Silent Ark

Chapter 34: 9 Subjects

"What time is it?"

"8:47."

"He arrived thirteen minutes early." Shen Qingci stood up. "He was nervous."

Lin Xiaohe did not respond.

Meeting Room No. 3 is at the other end of the corridor. It is a room of about 40 square meters with a long table in the middle that can seat 12 people.

There were several documents and several glasses of water on the table.

Zhou Muyuan sat at one end of the long table.

He was 61 years old, with gray hair and a thin face. He wore a dark blue jacket with the zipper pulled up to his chest.

His fingers were long, and they were crossed on the table, his nails neatly trimmed.

Shen Qingci knew him.

To be precise, she had met him twice—once three years ago at the Ninth Division's annual report, and once two months ago at the handover of Chen Dunli's belongings.

Lin Xiaohe was sitting next to Zhou Muyuan, and two people were sitting opposite them.

The one on the left is Lin Fan, the head of the Ninth Section. He is 45 years old, with a buzz cut, a square face, and wearing a black polo shirt. He looks more like a mid-level manager at an internet company than the head of a secret agency handling unconventional physical events.

The one on the right is Chu Chen, the deputy section chief, thirty-eight years old, tall and thin, wearing glasses, and his expression is always in a state of "I am thinking about something more important than what you are saying".

"Everyone's here," Lin Fan said.

No one responded.

It was obvious that not all the people had arrived—only five of the twelve seats were occupied, as most of the other team leaders had gone out on field missions.

"Everyone's here means that everyone who could come has come," Lin Fan added.

Zhou Muyuan glanced at Shen Qingci.

"Captain Shen, we haven't met many times before."

"Twice," Shen Qingci said, "once for a report, and once for the handover."

"Yes. I am very sorry about Professor Chen Dunli's matter."

"Thanks."

"I have seen what he left you."

Shen Qingci remained silent.

Zhou Muyuan pulled a document from the pile of files in front of him and pushed it to the middle of the table.

"Project Silent Ark," he said. "Professor Chen Dunli submitted the complete plan to the Ninth Division two weeks before the incident. I spent two months evaluating it item by item with my team."

He paused for a moment.

"My conclusion is that this plan is not feasible within the current framework of physics."

The meeting room was silent for three seconds.

Chu Chen adjusted his glasses: "Director Zhou, could you elaborate?"

"Okay." Zhou Muyuan opened the folder in front of him. "The core of the Silent Ark Project has two aspects: First, to build an aerospace carrier that can accommodate hundreds of millions of people; second, to use a warp drive to create a dark zone to deceive—the word you used in your documents is 'sovereign entity'—to deceive the observation of the sovereign entity."

"Yes," Lin Fan said.

"I'll start with the second one, the warp drive."

Zhou Muyuan's voice was very calm, like he was lecturing in class.

"The concept of a warp drive was first proposed by Akubierre in 1994. Its principle is to achieve faster-than-light travel by compressing the space in front and expanding the space behind."

"It's theoretically feasible, but there's a fatal problem: it requires a strange substance with negative mass density—negative energy."

"What is the current order of magnitude of negative energy that humans can produce?" Chu Chen asked.

"In the laboratory, the Casimir effect can produce extremely small amounts of negative energy. The order of magnitude is about 10 to the power of -27 kilograms per cubic meter," Zhou Muyuan said. "While the negative energy density required by the Akubieri metric is about 10 to the power of -44 kilograms per cubic meter—it sounds like we have more than we need, but that's the density per unit volume."

"To propel even a spaceship weighing only one ton, the total amount of negative energy required would be roughly equal to the mass of Jupiter."

"Jupiter," Chu Chen repeated.

"Jupiter," Zhou Muyuan said. "But Professor Chen Dunli's plan doesn't require a one-ton spaceship. It requires a space-based mothership that can accommodate hundreds of millions of people. I conservatively estimate that if this mothership weighs ten million tons—and that's a very conservative estimate—then the total amount of negative energy required will exceed the mass of the entire observable universe."

Shen Qingci looked at the documents on the desktop.

"So your conclusion is," she said, "that it can't be made."

"It's impossible to build within the current framework of physics," Zhou Muyuan said. "And it's not just a warp drive."

"The space carrier itself—a ten-million-ton structure—would require what kind of propulsion system to take off in Earth's gravitational field? Chemical fuel? Nuclear fusion? Antimatter? In any case, current engineering capabilities are at least three to four orders of magnitude behind."

"Three to four orders of magnitude," Chu Chen wrote on the paper, "that is, one thousand to ten thousand times."

"Yes. And the time window that Professor Chen Dunli left us—according to his own calculations—is about three to five years, within which we can bridge the technological gap by a thousand to ten thousand times."

Zhou Muyuan closed the folder.

"This is not an engineering problem, it's a physics problem, and physics problems cannot be solved by working overtime."

Lin Fan leaned back in his chair without saying a word.

Chu Chen glanced at Lin Fan, then turned to Zhou Muyuan.

"Director Zhou, I have a question."

"Please speak."

"You said 'within the framework of current physics.' Was that qualifier intentional?"

Zhou Muyuan looked at him for three seconds.

"Yes."

"Because the current framework of physics—" Chu Chen pushed up his glasses, "is being modified."

Zhou Muyuan did not respond.

"The speed of light has changed, the fine structure constant has changed, and the hydrogen atom spectrum is drifting," Chu Chen said. "Two months ago, these numbers were the 'cornerstones of physics,' but now they are 'parameters that are being modified.'"

"If the laws of physics themselves are changing, then are all your calculations—calculations based on these physical laws—still valid?"

"That's a good question," Zhou Muyuan said, "but the answer might not be what you're looking for."

"What do I want to hear?"

"What you want to hear is 'the laws of physics are changing, so anything is possible,'" Zhou Muyuan said. "But the reality is: the laws of physics are changing, which means we can't even determine 'what is impossible.' This doesn't prove that warp drives are feasible; it only proves that we know nothing."

Chu Chen did not refute.

Lin Fan finally spoke.

"Director Zhou, I understand your assessment. But I have another question."

"Please speak."

Did Professor Chen Dunli know these figures when he submitted this plan?

Zhou Muyuan remained silent for a while.

"Does he know that warp drives require Jupiter-level negative energy?"

"Of course he knows," Lin Fan said. "He's Chen Dunli. The derivation he threw away as waste paper, I could publish in Nature if I took it back."

"Then why did he even submit this plan?"

Lin Fan looked at Zhou Muyuan.

"Because he is Chen Dunli," he repeated. "He wouldn't submit something he himself thought was impossible."

"This does not constitute an argument."

"I know," Lin Fan said, "but there's an attachment in his plan, have you seen it?"

Zhou Muyuan's fingers paused for a moment.