The First Superhuman: Rebuilding Civilization from the Moon

"Understood, give me a moment. I’ll be right there."

After hanging up the communicator, Jason quickly excused himself from Minister Austin and the rest of the engineering team, setting off immediately for the astronomical observatory aboard Deep Space.

"So, what exactly did you find?" Jason asked, slightly out of breath as he strode through the observatory doors.

A large group of astronomers, who had been huddled together debating over several optical readouts, immediately swarmed around him.

"Look at these bright flashes on the planet’s surface... we suspect they are... nuclear detonations! Nuclear bombs!" a young astronomer exclaimed, practically vibrating with excitement.

Jason squinted, leaning in to examine the digital displays. It was a series of deep-space optical photographs of Planet Digg 114, located roughly 6.8 light-years away.

The images were incredibly blurry. Even when magnified thousands of times, the luminosity was exceptionally dim, and the resolution was terrible. To a layman like Jason, the images just looked like a mess of static and shadows; he couldn’t spot anything unusual.

The harsh reality of astrophysics was that even for a true interstellar civilization, clearly observing an Earth-like planet six light-years away was practically impossible.

This wasn’t a matter of building bigger telescopes or lacking advanced manufacturing techniques. It was because the universe itself has a fundamental limit on visual resolution!

On a quantum scale, scientists understand that space is filled with virtual particles constantly popping in and out of existence. When light from a distant star system travels across the vastness of space, the microscopic spacetime distortions caused by these virtual particles severely degrade the light waves. This identical interference acts as a hard bottleneck for radio telescopes as well.

Therefore, the universe imposes a strict resolution limit. Once a telescope’s aperture reaches this physical ceiling, no amount of tweaking or enlarging will make the image any clearer. Unless a civilization pioneers entirely new fields of physics that bypass the electromagnetic spectrum entirely, observing distant objects with perfect clarity remains impossible.

In a way, this cosmic blurriness acts as a natural protective barrier for primitive civilizations scattered across the stars!

"Is there actually something wrong with this photo?" Jason asked, utterly bewildered after staring at the blurry projection for a solid minute.

The researcher pointed to a specific coordinate on the image, highlighting a tiny white speck that took up barely two pixels. "Look here. This bright spot is a massive anomaly."

"These specific white flashes appeared exactly three times over our six-month recording period! Each flash lasted for roughly one to two seconds."

"But why jump straight to nuclear bombs? What’s the logic behind that?" Jason pressed.

The image had been digitally enhanced and magnified to its absolute limit, so it wasn’t unreasonable to assume a random white pixel was just a rendering artifact or background radiation.

"It is currently our leading hypothesis," a calm voice interjected.

Professor Thomson, the head of the observatory, stepped forward. "These optical readings were taken while Deep Space was utilizing its warp drive. As you know, while inside the warp bubble, all external astronomical data has to be heavily reconstructed by our mainframe, requiring a staggering amount of processing power."

"The system only finished crunching the raw data for this sector a few days ago. The mainframe’s anomaly-detection algorithms were the ones to flag these specific flashes..."

"After running the telemetry, we narrowed the flashes down to three distinct possibilities."

"Let’s hear them," Jason said, his interest fully piqued.

If those tiny white pixels truly were the blinding flashes of nuclear detonations, it meant Planet Digg 114 harbored a modern, industrialized civilization! Furthermore, it meant that civilization was currently tearing itself apart in a nuclear war!

An alien civilization armed with nuclear weapons? Now that is interesting, Jason thought to himself, resting his chin on his hand.

After all, Planet Digg 114 was the Federation’s next primary destination. If an advanced civilization was confirmed to live there, their entire colonization strategy would have to change overnight.

Professor Thomson adjusted his glasses. "The first possibility is a simple optical exposure error... The Deep Space hull emits its own ambient light and radiation, which might have temporarily blinded or interfered with the telescope’s sensors."

"The second possibility is a software bug in our image reconstruction matrix. The algorithm might have miscalculated the data during the warp jump. We are currently debugging the system to rule this out."

Jason nodded slowly. "And the third?"

"The first two are internal technical errors. The third possibility is that this planet is indeed suffering through an active nuclear exchange! We lean toward this because the anomaly didn’t just happen once—it was recorded three separate times at different intervals."

"...To be visible from 6.8 light-years away, these would have to be incredibly high-yield strategic warheads to produce that level of luminosity."

Jason’s brow furrowed tightly. He was suddenly confronted with a massive strategic blind spot: the Federation still lacked a cohesive diplomatic protocol. How were they supposed to handle first contact with an armed, technologically competent civilization?

He needed to convene a council meeting to discuss this immediately.

"Are there any other possibilities?" Jason asked, trying to cover all his bases. "Could something else generate that much light? Does it absolutely have to be a nuclear weapon?"

"Yes!" a junior researcher nodded emphatically. "Unless someone over six light-years away purposefully aimed an incredibly powerful, hyper-focused laser directly down the lens of our telescope... which is statistically impossible."

"Or, hypothetically, a super-massive ion engine, similar to the ones powering Deep Space could generate a similar flash. But they would have to be test-firing an interstellar mothership. The probability of that is effectively zero."

Even so, Jason wasn’t willing to dismiss the idea just because it was unlikely. Who was to say Planet Digg 114 hadn’t already birthed a space-faring empire? The main thrusters of Deep Space certainly produced blinding amounts of light.

He voiced his concerns, stressing that caution was their best weapon.

Professor Thomson shook his head dismissively. "An ion engine is highly improbable. According to the telemetry, the light spiked for barely two seconds before instantly vanishing. You don’t ignite a massive interstellar ion drive for a two-second burn..."

The room descended into a heated debate, but no definitive conclusion could be reached.

Finally, Jason sighed in resignation. "Here is what we do. First, run your diagnostics and rule out any internal technical glitches. Second, keep all sensors locked onto Planet Digg 114 and monitor for any repeat flashes."

"We are no longer traveling inside a warp bubble, so the telescopes have a clear, direct line of sight. We will be stationed in this current system for quite a while... I want eyes on that planet around the clock!"

With that, Jason left the observatory, his mind heavy with a dozen new anxieties.

He firmly believed that the research and development for the massive Titan-class frigate needed to be accelerated immediately!

It is always easier to destroy than to create; a primitive hunter can still disable a modern tank if they set the right trap. Even the crude weapons of a lower-tier civilization could pose a lethal threat to the Federation. And the ultimate crude weapon was the nuclear bomb.

Nuclear weapons were brutally simple, yet devastatingly effective. Humanity itself had yet to invent a more raw, destructive force.

Although the Federation boldly called itself an "Interstellar Civilization," its actual foundation was terrifyingly fragile. Their entire society existed aboard a single mothership!

If Deep Space took a direct hit from a high-yield nuclear warhead, the ship would suffer catastrophic damage. If the ship was destroyed, humanity would go extinct instantly.

The ship’s defensive plating was impressive, but it simply wasn’t designed to withstand a direct blast from a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon.

Jason couldn’t help but recall a radical proposal made by Blake, the alien astrosociologist: Strip-mine the local metal-rich planet and construct a moon-sized planetary fortress...

A planetary-class vessel would be virtually indestructible. A standard nuclear bomb would barely scratch its paint.

But visualizing the sheer, unfathomable scale of such a construction project made Jason’s head spin, and he immediately dismissed the thought.

The local planet had a mass of over 700 trillion trillion metric tons, whereas Deep Space weighed in the tens of billions of metric tons. They weren’t even in the same realm of engineering. The difference was hundreds of millions of times over!

It wasn’t that the Federation lacked the ambition for such a project; they simply lacked the power to achieve it.

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