Remembrance of Earth's Past feats, power & lore discussion thread

Through the telescope, they discovered a ring-shaped object. Since it was impossible to determine its distance from the ship, it was also impossible to estimate its size. The best guess was that its three-dimensional diameter was between eighty to one hundred kilometers, and the band of the ring was about twenty kilometers thick. The whole thing resembled a giant wedding band spinning in space. Complex patterns resembling circuitry could be discerned on the surface of the band. Based on the evidence, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the ring had been constructed by intelligent beings.
This was the first time humanity had observed another civilization outside of the Earth and Trisolaris.
But the most shocking thing was that the “Ring” was sealed. It existed in four-dimensional space, but didn’t reveal its interior as a three-dimensional object would have. Since its inside was concealed, that meant it was a true four-dimensional object. This was also the first true four-dimensional object detected by humanity since entering four-dimensional space.

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Whose tomb is this?
The tomb of those who created it.
Is this a spaceship?
It used to be a spaceship. But now it’s dead, and so it’s a tomb.
Who are you? Who is conversing with us?
I am the tomb. It is the tomb speaking to you. I’m dead.
You mean you’re a ship whose crew died? In other words, you’re the control system for the ship?

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Did you build this four-dimensional fragment?
You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?
Are you saying that for you, or at least for your creators, this four-dimensional space is like the sea for us?
More like a puddle. The sea has gone dry.
Why are so many ships, or tombs, gathered in such a small space?
When the sea is drying, the fish have to gather into a puddle. The puddle is also
drying, and all the fish are going to disappear.
Are all the fish here?
The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.
We’re sorry. What you said is really hard to understand.
The fish who dried the sea went onto land before they did this. They moved from one dark forest to another dark forest.

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Dark forest... what do you mean?
The same thing you mean.
Are you going to attack us?
I’m a tomb; I’m dead; I won’t attack anyone. There is no dark forest state between spaces of different dimensions. The lower-dimensional space cannot threaten the higher-dimensional space, and the resources of the lower-dimensional space are of no use to the higher-dimensional space. But the dark forest exists everywhere between those sharing the same dimensions.

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Everything in the ship lay exposed before Morovich and Guan, but even when observing some specific object, such as a cup or a pen, they saw infinite details, and the information received by their visual systems was incalculable. Even a lifetime would not be enough to take in the shape of any one of these objects in four-dimensional space.

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As Morovich and Guan stared at each other, two hands and forearms emerged from the bubble and remained suspended in midair. Each hand grabbed hold of one of theirs, and they were pulled into fourth-dimensional space.

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All who had experienced it agree that the sensation of being in four- dimensional space was indescribable. They would even say that it was the only thing encountered by humanity thus far that absolutely could not be captured by language.
People usually resorted to this analogy: Imagine a race of flat beings living inside a two-dimensional picture. No matter how rich or colorful the picture was, the flat people could only see the profile of the world around them. In their eyes, everything consisted of line segments of various lengths. Only when such a two-dimensional being was taken up out of the picture into three-dimensional space and looking down on the world could he see the entirety of the image.
This analogy simply expressed in some more detail the indescribability of experiencing four-dimensional space.
A person looking back upon the three-dimensional world from four-dimensional space for the first time realized this right away: He had never seen the world while he was in it. If the three-dimensional world were likened to a picture, all he had seen before was just a narrow view from the side: a line. Only from four-dimensional space could he see the picture as a whole. He would describe it this way: Nothing blocked whatever was placed behind it. Even the interiors of sealed spaces were laid open. This seemed a simple change, but when the world was displayed this way, the visual effect was utterly stunning. When all barriers and concealments were stripped away, and everything was exposed, the amount of information entering the viewer’s eyes was hundreds of millions times greater than when he was in three-dimensional space. The brain could not even process so much information right away.

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“Be careful of where you move your hands,” Chu Yan said. “You might poke an internal organ—yours or someone else’s—by mistake. But as long as you don’t use too much force, even contact won’t be a big deal. You’ll feel a bit of pain or nausea, and of course there’s the risk of infections. Also, don’t touch or move things unless you know exactly what they are. Everything on the ship is now naked: You might be touching a live wire or heated steam, or even integrated circuits, and cause system malfunctions. Overall, you’re like gods in the three-dimensional world, but you have to get used to being in four-dimensional space before you can use your powers effectively.”
Morovich and Guan quickly learned how to avoid touching inner organs. By moving in a certain direction, they could grasp someone’s hand instead of the bones inside the hand. To touch the bones or organs required exertion in another direction—a direction that didn’t exist in three-dimensional space.

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The pinnace entered four-dimensional space from a warped point between the two ships. At the tail of the pinnace, the small fusion reactor’s core turned from dim red to a faint blue as its power level increased. This flame, together with the balls of fire in the reactors of the two larger ships, illuminated this world of infinity times infinity. Blue Space and Gravity quickly receded, and as the pinnace sailed deeper into four-dimensional space, the high-dimensional spatial sensation intensified. Although Dr. West had already been to four-dimensional space twice, he exclaimed, “How grand is the spirit that can grasp such a world!”

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Guan Yifan shook his head, a gesture that appeared to be a struggle in
hypergravity. “For us, the dark forest state is all-important, but it’s just a detail of the cosmos. If you think of the cosmos as a great battlefield, dark forest strikes are nothing more than snipers shooting at the careless—messengers, mess men, etc. In the grand scheme of the battle, they are nothing. You have not seen what a true interstellar war is like.”
“Have you?”
“We’ve caught a few glimpses. But most things we know are just guesses.... Do you really want to know? The more you possess of this kind of knowledge, the less light remains in your heart.”

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Yifan asked, “Why don’t you tell me what the most powerful weapon for a civilization possessing almost infinite technological prowess is? Don’t think of this as a technical question. Think philosophy.”
Cheng Xin pondered for a while and then struggled to shake her head. “I don’t know.”
“Your experiences should give you a hint.”
What had she experienced? She had seen how a cruel attacker could lower the dimensions of space by one and destroy a solar system. What are dimensions?
“The universal laws of physics,” Cheng Xin said.
“That’s right. The universal laws of physics are the most terrifying weapons, and also the most effective defenses. Whether it’s by the Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy, at the scale of the local galactic group or the Virgo Supercluster, those warring civilizations possessing godlike technology will not hesitate to use the universal laws of physics as weapons. There are many laws that can be manipulated into weapons, but most commonly, the focus is on spatial dimensions and the speed of light. Typically, lowering spatial dimensions is a technique for attack, and lowering the speed of light is a technique for defense. Thus, the dimensional strike on the Solar System was an advanced attack method. A dimensional strike is a sign of respect. In this universe, respect is not easy to earn. I guess you could consider it an honor for Earth civilization.”

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While Cheng Xin was still recovering from the shock, Yifan continued, “The speed of light is also frequently used as a weapon. I’m not talking about building light tombs—or, as you call them, black domains. Those are just defensive mechanisms employed by weak worms like us. The gods do not stoop so low. In war, it’s possible to make reduced-lightspeed black holes to seal the enemy inside. But more commonly, the technique is used to construct the equivalents of pits and city walls. Some reduced-lightspeed belts are large enough to traverse an entire arm of a galaxy. In places where the stars are dense, many reduced-lightspeed black holes can be connected together into chains that stretch for tens of millions of light-years. That’s a Great Wall at the scale of the universe. Even the most powerful fleets, once trapped, would not be able to escape. Those barriers are very difficult to cross.”

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“What is the ultimate result of all this manipulation of space-time?”
“Dimensional strikes will eventually cause more and more of the universe to become two-dimensional, until one day the entire universe is two-dimensional. Similarly, the construction of fortifications will eventually cause all the reduced-lightspeed areas to connect, until the different lowered lightspeeds all average out: This new average will be the new c for the universe.

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“Of course, I’ve only brought up two examples. Other universal laws of physics have been used as weapons as well, though we don’t know all of them. It’s very possible that every law of physics has been weaponized. It’s possible that in some parts of the universe, even... Forget it, I don’t even believe that.”
“What were you going to say?”
“The foundation of mathematics.”
Cheng Xin tried to imagine it, but it was simply impossible. “That’s...madness.” Then she asked, “Will the universe turn into a war ruin? Or, maybe it’s more accurate to ask: Will the laws of physics turn into war ruins?”
“Maybe they already are.... The physicists and cosmologists of the new world are focused on trying to recover the original appearance of the universe before the wars more than ten billion years ago. They’ve already constructed a fairly clear theoretical model describing the pre-war universe. That was a really lovely time, when the universe itself was a Garden of Eden. Of course, the beauty could only be described mathematically. We can’t picture it: Our brains don’t have enough dimensions.”
Cheng Xin thought back to the conversation with the Ring again.

Did you build this four-dimensional fragment?
You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?

“You are saying that the universe of the Edenic Age was four-dimensional, and that the speed of light was much higher?”
“No, not at all. The universe of the Edenic Age was ten-dimensional. The speed of light back then wasn’t only much higher—rather, it was close to infinity. Light back then was capable of action at a distance, and could go from one end of the cosmos to the other within a Planck time.... If you had been to four-dimensional space, you would have some vague hint of how beautiful that ten-dimensional Garden must have been.”
“You’re saying—”
“I’m not saying anything.” Yifan seemed to have awakened from a dream. “We’ve only seen small hints; everything else is just guessing. You
should treat it as a guess, just a dark myth we’ve made up.”
But Cheng Xin continued to follow the course of the discussion taken so far. “—that during the wars after the Edenic Age, one dimension after another was imprisoned from the macroscopic into the microscopic, and the speed of light was reduced again and again.... ”
“As I said, I’m not saying anything, just guessing.” Yifan’s voice grew
softer. “But no one knows if the truth is even darker than our guesses.... We are certain of only one thing: The universe is dying.”

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“What about the Trisolaran Fleet?” Cheng Xin asked.
“We don’t know much. The First and Second Trisolaran Fleets never joined together. More than sixty years ago, there was a large-scale space battle near Taurus. It was brutal, and the resulting wreckage formed a new interstellar dust cloud. We know that one of the sides in the battle was the Second Trisolaran Fleet, but we don’t know who they were fighting against. We also don’t know how the battle ended.”

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They leapt across the surface under 0.2G. A thin layer of dust covered the surface of Planet Gray, along with gravel of various sizes. Due to the lack of atmospheric scattering of sunlight, shadows and lit areas were sharply delineated. When they were about a hundred meters from the death lines, Yifan waved Cheng Xin to a stop. Each death line was about twenty or thirty meters in diameter, and from here, they resembled death columns.
“These are probably the darkest things in the universe,” Cheng Xin said. The death lines showed no details except an exceptional blackness showing the boundaries of the zero-lightspeed region, with no real surface. Looking up, the lines showed up clearly even against the dark backdrop of space.
“These are the deadest things in the universe as well,” said Guan Yifan. “Zero-lightspeed means absolute, one hundred percent death. Inside it, every fundamental particle, every quark is dead. There is no vibration. Even without a source of gravity inside, each death line is a black hole. A zero-gravity black hole. Anything that falls in cannot reemerge.”

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“That’s right. These are only about a hundred kilometers high. We’ve seen columns even shorter than these, presumably left by ships that entered lightspeed almost instantaneously.”
“Are these the most advanced lightspeed ships?”
“Maybe. But this is a rarely seen technique. Death lines are usually the products of Zero-Homers.”
“Zero-Homers?”
“They’re also called Resetters. Maybe they’re a group of intelligent individuals, or a civilization, or a group of civilizations. We don’t know exactly who they are, but we’ve confirmed their existence. The Zero- Homers want to reset the universe and return it to the Garden of Eden.”
“How?”
“By moving the hour hand of the clock past twelve. Take spatial dimensions as an example. It’s practically impossible to drag a universe in lower dimensions back into higher dimensions, so maybe it’s better to work forward in the other direction. If the universe can be lowered into zero dimensions and then beyond, the clock might be reset and everything returned to the beginning. The universe might possess ten macroscopic dimensions again.”

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“Does a rupture make the speed of light zero in the entire region?”
“No, no. After rupture, it turns into a regular trail. The speed of light inside goes up as the trail dissipates over a wider region, but it will never be much more than a dozen meters per second. After these death lines expand, this entire system might turn into a reduced-lightspeed black hole, or a black domain.... Let’s go.”

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Bunker Era, Year 67 Orion Arm of the Milky Way
Examining the data was Singer’s job; judging the sincerity of the coordinates was Singer’s joy.

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As he continued to sing, Singer picked up the dual-vector foil with a force field feeler and carelessly tossed it at the Star-Pluckers.

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Bunker Era, Year 66 Outside the Solar System
A year before Cheng Xin’s awakening, the advance warning system discovered an unknown flying object sweeping past the edge of the Oort Cloud at a speed close to lightspeed.

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“It’s too dangerous. Outsiders come here often.”
“Outsiders? Extraterrestrials?” AA asked.
“Yes. This is close to the center of the Orion Arm. Two busy shipping lanes flow through here.”

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Although humanity had learned anti-gravity technology, it consumed too much energy for practical use. Aircraft still mostly relied on traditional propellers.

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Three days later, a powerful laser vaporized Thomas Wade in one-ten-thousandth of a second.

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“Where are Blue Space and Gravity now?” Cheng Xin struggled to stand, pulling herself up by the railing of the stairs. Yifan continued down with AA.
“In museums.”
“Where are the museums?” AA asked. She put her arm around Yifan’s shoulder so that Yifan was practically carrying her down.
“On World I and World IV.”
“How many worlds are there?”
“Four. And two more are being opened up for settlement.”
“Where are all these worlds?”
Guan Yifan gently deposited AA on the ground and laughed. “A word of advice: In the future, no matter who you meet—human or otherwise—don’t ask for the location of their worlds. That’s a basic bit of manners in the cosmos—like how it’s impolite to ask a lady’s age.... Nonetheless, let me ask you, how old are you now?”

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Cheng Xin was mesmerized by Yifan’s account of the new human worlds. But she noticed that while he discussed Worlds I, II, and IV, nothing was said about III.
“I’ve never been there. No one else has, either. Well, it’s more accurate to say that anyone who goes there cannot return. That world is sealed inside a light tomb.”
“A light tomb?”
“It’s a reduced-lightspeed black hole produced by the trails of lightspeed ships. Something happened on World III that caused them to think that their coordinates had been exposed. They had no choice but to turn their world into such a black hole.”
“We call such a place a black domain.”

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Two possibilities presented themselves. One was that coincidentally, the Trisolarans had also picked this term. The second possibility was far more terrifying: the Trisolarans had already discovered the Galactic humans. Given how quickly Yun Tianming had arrived on Planet Blue, it was apparent that the First Trisolaran Fleet was very close to the worlds of humankind. And now, the Trisolaran civilization had developed to the point where they were capable of constructing small universes: This was a great threat to humanity.

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They decided to familiarize themselves with the environment before entering the house, and so they continued to walk past it. After a bit less than a kilometer, they reached the edge of the small world and faced the duplicate world before them. At first, they thought it was just a reflected image of their own world, though it was not mirrored. But after they were halfway there they decided that it couldn’t be a reflection: Everything looked so real. They took a step forward and entered the duplicate world without any resistance. Looking around, Cheng Xin was struck with a hint of terror.

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“Are you familiar with the work of Charles Misner?”
“Who was he?”
“A physicist of the Common Era. He was the one who first came up
with this concept. The world we’re in is actually very simple. It’s a regular cube about a kilometer on each side. You can imagine it as a room with four walls and a ceiling as well as a floor. But the room is constructed such that the ceiling is also the floor, and each wall is the same as the opposite wall. In reality, it has only two walls. If you walk through one of the walls, you’ll immediately reappear at the opposite wall, and the same is true of the floor and ceiling. Thus, this is a completely enclosed world in which the end is also the beginning. The images we see all around us are the result of light returning to the starting point after crossing the world. We’re still in the same world we started from, because this is the only world that exists. Every copy we see around us is just an image of this world.”
“So this is...”
“Yes!” Yifan swept his arm around to indicate everything. “Yun Tianming once gave you a star, and now he’s given you a universe. Cheng Xin, this is an entire universe. It might be small, but it’s a complete universe.”

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“No. You’re also one of the intended recipients. Your authorization was added to the recognition system later; otherwise you wouldn’t have been allowed in. Mr. Yun hoped that you could hide in this tiny universe and avoid the collapse of the great universe—or the big crunch—and, after the next big bang, enter the new universe and see its Edenic Age. Right now, we exist in an independent timeline. Time is passing rapidly in the great universe, and you will certainly be able to see its end within your lifetimes. More specifically, I estimate that the great universe will collapse into a singularity after about ten years here.”

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“I’ve been reading Trisolaran cosmology, and came across a proof for the elegance of the mathematics behind the great universe we all came from. The design of the total mass in the universe was precise and perfect. The Trisolarans had proved that the total mass of the universe was just enough to allow the big crunch. If the total mass were reduced even slightly, the universe would turn from being closed to open, and expand indefinitely.”
“But mass has been lost,” Cheng Xin said. She understood right away what he was getting at.
“Yes. The Trisolarans have already constructed several hundred mini-universes. How many more have been constructed by other civilizations in the universe to escape the big crunch, or for some other purpose? Each of these mini-universes took away some matter from the great universe.”
“We need to ask Sophon.”
“I have. She told me that at the time of Universe 647’s completion, the Trisolarans had not observed any influence from the loss of mass in the great universe. That universe was closed and was certain to eventually collapse.”
“What about after Universe 647 was constructed?”
“She had no idea, of course. She also mentioned that there was a group of intelligent beings in the universe that resembled the Zero-Homers, but they called themselves the Returners. They advocated against the construction of mini-universes, and called for the mass in completed mini-universes to be returned to the great universe.... But she didn’t know much else about them. All right, let’s forget all this. We’re not God.”

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The only way to prevent this future was to return the matter locked up in all the mini-universes constructed by all the civilizations. But such a decision meant that the mini-universes would not survive, and all the refugees in the mini-universes had to return to the great universe. That was the meaning of the name of the Returners’ movement.

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They also cared about the answer to one question in particular: Could the mini-universe communicate with the great universe? Sophon told them that there was no way for the mini-universe to transmit any information to the greater universe, but it was possible for the mini-universe to receive broadcasts from the great universe. She explained that all the universes were bubbles above a supermembrane—this was a fundamental conceptual image from Trisolaran physics and cosmology, and she could explain it no further. The great universe had enough energy to propagate information across the supermembrane. However, this was difficult and required a great expenditure of energy—the great universe would have to convert a Milky Way’s worth of matter into pure energy. As a matter of fact, the monitoring systems in Universe 647 often received messages from other great universes on the supermembrane. Some were natural phenomena; some were messages from intelligent beings that could not be decoded—but they had never received any message from the particular great universe they had come from.

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They knew that languages and scripts evolved very quickly. If the two civilizations had survived for a long time or even continued to exist now, their scripts were surely very different from what was being shown on the screen. But to allow those hiding in mini-universes to understand, they had to write in ancient scripts. Compared to the total number of civilizations that had lived in the great universe, 1.57 million was a tiny number.
In the eternal night of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, two civilizations had swept through like two shooting stars, and the universe had remembered their light.

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A notice from the Returners: The total mass of our universe has decreased to below the critical threshold. The universe will turn from being closed to open, and die a slow death in perpetual expansion. All lives and all memories will also die. Please return the mass you have taken away and send only memories to the new universe.

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Back to the coordinates. Many sets of coordinates flitted across space, like the matrix insects flitting across the sky of the home world. Picking up coordinates was the job of the main core, which swallowed all the messages passing through space: medium membrane, long membrane, light membrane, and maybe one day even short membrane. The main core remembered the positions of all the stars. By matching the received data against various map projections and position schema, it could pick out the coordinates of the messages’ origin. It was said that the main core could match position schema from five hundred million time grains ago. Singer never tried anything like that—it would be meaningless. In that distant age, the low-entropy clusters in space were rare and far apart, and had not evolved the hiding gene and the cleansing gene. But now—
Hide yourself well; cleanse well.

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“Have you heard something?” The Elder began to riffle through Singer’s thoughts, and Singer shuddered. Very quickly, the Elder found the rumor in Singer’s mind. It wasn’t a great sin—the rumor was an open secret on the seed.

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It was a rumor about the war between the home world and the fringe world. Before, news about the war had been frequent, but then the reports stopped, indicating that the war wasn’t going well, perhaps even heading into a crisis. But the home world couldn’t coexist with the fringe world. The fringe world had to be destroyed, lest the home world be destroyed by it. If the war couldn’t be won, then...

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Entropy increased in the universe, and order decreased. The process was like the boundless wings of the giant balance bird pressing down upon all of existence. But low-entropy entities were different. The low-entropy entities decreased their entropy and increased their order, like columns of phosphorescence rising over the inky-dark sea. This was meaning, the highest meaning, higher than enjoyment. To maintain this meaning, low- entropy entities had to continue to exist.

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Of the three stars, one was missing. There was a white cloud of dust in its place, like the feces of an abyss whale.
It’s already been cleansed. Nothing more to do.
Singer put the mass dot back into storage.
That was fast.
He activated a main core process to trace the source of the mass dot that had killed that star. This was a hopeless task with almost zero chance of success, but required by established procedure. The process soon terminated, and like every other time, yielded no results.

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Of the three stars, one was missing. There was a white cloud of dust in its place, like the feces of an abyss whale.

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