Voyage of the Stars

With the help of the navigation technology of the intermediate stage of the fourth-level civilization, the journey of mankind across the spiral arm was relatively smooth. Although they had to come up with a relay navigation method to cross the two stars with the largest distance, there were no accidents on the journey.

After emptying the antimatter on the transport ship, it took the human fleet only 30 years to travel the remaining distance and reach the star on the other side.

In this star system, humans were surprised to find some traces of civilization.

Originally, humans planned to blow up a rocky planet here to replenish some materials, and then use these rocks as heavy nuclear fusion fuel to produce antimatter. After replenishing the antimatter fuel, they went directly to the Perseus spiral arm.

But when the probe spacecraft arrived at the target star system and fed back the situation inside the star system, all human leaders couldn't help but shudder.

This star system has a red dwarf star, which is the most common in the universe, as the main sequence star. Humans who have not encountered a single star system for a long time find it very rare. Scientists explained from the perspective of the evolution of the Milky Way that it may be because the density of matter here was low in the distant past, and the mass of the formation of a multi-star system was insufficient.

This red dwarf is one-third larger than the well-known Proxima Centauri, but it still belongs to the category of red dwarfs. As a main sequence star, it has four planets under its gravitational bond, two of which are rocky planets and the other two are gas planets.

However, these two gas planets are not typical Jupiter-like planets. They all have beautiful ring belts like Saturn's rings. One of them is very small, only about 600 times the size of the earth, which is considered small among gas planets. If compared with Jupiter, it is less than half the size of Jupiter.

The two gas planets are located in the outermost two orbits of the main sequence star, and one revolution takes about 20 years.

The first and second orbits are the orbits of the two rocky planets, but they are very close to the red dwarf, much closer than Mercury is to the sun, and they are within the range of tidal locking of the red dwarf. It is precisely because they are too close that the average surface temperature of one of the planets facing the star is around 800 degrees Celsius, which is very unfavorable for mining.

The temperature has reached the melting point of granite. The magma formed by the melting of granite is acidic magma, so most of its surface is a magma ocean, and only a small part of rocks such as andesite can still maintain its rock properties.

The other one is even hotter. The temperature on the side facing the star is thousands of degrees Celsius, which can basically be said to be a half-magma planet. But the side facing away from the star is kept at about minus 100 degrees Celsius all year round.

On one side is the hot magma, and on the other side is the cold world, which is a world of ice and fire.

The pictures sent back from the detector are still quite spectacular, especially the dividing line between hot and cold, which is the dividing line between hot and cold, and also the dividing line between day and night.

Because one side is scorched all year round, these two planets always have a very hot core, so that volcanic eruptions often occur on the side facing away from the red dwarf.

In theory, volcanic eruptions will bring a lot of gas to the surface of these two planets, and then form the planetary atmosphere. But the fact is that the mass of these two planets is too small, and their gravity is not enough to bind the atmosphere, so that over the years, their gases have escaped into the universe, and then were blown into the vast space by the occasional stellar wind of the red dwarf.

And because these two planets are semi-magma planets, the internal activities are so intense that all the gases in their interiors have been sprayed out, leaving only rolling magma.

In such an environment, it is very troublesome to use star destroyers to blast and extract minerals from planets, because they are too close to the star. Bombing will expose the entire planetary fragments to the star's flames and turn them into lumps of magma in the starry sky. Large structures will also reassemble into a magma ball under the action of gravity.

So if you want to obtain mineral resources from these two planets, the best way is to send mining equipment to their backs for mining.

However, it seems that humans no longer need to carry out mining operations on these two planets, because humans have discovered a large group of asteroids in the orbit of the other outermost gas planet.

It is the gas planet that is less than half the size of the wood. There are large and small asteroids scattered on its inner and outer orbits, some of which are thousands of kilometers long, and some are tens or hundreds of kilometers long.

It is like an asteroid belt, but it is on the orbit of a gas planet. No one needs to tell them, human scientists can see the anomaly at a glance.

It is normal for such an asteroid belt to be on the orbit of a planet, not on the orbit of a gas planet satellite.

Sure enough, after the probe exploration, scientists quickly discovered the anomaly.

They found that these asteroids were distributed extremely unevenly. They were not all distributed on the satellite orbit, but concentrated on one side.

This kind of distribution is very familiar to humans, just like the distribution of planetary fragments when they used star destroyers to mine.

Sure enough, after a close field investigation by the exploration spacecraft, people found that these asteroids should now be quoted, because they are not asteroids at all, but planetary fragments.

This is obviously not the explosion of the planet itself, but the work of a certain civilization. A certain civilization came here and destroyed the two rocky satellites of this gas planet with star destroyers.

So why do they have no reason to destroy the only two planets on this gaseous planet?

The answer is obvious, just like what humans did in the past, for heavy metal minerals, for energy, and for various resources.

That is to say, a long time ago, there may have been a civilization that sailed across the spiral arm like humans do now, except that humans sailed from the Orion Arm to the Perseus Arm, while the unknown civilization sailed in the opposite direction.

The planet fragments that are now wandering like a pile of asteroids are the traces of their resource mining in the past.

"It seems that not only humans will use star destroyers to mine for convenience, but other civilizations will also do so!"

Seeing this situation, many people silently muttered in their hearts.

That's right, after all, there is no absolute overlord ruler in this universe to restrict the behavior of all civilizations. No one cares about bombing planets, so each civilization will naturally do whatever is convenient for them.

Judging from the mining method and the behavior of crossing the spiral arm from this position, the technological level of that civilization should be similar to that of humans today, otherwise they would either cross directly or not pass.

And now these planet fragments... after detection, humans have found that they have not been fully utilized, and the spectrum detector has detected some spectrum information of heavy metals. For a civilization that has achieved heavy nuclear fusion, rock itself is a fuel that can be burned to obtain energy, so this piece of planetary fragments is a ready-made resource collection site.