilization. This purple virus is very similar to a gene virus, so could it be a devil left by another genetic modification experiment?” Lin Si’s fingers grazed Ling Yi’s palm scratch by scratch. These unconscious movements helped him stay calm. “I told you about the second law of thermodynamics before—it was pessimistic. But in fact, all theories and hypotheses that discuss the laws of the universe are like this, pointing towards our inevitable destruction.”

“This is our destiny in the materialistic sense, and it has created a great number of pessimists,” Adelaide shrugged, his tone gradually becoming flippant. “People will always die, but life must go on. As a psychiatrist, I encourage all young girls and young men to quickly confess to the ones they have in their hearts, encourage the dying elderly to immediately spend a lot of money and enjoy life, and encourage scientists to seize all the time they can to explore the unknown. After all, whether it’s a single person’s life or the entire civilization, it’s all just fireworks, so why not blow it up a little more beautifully?”

Ling Yi tilted his head. “Like crushing a can that’s already been crushed?” 41

Adelaide looked like he gained a newfound respect for him. “An ingenious summary!”

Ling Yi laughed. “Sounds good.”

Adelaide looked at him and also laughed. “Of course it’s good.”

Ling Yi said, “Are you hinting at me?”

Adelaide said, “I am hinting at you.”

Lin Si: “?”

*

The author has something to say:

Today is the theory segment I like a lot =w=

If I break my update streak again, I’m a puppy. The bald kind.

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