Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones.

Chapter 372 Capturing Stars and Moon
In just over twenty years, Li Qingsong completed the construction of an industrial system in this completely pristine star system.

On every valuable planet, countless factories have sprung up, and numerous space elevators, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of kilometers in length, have been erected. Huge fleets of transport ships travel back and forth between different planets day and night.

The warehouses, which had long been spotless, were once again filled with countless supplies. Inside the living spaceship, the weather system, water circulation system, and wilderness environment system, which had been canceled due to insufficient energy, were reactivated. The mountains were once again covered with green grass, and various birds and beasts reappeared in the jungle.

Rivers between cities and mountains began to flow again, and long-dried-up lakes and oceans were once again covered with blue waves.

One laboratory after another resumed operation, and countless researchers worked tirelessly day and night.

The preliminary preparations for materials and facilities for the gravity project were also truly completed at this moment.

So, it's time to really charge towards a breakthrough in fundamental physics.

Li Qingsong knew that gravity differed from the other three fundamental forces in some ways.

This difference was already noticed by scientists during the period of low electrical activity, which was also the period of human civilization.

That is, compared to the other three fundamental forces, gravity is so strange and so out of place. In order to describe gravity, scientists even had to develop a theory called relativity.

This incompatibility manifests itself in various ways. The most obvious difference is that relativity posits that spacetime is smooth and continuous, while quantum mechanics considers spacetime to be discontinuous.

Applying this to gravity, relativity states that gravity is the curvature of spacetime, while quantum mechanics considers gravity to be a force between matter.

Since it involves forces, the issue of gravitons comes into play.

Just as electromagnetic force is transmitted through photons, weak nuclear force through W and Z bosons, strong nuclear force through gluons, and so on, gravity should also require a particle to transmit it.

This particle, whose identity is not yet fully defined, is the graviton.

Li Qingsong had long been certain of the existence of gravitational waves. He had even developed a highly accurate gravitational wave detector, which could even be used to receive gravitational wave communication signals.

The information we received from the Crimson Star Alliance was transmitted via gravitational waves.

So... where are the gravitons?
How can we detect it and determine its properties?
This is the fundamental condition for unifying gravity. In scientific terms, it means achieving the quantization of gravity.

In other words, gravity must first be incorporated into the framework of quantum mechanics before we can talk about unifying it.

To give an analogy, it's like there are two races on Earth. One race has developed some technology and shares common values ​​and morals; they are called the intelligent race. The other race is the barbarian race, who eat raw meat and drink blood.

Now these two races intend to make peace. So, regardless of whether the peace talks succeed or not, the intelligent race must first do one thing: civilize the barbarians and get them to accept some of their own ideas, such as equality for all, mutual love, peaceful coexistence, and the pricelessness of life.

The values ​​of "equality for all, mutual love, peaceful coexistence, and the pricelessness of life" form the "framework." Only when the barbarians also accept this framework and are placed within it can further peace talks take place.

Otherwise, the wise believe life is priceless, while the barbarians believe a life is worthless. The wise believe mutual love is the right thing to do, while the barbarians believe intrigue and deception is the way to go. The wise believe that once a treaty is signed, it must be obeyed, while the barbarians believe that treaties are meant to be broken. Their values ​​are not on the same level, and they don't value the same thing at all. They are talking at cross purposes, so what can they possibly talk about?
At this moment, gravity, relative to Li Qingsong, is a "barbarian." Quantizing it, in preparation for future unification, is equivalent to the intelligent race civilizing the barbarians, thereby preparing for negotiations.

Clearly, to achieve the quantization of gravity, we must first be able to detect gravitons. Otherwise, we can't even be certain whether gravitons exist, so what's the point of quantization?
To accomplish this task, long before they even docked with this star system, scientists of various races and Li Qingsong engaged in extensive thinking and discussions, which led to some consensus and the discovery of some potentially effective methods.

We still need to improve the detection accuracy.

How to improve detection accuracy?

Engineers and scientists are prepared to do it in two ways.

First, build a sufficiently large detector with a basic principle similar to that of a neutrino telescope.

In theoretical calculations, Li Qingsong and scientists from various races agree that there is a probability that gravitons and ordinary matter particles will collide, and such collisions may also lead to some observable optical phenomena.

Based on existing scientific data, Li Qingsong also knows that gravitons have extremely strong penetrating power, even far exceeding that of neutrinos.

Existing neutrino telescopes have virtually no chance of detecting gravitons colliding with pure water molecules within a foreseeable timeframe.

To detect graviton collisions using this method and then use the collision data to study the various properties of gravitons, the size of the largest existing neutrino telescope would need to be increased by 5000 million times.

The largest neutrino telescope ever built by Li Qingsong contains 21.5 billion tons of pure water and is spherical in shape, with a diameter of 1600 meters.

If this enormous water jug ​​were placed on Earth, it would be even taller than Mount Tai.

If its volume were increased by 5000 million times, the amount of pure water it could hold would reach approximately 10 quadrillion tons.

On Earth, the total mass of all water, including all oceans, lakes, rivers, water in the atmosphere, water in the soil, water in living organisms, and so on, is only about 140 trillion tons.

This proposed graviton telescope would require a volume of water equivalent to one-fourteenth of the Earth's total water volume, roughly equivalent to the total volume of the Indian Ocean.

If this much water were scattered into space, it would even condense under its own gravity into a water sphere with a diameter of 720 kilometers!

More importantly, to ensure the accuracy of the observation, the water must be ultrapure, meaning that there is at most one impurity molecule in every 1 trillion water molecules.

Even Li Qingsong found such a massive project somewhat challenging.

But this is probably still within the scope of what a typical powerful nuclear civilization can achieve; it's just that it takes longer to build.

At least from a social engineering perspective, it is possible to accomplish the task of gravitational quantization using such a detector.

Then there's nothing more to say, just do it.

The second approach engineers and scientists have prepared to improve detection accuracy is to use gas giants as a medium.

Based on calculations using existing theories, scientists believe that the interaction between gravitations causes a phenomenon called "turbulence" at the microscopic level. If this turbulence can be detected, it can be used to study the various properties of gravitons, thereby completing the work of quantizing gravity.

However, this turbulence phenomenon is extremely weak and cannot be detected under normal testing conditions.

Unless the experimental apparatus is scaled up large enough, these subtle turbulent phenomena will not be amplified in tandem and thus become detectable.

How big do we need to scale it up? Precise calculations show that... about the size of a gas giant planet would be sufficient.

This is clearly an undertaking that ordinary powerful nuclear civilizations could not accomplish, and even Li Qingsong's engineering capabilities are far from sufficient. However, it is obvious that Li Qingsong does not actually need to build such a massive probe, because suitable experimental mediums naturally exist within the galaxy.

Those massive gas giants are natural testing grounds.

The only problem now is how to get deep enough into the interior of the gas giant to conduct actual observations and see if the theoretically predicted "turbulence" phenomenon can be observed.

Back when the nuclear mass was first upgraded from a weak electron to a strong core, Li Qingsong had already attempted to conduct observations inside gas giants.

However, due to the immense pressure inside the gas giant and the limitations of their own technology, they ultimately failed.

However, our technology has now reached the pinnacle of strong nuclear materials, which have long been widely used and have made great strides. The performance of our probes has been greatly improved, making it possible to enter the interior of gas giants for exploration.

Of course, the strong nuclear material that Li Qingsong possesses at this moment is not, in essence, the kind of material that "overcomes the Coulomb repulsion between atomic nuclei and makes them closely aligned".

An idealized strong nuclear material would have a density roughly equivalent to that of a neutron star. Its various properties would be unimaginably powerful, capable of withstanding the explosion of a high-yield hydrogen bomb at close range, and likely wouldn't break even if dropped into the core of a star.

However, its technological content is too high. In the foreseeable future, even if it successfully advances to a gravity civilization, Li Qingsong knows that he has no possibility of making such a material.

The so-called "strong nuclear material" that Li Qingsong refers to at this stage is actually a material obtained through strong nuclear excitation, similar to an energy shield. Its performance is, of course, far inferior to a truly ideal strong nuclear material, but it is still much better than conventional materials and is sufficient for most purposes.

Having confirmed that both methods were feasible in engineering, Li Qingsong immediately joined forces with many scientists specializing in intelligent life sciences to launch a full-scale attack on "graviton quantization".

The first step was the construction of the graviton telescope.

It's far too large to simply find a place in space to begin construction. A more economical and reasonable approach would be to find a dwarf planet and use its structure and framework to build the graviton telescope.

After searching for a while, Li Qingsong quickly found a suitable planet.

It is about 120 billion kilometers away from its host star, receives very low levels of stellar radiation, and has no large planets nearby, so there is no need to worry about gravitational interference.

It's just that the distance is quite far. 120 billion kilometers, even for Li Qingsong's transport ship, a single trip would take about three months.

But for Li Qingsong, this obstacle was at most a little troublesome, and still nothing serious.

A large number of industrial and transport ships arrived at the dwarf planet, and the project began immediately.

Manipulating the Primordial AI, directing various intelligent robots and machines to carry out operations on the ground, Li Qingsong also spared a moment to gaze at the land of this dwarf planet covered with dark red torin, his heart filled with emotion. He recalled the days when he struggled to develop on the planet Luo Shen, accumulating clones and advancing technology bit by bit.

Tens of thousands of years have passed in the blink of an eye...

Fortunately, after tens of thousands of years of development, I am no longer the same person I was back then. With my current technology, a dwarf planet is no longer something I can only look up to, but a tool that I can mold and transform at will.

This time, the project Li Qingsong is going to undertake is also very simple.

Hollow out this dwarf planet!
This enormous star, with a diameter of 900 kilometers and a total mass of 100 trillion tons, had its outer shell, which was about 80 kilometers thick, completely hollowed out inside!

This translates to a staggering 55 trillion tons of earth. This mass is roughly equivalent to the total volume of water in the Pacific Ocean, the largest of the Earth's four oceans.

Under the direct control of the Primordial AI, countless giant machines began to carve 25,000 holes on the desolate and lifeless land of this dwarf planet, averaging one hole every 10 x 10,100 square kilometers.

Each circular cave has a radius of about 550 meters, an area of ​​1 square kilometer, and a depth of 80 kilometers.

After reaching this depth, Li Qingsong stopped digging and began excavation.

What are we digging for?
Dig up everything!
Whether it's water ice, dry ice, liquid hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, or silicate, sulfate, or other rocks, dig whatever you can find, leaving nothing behind.

Massive amounts of earth were continuously lifted by the heavy-duty elevator and then transported to the space elevator, from where they were taken into space.

The space carriers and giant transport ships that arrived fully loaded, after unloading their cargo and cleaning their cargo holds, transported the excavated soil to a location tens of millions of kilometers away, where it naturally reassembled under its own gravity.

Huge cavities soon appeared 80 kilometers underground. To keep these cavities intact and prevent them from collapsing under their own gravity, Li Qingsong followed the excavation process, building support structures as he dug.

Made of high-strength nuclear materials, the massive support rods, like giant pillars supporting the sky, connect one end to the deeper bottom layer and the other end to the outer shell, which is 80 kilometers thick, holding it firmly in place and preventing it from collapsing.

As the excavation progressed, the underground cavity grew larger and deeper, and the supporting pillars also extended, became longer, and increased in number.

Time slips away quietly, and several years have passed in the blink of an eye.

With the last pile of earth removed, Li Qingsong completely opened up this underground cavity.

From this moment on, the dwarf planet exhibited a structure that no natural process could have created.

Its interior is a massive sphere with a diameter of 730 kilometers, and its exterior is a thick shell with a thickness of 80 kilometers, and these two... are not connected.

Imagine a hard-boiled egg. The current state of this planet is like that hard-boiled egg where the egg white has disappeared, leaving only the shell and yolk. The yolk is suspended inside the shell, with no natural structure connecting it to the shell.

The giant support pillars, numbering in the millions, were specially built by Li Qingsong to connect the yolk and the shell and to prevent the shell from falling and hitting the yolk.

As he manipulated a clone to stand on the surface of the core, gazing up at the world illuminated by countless lights, Li Qingsong was filled with emotion.

What appeared before him was a strange sight.

Beneath our feet lies flat earth, while the sky is composed of rocks of various colors. Between the earth and the sky stand towering pillars, so numerous that their end is nowhere in sight.

"It's really amazing..."

But this is not the end of the project; Li Qingsong will continue.

Break this core apart and dig it out!
Like ants slowly devouring a steamed bun, the core's volume continued to shrink under Li Qingsong's immense engineering capabilities. Meanwhile, tens of millions of kilometers away, a new planet was gradually forming.

Ship after ship of planetary debris was dumped here. At first, the debris remained independent, not touching each other, roughly forming a small asteroid belt, all orbiting the star together.

However, with the rapid increase in the amount of matter, this situation quickly changed.

Li Qingsong observed that the asteroids, with an average size of no more than 200 meters, seemed to be controlled by an invisible hand, beginning to aggregate and compress each other, slowly forming a celestial body with an irregular shape.

As matter increased again, this non-standard star gradually took on a spherical shape.

A true dwarf planet was born before Li Qingsong's eyes.

"Compared to the ancients, my actions at this moment could truly be considered as 'grasping the stars and seizing the moon.'"

Li Qingsong thought to himself, "It's a pity that right now I can only lift dwarf planets at most. I'm still too weak to lift those large planets."

With the appearance of this artificial dwarf planet, the actual construction site, where the star located in the core, completely disappeared.

Now, this natural dwarf planet is truly just an outer shell; there's nothing inside anymore.

Millions of towering pillars, each 740 kilometers long and crisscrossing, pointing in different directions, support this layer of approximately 44 trillion tons, roughly equivalent to the combined mass of the two Atlantic Oceans, keeping it stable.

On average, each pillar would need to support a mass of approximately 2000 billion tons. This seems enormous, far beyond what a single pillar could support, but remember, this is a dwarf planet, not Earth.

In fact, what these pillars need to support is not 2000 billion tons of mass, but the gravitational force between these masses. They only need to counteract this gravitational force.

This number is much smaller, and it's no problem to support it with these pillars.

At this moment, a series of strange phenomena occurred within this enormous internal cavity.

As the project progressed to this stage, Li Qingsong's material transportation mission on this planet no longer relied on the previous methods of building high-speed railways on the planet's surface or using spaceships directly. Instead, he adopted a completely new transportation method that had never appeared before.

Pack the supplies up and throw them down.

Yes, it's that simple.

At this moment, a batch of fusion fuel needed to be transported from one side of the planet to the other. So, the large tanks containing protium were thrown down from this side.

After breaking through the outer shell and entering the internal cavity, this huge and heavy container continued to fall at high speed, maintaining its acceleration until it reached the now empty center of the planet.

Once it passes the center of mass, its speed begins to decrease and continues to slow down. It continues until it passes the hole on the opposite side of the planet and reaches the surface on the other side, at which point its speed reaches zero.

People can simply pull the intelligent robots away and store them here.

The gravitational relationship caused by the mass distribution of a star creates this spectacular scene.

Unfortunately, this ingenious method of transporting supplies only lasted for a few days before it became unusable.

Because Li Qingsong's project has moved to the next stage.

The construction of the gravitational telescope should now take place inside this huge, excavated cavity.

In the early stages of the mission, besides digging out the original "star core", Li Qingsong was also carrying out another task.

Extracting water from the moon of a gas giant.

Its radius is approximately 1500 kilometers, corresponding to a surface area of ​​about 2820 million square kilometers. This vast area is entirely covered by a thick layer of ice. Beneath this layer, about 500 meters thick, lies a liquid ocean with an average depth of about 3000 meters.

If this much water were spread evenly across the Earth's surface, it would reach a depth of about 160 meters!
Now, due to Li Qingsong's decades of continuous mining, all water sources on this satellite, including ice and liquid water, have disappeared and been transported to the vicinity of that distant dwarf planet.

They converged there to form a "Mercury" with a diameter of more than 700 kilometers.

What Li Qingsong needs to do now is to stuff this "Mercury," which is about 700 kilometers in diameter, into the interior of this spherical shell.

Of course, there is one more thing to do before that: water purification.

Only ultrapure water can be used to observe gravitons.

Thus, while the construction of the giant water storage tanks inside the spherical shell and the equipment inside the gravitational telescope was underway, the numerous water purification plants that Li Qingsong built on the planet's surface also began to operate.

Numerous giant transport ships deliver loads of water to the factory, where it undergoes purification. The surging ultrapure water is then poured into the spherical shell, filling the pre-built water storage chambers.

It lasted for a full ten years, until that "Mercury" completely disappeared, and this dwarf planet regained its core, no longer just having that thin outer layer.

(End of this chapter)