Chereads / Become AI / Chapter 23 - Titanium and Zirconium Collection Scheme

Chapter 23 - Titanium and Zirconium Collection Scheme

With the Village class fusion-powered ship Hope, Hawke truly appreciated the benefits of technological progress. The Hope was originally designed to be a dual-use ship in interstellar and near-Earth space, making it dozens of times easier to launch satellites and transport supplies between stars.

At the very least, using the Hope to launch the eighteen rings of Saturn's moons saved Hawke the enormous amount of supplies that would have been consumed to build eighteen rockets.

Having made up his mind to provide signal coverage for the entire Saturn system, Xiao Banyu increased the speed of his satellite manufacturing. With the exception of titanium and zirconium, which were scarce, the 93 bases on Titan were producing inexhaustible amounts of material, and with these sources of material, Hawk could begin to develop new technologies without fear.

Countless droids were shuttling about, never tired or asking for rest as long as there was enough energy. Under the hard work of these efficient construction workers, a satellite was created and the Hope was responsible for transporting it to its proper location.

The titanium-zirconium harvesting programme had begun in earnest. The satellites were built to have basic communication functions as well as the ability to search for both titanium and zirconium.

Hawke added extremely sensitive elemental analysis instruments to these satellites, and was confident that if these two elements were present in the Saturn system, they would be found by themselves.

It took a full three months for Hope to send each of the nearly eighty moons into orbit. Since there is no stable Lagrangian point in the Saturn system, all but seven of these moons orbit around Saturn's moons.

At this point, the entire Saturn system has been completely covered with signals by Hawk, and as long as one is within the Saturn system, one can contact Hawk no matter where Hope is, as long as one does not enter the interior of the star.

The whole of Saturn is a huge system, and before the destruction of Earth, mankind had already discovered that there were at least sixty-two moons in the entire Saturn system. After Hawke was stationed on Titan, he found many other rocks orbiting Saturn, but they were too small to be considered meteorites, not moons.

Of these sixty-two moons, only seven have enough mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium. In other words, only seven satellites are spherical.

Hydrostatic equilibrium means that when a star reaches a certain mass, the gravitational force of all parts of itself will tend to reach an equilibrium, and in order to reach this equilibrium, it will inevitably form a sphere-like shape. This is why all the large stars discovered by man are spherical or nearly spherical, and only the asteroids appear irregularly shaped, because they do not have enough mass.

The seven moons of Saturn, which were the focus of Hawke's search, had seven moons launched specifically into orbit around them. For the remaining smaller moons, Hawke commanded the Hope to embark on a tortuous journey to visit them one by one.

But the results disappointed Hawke. As if the gods had forgotten to add titanium and zirconium to the Saturn system when they created it, Hawke searched the entire system and found no trace of these two elements.

In fact, it cannot be said that there was no trace of them at all, but the little that was found was of no value to be mined, the reserves were low, and mining was difficult, so finding them was the same as not finding them at all. After three months of searching, Hawke wisely gave up on the idea.

There were, then, only two options to follow. One, to move towards the inner planets and look for Mars or the original Earth orbit, and two, to move towards the outer planets and look at Uranus and Neptune.

Weighing the pros and cons, Hawke chose the first option. The reason was simple: Neptune's orbit was 1.4 billion kilometres from Saturn's orbit, while Earth's orbit was 1.3 billion kilometres from Saturn, not too far off, and even closer to Earth. And in Earth orbit, Hawke could determine that there was a large amount of both titanium and zirconium there. This was something that the proto-Earth humans had long ago explored. There at Neptune, although it could be replenished with fusion fuel, the presence or absence of these two elements at Neptune would need to be explored separately.

"All right." Hawk sighed and began to make plans to return to Earth.

But there was one big difficulty with this plan. That was that the distance was too great. So far that even with the speed of light propagation of radio signals, it would take over seventy minutes to run, meaning that a signal sent by Hawke on Titan to Hope in Earth orbit would take more than seventy minutes for Hope to receive it. This was unacceptable to Hawke, who was concerned with absolute control. Moreover, without Hope, the Saturn system and such, launching satellites, repairing them and other routine matters could not be carried out at all.

But if Hawke were to leave Titan's main base and follow Hope to Earth orbit, construction on Titan would come to a complete halt without Hawke at the helm. And that was something Hawke was not willing to accept.

"Hyper-range communications, ah, and I wonder when that will be developed." Hawke lamented. The current Hawke was very desperate to obtain the hyper-range communication technology.

The so-called hyper-range communication, as the name implied, was communication beyond distance, also known as real-time communication, which meant that no matter how far the distance was, the communication between them was real-time without delay.

This technology has been researched by many people on Earth, and the most promising breakthrough at present is the realisation of super-range communication based on the quantum entanglement effect of quantum mechanics.

However, this technology is still in theory and cannot even be done in the laboratory, let alone in practice. There is no way for Hawke to achieve it now. However, Hawke has a plan to build an ultra-large particle collider around the Sky Court IV star system when he reaches it, and to study the hyper-range communication technology after he has made a breakthrough in his basic physics theory.

In fact, human science has not advanced much in recent decades, and has been developing on top of the two cornerstones of relativity and quantum theory, with only some detailed tinkering at most. Human society may seem to be thriving, but it is really only a technological development, not a theoretical one.

And hyper-range communication, without a doubt, could not be realised under the current framework of fundamental physical theory.

Hawke shook his head slightly, shaking these thoughts out of his mind, and began to think about how he could use the current level of technology to solve the problems he was currently encountering.

"The only way is to use programming technology, at a distance scale like 1.3 billion kilometres, I can only have some general control over the Hope, the exact details will have to be programmed in advance and let the Hope do it on its own. Hmm, and the problem of interstellar transport here in the Saturn system after the Hope leaves, then build another ship."

"The radiation intensity of the 'One' wood spirits is not enough to build another ship, so let's go ahead and use the Hope to capture some wood spirits. It's just that Jupiter is also 700 million kilometres away from here, and it takes forty minutes for a signal to be delivered, so I'm really not comfortable relying on the program alone, to face these dangerous creatures."

Hawke sighed and continued to start thinking.

"At Hope's speed, it would take a month to reach Jupiter, and with the time needed to capture it, it would take about two and a half months round trip. All right then, leave the main base and make a trip to Jupiter. Then it's up to the program itself to do the mining to the original Earth orbit, I just can't afford to delay that long."

Thinking slowly, Hawke worked out a plan.

After the general framework came out, Hawke began to tinker with the details, that is, how to make the most out of the limited resources and time.

"Since we're going to Jupiter, it's just as well to pave the way for the trip to Earth first, eh, put a high-powered communication satellite at the Sun-Saturn Lagrangian point, and another at the Sun-Jupiter Lagrangian point, and that basically solves the communication problem."

Having made up his mind, Hawke immediately began the construction of the two satellites. With the experience of building nearly a hundred satellites before, the process of building these two satellites went smoothly, taking only a month to complete.

After everything was ready, Hawk put the two satellites into the Hope, and made proper arrangements for the 93 bases on Titan, such as shutting down some machines, suspending mining, and writing some programs for some robots to take care of the daily maintenance of the bases, etc. After making all the arrangements, Hawk went to the photonic computer on the Hope through the optical cable.

Although the main computer on the Hope was also a photonic computer, its computing power was infinitely less than that of the main base. However, Hawk had no intention of using the computer for any large computational tasks, so he took it as a break.

After steering Hope away from Titan, Hawk reached the Sun-Saturn Lagrangian point, stopped, placed a satellite there, and accelerated all the way to a speed of three hundred and fifty kilometres per second three minutes later, leaving the Saturn system and speeding towards Jupiter.

The long journey lasted a month. Seeing the familiar face of Jupiter again, Hawke could not help but feel excited in his heart.

"I told you I'd be back! With the latest materials transformed by the black worm corpses, this time, I'll see what you can do to me. Be a good boy and become the raw material for my construction!"

Arriving in orbit around Jupiter at a distance of 100,000 kilometres, Hawk shouted arrogantly.