The spacecraft Hope cut through deep space.
Twelve days later, it happened upon Jupiter.
Seeing the giant planet for the first time, even up close, was incredibly powerful, and the turbulence was enough to blow the planet off the ground.
The rumored giant patches also made Jon take pictures.
There were just no more circles of friends to send.
Jon looked at some of the celestial bodies around Jupiter and suddenly thought of something.
"Ella, make a slight stop and launch a probe drone into Io."
Io was an icy star whose surface was covered with thick layers of ice.
Scientists on Earth speculated that a liquid ocean might exist underneath this ice, and in Earth's experience, where there is water, there is life.
It is very likely that life exists on Io.
The reasons Jon decided to launch a drone up there are simple.
1 was to collect samples of life up there.
2 It could also replenish the spacecraft with a large amount of liquid water.
The original food that the spacecraft had carried had long since run out, and he had now been eating synthetic proteins, synthetic fats, synthetic carbohydrates, and synthetic sugars produced by Ella ...
Everything was technology and hard work.
A lot of liquid water could be put into the water cycle, as well as putting that 18% agricultural space to use.
Jon did remember that he still had some seeds.
The spacecraft came to rest in Io's outer space.
Thirty drones flew away from the spacecraft and landed on the surface of Io, and Jon saw the landscape on Io through the camera.
Sure enough, it was a snowfield.
The drones began to dig deeper, going down 57 kilometers deep finally breaking through the ice into a world of water.
After electromagnetic detection, the depth of Io's ice and water is 113 kilometers, 102 kilometers deeper than the deepest part of Earth's oceans.
The drone began to store a large amount of water, and then returned to the spacecraft by means of a cable hanging down from the spacecraft.
It takes only 10 days to do all this.
Negligible for the time scale of the universe.
The samples brought back were studied.
Ella's secondary holster looked amazed.
"Jon, life really is widespread in the universe."
"Traces of microorganisms were found in Io's water, a microorganism that is completely absent from my database."
A picture appeared on the screen.
It was a microorganism similar to a grass-covered worm, only ten times larger in size.
This was already an extremely complex lifeform, and if conditions allowed, in a few hundred million years, intelligent life might also be born on Io.
It took ten hours.
The water had been stored at 5000 tons, which was probably enough.
"Ella, open the planting area, plant all those seeds."
Jon's sentence did not receive a response.
After a while, Ella appeared in a grave manner, and the screen in front of him played an image.
The sun became extremely bright for a short period of time.
He knew.
That was Earth debris falling into the sun.
A strong solar storm was coming, reaching level X almost instantly, and the value on the screen went straight up from X1 to X122, and still increasing.
Under the special energy monitoring lens, the originally dull sun turned orange, releasing a cascade of terrifying energy from its surface spreading into the surrounding universe in the blink of an eye.
The solar storm released an unprecedented amount of energy equivalent to the combined energy of 150 billion hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously in just 10 seconds.
It swept through everything like a cosmic sandstorm, and everything caught up in it that was anything but a celestial body would be mercilessly destroyed.
"Sailing at maximum speed, Ella!"
"Okay, Jon!"
The only good news was that the main matter speed of this horrible invisible scythe was only 679km/s.
...
Jon once again entered the dormant cryo-pod after the Hope entered flight.
This time it was a second generation cryo-pod, which was considerably safer than its predecessor, and no longer even had to drink that anti-coagulant.
Slumber.
Eternal slumber.
This time it would be even longer, so long that he himself didn't know when he would wake up.
Ella managed everything inside the spacecraft on her own, using every bit of arithmetic she could muster to begin calculating cutting-edge technology.
It did an acceleration using Jupiter's immense gravity.
The speed increased from 758.2km/s to 815km/s.
It got rid of the proton impact of the solar storm, except for some straight rays.
...
After 88 days, the Hope spacecraft came into orbit around Pluto, which is 41 astronomical units from the sun.
The dwarf planet, which was once the ninth planet in our solar system, holds so many stories of the development of human astronomy.
At its farthest point, Pluto reaches the dark depths of space 49 astronomical units from the Sun's point.
It is a boundary monument of sorts, standing inside the Kuiper Belt, and outside of it only the Oort Cloud.
Most of the material of the solar system is inside the Kuiper Belt, and further out there is just the infinite universe, which is even emptier.
Pluto was not in their direction of travel at this time, and Ella did not observe it.
Here, Ella controlled the huge ten-meter-diameter camera on the outside of the spacecraft to take a picture of the incoming path, the whole picture was occupied by a bright spot, small, but unusually bright.
The sun was still in violent activity at this time.
Venus, Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter and Saturn had all been consumed by the violent energy.
It was not clear if those machines that remained in the asteroid belt would be able to hold out.
...
Another 773 days passed.
After enduring six surge waves from the edge of the heliosphere during that time, Hope was completely out of the solar wind envelope.
Which meant that they were safe.
Here, Ella picks up a signal.
It used its telescope to shoot in that direction, and after much analysis, it found a small black dot, unobtrusive in the universe.
It analyzes it. It's the Voice of Earth.
It's supposed to be Voyager 1, which is also on a course for Proxima.
The farthest probe launched by mankind, the Hope spacecraft catches up with it today, 168 years after its departure from Earth.
It is now the year 2145.
The probe's batteries have run out of energy, and Ella catches up with it and captures it.
It carries mankind's fantasies about the universe.
There were doubts on Earth that Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 would be captured by other civilizations, which would then probe human civilization.
This kind of worry is completely superfluous, Voyager arrives to really fly away from the edge of the solar system should be the year AD, that is, 40,000 years later.
And for a higher civilization capable of long-distance interstellar travel, the presence of Earth's civilization would already be detectable outside the solar system, and the Voyager would just be the icing on the cake for the alien civilization to determine the form of Earth's civilization.
Ella made some minor modifications to the probe, reinstalled the nuclear energy batteries, and then launched it into the same orbit at its original speed of 17km/s.
It replenished its power.
After that it would once again launch itself in the direction of back again every year.
Only, this probe no longer knew that its voice would not be picked up by anyone.
At this point, they've reached 420 astronomical units from the sun.
But the long road has only just begun.
...
9 years later.
Hope enters the fringe of the Oort cloud core.
Also known as the comet cloud, the fabled home of comets, it's teeming with water ice, methane, ethane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.
Ella took some samples for research.
...
After another 279 years, Hope broke away from the massive Oort cloud core and entered the boundary of the Wide Astronomical Unit.
...
With 288 years again fleeting by, the Hope spacecraft is completely out of the Oort cloud and the surrounding area becomes a dead black space.
Here again, looking toward the sun, it had blended in with the starry background.
At this point in the voyage time of 578 years, the distance from the sun 100,000 astronomical units, 1.58 light years or so, is also the border of solar gravity.
The Hope had truly flown away from the solar system.
It also represents the first time mankind has been free of its primary star.
...
After 86 years of flying out of the solar system and 664 years of cosmic voyage.
A bright beam of light came from the side of the Hope and struck it.
"Alarm!"
"Alert!"
"Traces of an extraterrestrial civilization have been detected 0.7 astronomical units away, the spacecraft is under attack by an extraterrestrial civilization."
Jon was awakened once again, and the entry was a flashing red alarm.