The First Superhuman: Rebuilding Civilization from the Moon

The universe was vast and boundless, hiding countless ancient secrets in its depths.

During this quiet leg of the voyage, Jason stood on the bridge, completely lost in thought.

Strangely enough, warp drive was classified as a Level-2 technology. It felt like the universe’s greatest gift to budding civilizations. Exceeding the speed of light, it bypassed the strict laws of relativity and was vastly more energy-efficient than conventional thrusters. It was this very technology that made interstellar travel feasible in the first place.

The key to warp drive was exotic matter. As a specific variant of dark matter, it was woven into the very fabric of space, rendering it practically ubiquitous.

Not only could exotic matter fold space, but in sufficient quantities, it could even tear open temporary spacetime vortices. Just like a whirlpool in the ocean dragging the surface down to the seabed, these spacetime vortices could instantly bridge two unimaginably distant points in the cosmos.

In popular science fiction, this was known as a "wormhole."

Building on this framework, physicists theorized the existence of "phantom matter"—a substance possessing both positive energy and negative mass. If it existed, its repulsive gravitational effect could prop a wormhole open, preventing it from collapsing in on itself.

Because of this, wormhole mechanics had become a major focal point in modern dark matter research. Using wormholes for instantaneous long-haul interstellar transit had moved past mere sci-fi fantasy and into the realm of theoretical possibility.

Unfortunately, the sheer volume of exotic matter required to tear open and stabilize a functional wormhole was astronomical, far exceeding humanity’s current industrial and technological limits.

With their current energy output, the Federation could only pry open a microscopic wormhole slightly larger than the Planck length. It was so impossibly small that not even a single subatomic quark could pass through it.

Furthermore, experimental data showed that these microscopic wormholes were incredibly unstable. They would violently collapse into a shower of base particles in a 10^{-27} seconds.

This rapid decay mirrored the behavior of miniature black holes, which sparked a massive wave of debate among the Senior Scientists.

They couldn’t help but wonder: what exactly was the relationship between black holes and wormholes?

Jason had taken a keen interest in these cutting-edge physics theories, spending much of his free time poring over the latest research papers. For any interstellar civilization, speed was everything. True wormhole transit would be leaps and bounds ahead of their current warp drives.

Some physicists hypothesized that wormholes might act as bridges to parallel dimensions or infant universes, even opening the door to time travel. Others dismissed time travel as an absolute impossibility, arguing instead that wormholes were simply cosmic shortcuts to traverse vast spatial distances instantaneously.

There was even a fringe theory suggesting that wormholes were actually the connective tissue between a black hole and a white hole, earning them the nickname "gray tunnels."

This line of thought eventually spawned a completely new sub-branch of black hole astrophysics, proposing that a specific class of rotating black holes with immense angular momentum might actually be functional wormholes.

These were known as Kerr black holes, and some believed they could serve as gateways connecting entirely different corners of the universe!

Regardless, the dream of "wormhole transit" was still centuries, if not millennia, away from becoming a reality. It remained a purely theoretical concept. Besides, no one in their right mind would dare dive into a Kerr black hole just to test the math.

For now, warp drives remained their best and safest option. In fact, most advanced species relied on them, even the legendary Level-4 civilizations.

The core mechanism behind faster-than-light travel lay in the successful generation of a stable warp bubble.

"The current limitations shouldn’t be a hardware issue on our end, nor is it because we failed to reverse-engineer the tech properly," a leading aerospace engineer explained during a recent briefing. "The base warp bubble structure we adapted from the Viridians simply has a hard cap of three times the speed of light."

"We are currently running simulations to refine the field dynamics and hopefully push past that limit."

Because this was an incredibly long voyage, the Deep Space had to frequently drop out of warp to scan the surrounding sectors, update their astrometric charts, and adjust their heading.

In deep space navigation, even a fraction of a degree in miscalculation could spell disaster. Absolute precision was paramount, especially since humanity lacked the navigational mastery to reach their destination in one continuous jump.

Now, after more than two years of travel, the Deep Space had successfully traversed 5.8 light-years.

To ensure the ship’s continued safety, they needed to drop out of warp and conduct a comprehensive, routine systems check.

They had parked in the most desolate stretch of the cosmos, a full light-year away from the nearest neighboring star. There wasn’t a single rogue asteroid or stray comet in sight; only the Deep Space drifted in absolute solitude.

From out here, even the brightest stars were nothing more than distant, unremarkable pinpricks of light.

The most terrifying environment in the universe wasn’t a dense, chaotic asteroid field or a hyper-lethal death world. It was this seemingly mundane, empty interstellar void.

The concentration of matter out here was unfathomably sparse, averaging a mere single atom per cubic centimeter. To put that into perspective, it was the equivalent of taking a single drop of water and dispersing it evenly across five million cubic kilometers of empty space.

The void between the stars was simply too vast. If a ship were to truly become stranded out here, there would be no planets to mine, no stars to harvest energy from. The crew would have no choice but to slowly wait for the inevitable embrace of death.

Without matter, there was no way to generate energy. Without energy, there was no way to move.

Staring out into the endless abyss, Jason couldn’t shake a lingering sense of dread... even though the Noah was currently packed to the brim with supplies.

His mind drifted back to the dark days immediately following the destruction of the Solar System. He remembered the desperate rationing, the suffocating fear, and the sheer hopelessness of drifting aimlessly through the dark.

As the supreme commander of the Federation, his mindset was fundamentally different from the civilian populace. Constantly anticipating the worst-case scenario had become second nature to him.

Hardship forges survival, while comfort breeds complacency. Even after successfully leading humanity to become a true interstellar civilization, he still couldn’t allow himself to relax.

Of course, for the average citizen, daily life hadn’t changed much. They still lived aboard the Noah, going about their usual routines. Knowing that their billion metric tons of helium-3 reserves could effortlessly sustain them for millions of years left them with little to worry about.

The ship’s astronomy department, however, was operating at a frantic pace.

During this routine maintenance halt, they had trained their long-range sensors on a glowing nebula roughly six light-years behind them. It was the very same stellar nursery humanity had just departed.

The nebula looked like an ethereal, glowing cloud, partially obscured by the ’187J3X1’ binary star system. The massive streams of stellar matter violently ejected by the binary pair actually formed a significant portion of the nebula’s structure.

The overall matter density within a nebula was generally quite low. Compared to Earth’s atmospheric standards, certain pockets were practically a hard vacuum, harboring roughly 10 to 100 atoms per cubic centimeter. Still, that was a massive improvement over the absolute emptiness of deep interstellar space.

Under the right conditions, nebulae and stars existed in a cyclical relationship, often giving birth to one another. If a localized region of a nebula gathered enough mass, it would begin to collapse inward under its own immense gravity. As the core density and temperature of the contracting gas cloud skyrocketed, it would eventually ignite a runaway nuclear fusion reaction, birthing a brand new protostar.

"It’s a shame. This particular nebula just doesn’t possess the critical mass required to ignite a new star," one astronomer noted, analyzing the spectral data. "It looks like the vast majority of the available stellar material was already consumed to form that binary pair. There simply isn’t enough left."

"It’s practically impossible anyway," his colleague replied. "The Milky Way has been a ’zombie’ galaxy for a very, very long time. It’s completely lost the ability to generate new stars."

"The galaxy’s entropy has finally hit its absolute threshold. It’s slowly dying..."

The two astronomers launched into an animated debate, passionately discussing the life cycles of stars, galactic evolution, and the looming reality of the law of increasing entropy.

For some unknown reason, not a single new star had been born within the Milky Way for the past billion years.

When that terrifying revelation had first been made public, it sent shockwaves through the Federation. The Milky Way, which appeared vibrant and unchanging to the naked eye, was actually marching steadily toward its final, inevitable death.

Naturally, the galaxy was still functioning, and its existing stars would continue to burn for tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of years. No human alive needed to lose sleep over when the galaxy would finally go dark.

However, the slow "death" of their home galaxy served as undeniable, harrowing proof of the law of entropy: nothing in the universe lasted forever.

"Do you think some god-like savior could suddenly appear and reverse the galaxy’s decay?" one of them joked lightly.

"Well, humanity certainly isn’t anywhere close to pulling off a miracle like that... But who knows? Maybe one of those legendary S-Level civilizations could manage it," the other astronomer chuckled.

Despite the lighthearted banter, a heavy, unsettling silence hung over the observatory whenever the death of the Milky Way was brought up.

Why had the galaxy lost its ability to birth new stars? Humanity still didn’t have an answer. The universe remained full of terrifying, unsolved mysteries.

Suddenly, a third astronomer broke the silence, shouting from across the room. "The spectrographic analysis is in! There’s water! We’ve detected massive concentrations of H_2O in the atmosphere of Digg-114!"

"There is an extremely high probability of stable, liquid water on the surface!"

That single announcement instantly drew every eye in the room...

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