Chapter 674: Chapter 422: One Piece of Information After Another [Thanks to the Tily Alliance Leader Lao You Zi]
Oxfordshire did not disappoint him.
Indeed, it was a ga city.
After taking a quick tour around the city, Harrison Clark initially estimated that Oxfordshire’s population must have been over 300 million.
The area of the urban center covered nearly 4,000 square kiloters.
The buildings were not densely arranged, nor were they tall.
Apart from the collapsed residential high-rises, the height of most structures did not exceed one kiloter.
However, the buildings were all massive, covering dozens or even hundreds of acres each.
After a quick look, Harrison was overjoyed.
He found many destroyed machines among these large structures and even discovered a Super Calculation Center.
Harrison speculated that this ti Oxfordshire served as both an industrial manufacturing center and a scientific center, which suited his needs.
First, according to his mory, he found the Chesterton Apartnt and settled there.
Finding the apartnt was quite simple, as it had not changed a bit in a thousand years.
It probably beca a historical site and was preserved in its original form.
Of course, 21st-century reinforced concrete buildings could not survive for so many years.
To retain this appearance, the building materials must have been replaced at least once.
Unlike other massive structures, Chesterton Apartnt contained almost no futuristic technology; it was exactly the sa as when he first settled there, authentic and retro, even the appliances were antique.
It was probably because there were not many postmodern technological products in the historic district that the damages to Chesterton Apartnt were minimal.
After settling in, he began to familiarize himself with the city.
Dealing with a large city required a different approach than a small one.
He spent a whole day dividing Oxfordshire’s ruins into four main zones: research, industrial, residential, and comrcial. Then, he classified these zones into three levels of exploration priority based on the degree of damage.
That night, with a cup of tea in hand, he leisurely visited the highest-priority East Suburb Research District.
He had noticed earlier that there was a massive tal column rising into the sky in the East Suburb Research District.
The column was over 300 ters in diater, 4,000 ters tall, and consisted of a tallic outer shell with dozens of sections.
It was a massive optical telescope.
He was quite surprised to see such an ancient instrunt in this era, especially one built on Earth.
What was even more astonishing was that, although the central control intelligence was destroyed, the main structure of the telescope remained intact and even the lenses inside were undamaged.
After tinkering for most of the night, the newly-minted bomb making expert Harrison successfully restored the telescope’s functionality and managed to project the image onto a haphazardly assembled projector.
He finally saw the world beyond the stars through the telescope.
There was a huge light belt between Neptune and Uranus’ orbits.
The light belt rotated like planets orbiting the sun.
From ti to ti, arcs of electricity flickered on the belt, and almost every arc contained enough energy to sustain three days and nights of thunderstorms on Earth.
Harrison continued to increase the magnification of the optical telescope, and he could discern that the light belt was composed of fragnts stacked together like tattered pieces of cloth.
The arcs of electricity were generated from these “shattered pieces” as they collided and circulated.
Harrison knew what it was: the “corpse” of the torn Dyson mbrane.
He was relieved.
In this tiline, humans completed the monuntal feat of creating the Dyson mbrane 2500 years ago.
Although it is now in ruins and the torn Dyson mbrane has reassembled into a massive “solar ring,” its existence at least indicates that human efforts were not in vain.
If everything is beyond redemption, and millions or billions of years later, other nascent species arrive in the Solar System and see the remnants of these Dyson mbranes, perhaps they will regard these as a new cosmic wonder created by nature itself.
They would exclaim,
“Ah, this is a great life-like structure with genetic information, a purely natural solar ring. How incredible the universe is!”
But at this mont, in Harrison’s heart, there is only an indescribable emotion.
Since the Dyson mbrane was destroyed artificially, human civilization in the Solar System this ti indeed beca extinct.
Before, he had fantasized that perhaps there were still humans on Mars and other planets.
The remnants of the Dyson mbrane shattered his illusions.
Harrison shrugged and muttered to himself, “Oh well.”
But he did manage to co up with another conclusion.
The ergence of the Dyson mbrane was of great significance to humanity; it marked the second stage of humanity’s mastery of photosynthesis, virtually granting them access to inexhaustible energy and raw materials within the Solar System.
With the technological level represented by the Dyson mbrane and the productivity it brought, humans must have built nurous large-scale interstellar ships 2500 years ago.
There would have been more Vigorous Expedition Teams that raced outwards, and the number of successfully arrived expeditionary colonial ships should not have been limited to just two.
Otherwise, it would not make sense.
So, there must be plenty of human colonies in the Orion Arm!
Thinking about this, Harrison cheered up again. He gleefully used the optical telescope to scan the night sky, fantasizing that new humans might be looking at Earth’s direction from within those stellar systems in the Orion Arm.
“If the people who went out there knew that there’s a person on their howorld watching them, how would they feel? Moved? Happy? Will they imdiately send a ship with curvature flight capability to pick up?”
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