Black technology: a super empire spanning two worlds

Chapter 30 [I was so shocked that I broke out in a cold sweat]

What Xiao Yu is more curious about now is why the atmospheric environment of Blue Star has become what it is today. After a while, he entered the keyword "historical changes of the atmosphere of Blue Star" on the search engine, and soon a lot of related information appeared.

After selecting a historical narrative article, Xiao Yu directly clicked on it to enter the page.

"More than a hundred years ago, an extremely deadly pathogen that specifically attacks chloroplasts appeared on the blue planet and swept through the plants on the entire planet, causing an irreversible ecological collapse?" Xiao Yu read out the contents of the article with a look of surprise on his face, and then continued reading.

According to the article, this extreme pathogen kills all plants and algae in the ocean, then spreads to land, leaving no grass or plants anywhere it goes.

All plants have chloroplasts. Without chloroplasts, photosynthesis is impossible and the plants will die. Nature is a whole. If one link is destroyed, it will trigger a serious chain reaction.

Plants are producers in the ecosystem and support the energy flow of the entire ecosystem. The death of plants leads to the starvation of animals that feed on plants, and then the population gradually dies out and becomes extinct. This in turn leads to carnivores starving to death due to lack of prey, and the species also gradually dies out and becomes extinct, and the entire ecosystem falls into an irreversible collapse from the bottom up.

Even more deadly, the disaster is progressing exponentially.

The death of plants caused the oxygen in the blue planet to become less and less. In fact, oxygen is widely present in the blue planet. It is contained in carbon dioxide, water and various minerals.

But until the organic matter was transformed, humans and animals could not use this oxygen.

Combustion, corrosion and the metabolic activities of life are constantly consuming the oxygen in the atmosphere of the blue planet. To make matters worse, while the oxygen level is only decreasing and not increasing, the carbon dioxide level is only increasing and not decreasing.

Oxygen combines with the carbon in the human body to produce carbon dioxide, releasing energy at the same time. When grass and wood burn, oxygen combines with the carbon in the wood to produce carbon dioxide. This reaction also occurs when plants rot, and on an extremely large scale.

The chloroplasts in plants use sunlight to decompose carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. The oxygen will return to the atmosphere, and the carbon will be integrated into carbohydrates by the plants to provide energy for growth, allowing the entire ecosystem to achieve a cyclical dynamic balance.

However, as the chloroplasts of plants are destroyed by extreme pathogens, photosynthesis ends with the death of plants. No new oxygen is produced in the nature of the blue planet. However, breathing, combustion, and corruption continue, and the scale continues to expand and deteriorate, and oxygen will continue to be consumed.

Most of the decaying matter on land is completed in about half a century, and the total oxygen consumed actually accounts for less than 1% of the oxygen content in the atmosphere of the blue planet. However, the decaying matter deposited on the seabed for billions of years is more than ten times that of the land, or even more, and will also be brought to the surface of the planet.

Blue Star and Flame Star form a binary star system and are tidally locked to each other. Flame Star, which is larger than Blue Star, exerts a huge tidal force on Blue Star. Coupled with the tidal force exerted by the star orbiting around it, the ocean of Blue Star will periodically overturn the ocean currents, and this cycle will last for three cycles a year.

This is what causes the surface water on the blue planet to sink to the bottom, and the seawater on the seabed is brought to the surface, while also bringing the organic carbon deposited on the seabed to the surface of the planet.

In the past, land plants on the blue planet, including algae in the ocean, consumed this carbon dioxide to form a dynamic balance, but the extinction of plants broke the balance, causing the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere to continue to rise, reaching a peak concentration of 1.90%.

The actual concentration of carbon dioxide in the Blue Planet's atmosphere is about 1.89%, but it is still 46 times the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.

"So that's why the atmospheric environment of Blue Planet has changed so dramatically..." Xiao Yu nodded to himself as if he had suddenly realized something, but then he suddenly broke out in a cold sweat, and he quickly closed the webpage and searched for relevant information about that extreme pathogen. Because he suddenly realized that he had traveled back and forth between Blue Planet and Earth several times, and he had never done any quarantine or disinfection.

Xiao Yu's heart sank, and he even felt terrified when he thought about it. If he accidentally brought an extreme pathogen from Blue Star that specifically attacks plant chloroplasts to Earth without knowing it, once it spread on Earth, the consequences would be disastrous.

"It was a close call. Fortunately, this pathogen has disappeared on Blue Star..." After looking through the relevant information for several hours, Xiao Yu breathed a sigh of relief.

He was really scared just now. Xiao Yu decided that he would still have to take isolation measures when traveling between the two worlds in the future, including disinfecting and inactivating all products brought from Blue Star to Earth, so as not to bring some unclean things to Earth. It is better to be safe than sorry.

Xiao Yu calmed himself down and continued to learn more about the cultural history of Blue Star.

As he got to know more, Xiao Yu couldn't help but be moved. He had never imagined that human civilization in the Blue Star world had such a tragic past.

After the great collapse of the ecology of Blue Planet, a global food crisis broke out, becoming the last straw that broke the camel's back for the human civilization and order of Blue Planet. Hunger can bring the most primitive fear to people, and civilization and order completely collapsed, lasting for as long as thirty years.

Within these thirty years, the global population of the Blue Star world dropped sharply from a peak of 97 billion to an estimated 28 billion, a decrease of 69 billion people. In fact, the number of deaths in the past thirty years exceeded 72 billion, because the 28 billion surviving population included newborns in these thirty years.

In the first ten years of the ecological collapse, the population decline on Blue Planet was not that exaggerated, because the food stock was supporting it and order had not collapsed.

But by the second decade, the situation could no longer be contained. A food crisis broke out, the civilized order completely collapsed, and the global population plummeted in just twenty years.

The world of Blue Star has entered the "age of cannibalism", which is "cannibalism" in the physical sense, because everything that can be eaten has been eaten up, and food can no longer be produced. As a result, it is inevitable to enter an extremely dark and terrifying stage of cannibalism.

In that era, the only way to survive was to completely abandon humanity and transform into a human-shaped beast.

When Xiao Yu saw this section of the cultural history of the Blue Star world, he couldn't help but feel shocked. It was a picture of what a hell on earth it was.

Cannibalism led to large-scale genetic prion gene mutations, causing widespread death and plague. This series of chain reaction disasters caused the population of the Blue Star world to drop sharply from nearly 10 billion to less than 3 billion in just two or three decades.

Today's human civilization on Blue Star characterizes those thirty years as the "Dark Wasteland Age". The turning point that ended this dark age was when humans on Blue Star at that time successfully broke through the technology of artificially synthesizing starch using carbon dioxide and achieved industrial mass production.

It was this technological breakthrough that gradually eased the food crisis and ended the dark age of cannibalism.

……

(End of this chapter)