65 Million Years Ago, Earth’s Victoria Wetlands
Venusian technology was advanced. Their history of entering space had already spanned more than a hundred years, and tens of thousands of artificial satellites, probes, and spacecraft shuttled between Venus, Earth, and Mars.
One side effect of space activity had begun to appear: space debris drifted everywhere, threatening the safety of flight routes, and even occasionally falling onto planets, causing losses of life and property.
Recovering space debris was time-consuming and laborious, so the Venusian Alliance decided that Earth’s “cleanup crews,” located midway along the routes, would take care of this vexing work.
The “cleanup crews’” equipment consisted mainly of the space elevator located in the Victoria Wetlands and specialized garbage-cleaning spacecraft in near-Earth orbit. As for personnel, they were, of course, serious felons exiled to Earth, as well as clones manufactured by Maria.
Thus Earth’s Victoria Wetlands became the landfill for Venusian space debris.
Maria had thought that after Tesla had bid her farewell a few days earlier and returned to Venus, his work there would keep him entangled, and that a long time might pass before the two of them met again.
To Maria’s surprise and delight, only a few days had gone by before Nikola Tesla came to Earth once more and stood before her. Accompanying him was Abbott, president of the Venusian Academy of Sciences.
After the three of them had dinner together, they sat around the table.
Abbott asked, “Nikola, the mission the two of us have this time can only succeed, not fail. Time is pressing, yet you dragged me all the way to Earth. Can you tell me why now?”
Tesla gently took Maria’s hand and said, “Maria, you are isolated from the world here in the place of exile. Unfortunately, Venus has encountered an enormous crisis. Abbott and I have been ordered to formulate a plan for the safe evacuation of the Venusians.”
Tesla turned his head and said to Abbott, “If the Venusians must evacuate Venus, the only habitable planets are Earth and Mars. Earth, of course, is the first stop we need to investigate.”
Nikola Tesla voiced his thoughts to Abbott and the stunned Maria. “Venus currently has a population of more than six billion. To relocate all of them to other planets is almost an impossible task. The difficulties are immense, and the factors that must be considered in combination are extremely complex.”
Tesla analyzed and evaluated the various data and proposals investigated and compiled by the Venusian Academy of Sciences. Through the Lightning Ball, he connected to the external brain and formed a plan.
There were only three planets in the Solar System located within the human habitable zone: Venus, Earth, and Mars.
Tesla’s migration plan was “one primary, one backup, and one to wait for.” In other words, transform Mars into the main immigration destination, use Earth as the backup destination, and, over a longer period of time, wait for Venus’s natural environment to recover so that Venusian humanity could ultimately return to the Venus they were most accustomed and adapted to.
“According to the plan from me and the Academy’s experts, Earth is the first choice. How could your first choice be Mars?”
“Earth does indeed have many similarities to Venus and appears to be the first-choice target. Before I explain my reasons to you, let me first tell you the reason the Lightning Ball’s external brain ruled out Earth.”
Tesla gave Maria a meaningful look, then continued, “The underlying values of large artificial intelligence models are set by us humans. Therefore, its reason for ruling out Earth was that humans have no right to exterminate the dinosaurs.”
Tesla’s reasons were, of course, not limited to ethics. Earth did indeed have many similarities to Venus. For example, their radii and densities were similar, and the difference in surface gravitational acceleration was not large. Earth’s oxygen concentration was 28%, slightly higher than Venus’s 21%, but that was not necessarily a bad thing.
However, Earth’s plate movement was too slight, resulting in almost no high mountains on Earth. It could not form long rivers or broad alluvial plains. How could a planet unsuitable for agriculture and animal husbandry be called habitable?
“My plan is to use superluminal wave power stations to inject energy into Earth’s interior, intensify plate movement, and create great mountains and rivers. Before that, we Venusians will go to Mars first.”
Abbott immediately thought of how the superluminal wave power station had raised the surface of Tower Island by 3,000 meters, causing a large-scale marine regression event.
He slapped his thigh and said, “Brilliant! We start transforming Earth now, move the Venusians to Mars, and after Earth’s landforms become habitable, move to Earth.”
“Abbott, don’t forget that Mars is not a ready-made ideal place either. We cannot let the Venusians simply ‘move in with their bags.’”
Abbott calmed down and said, “Yes. Leaving aside Mars’s excessively low temperature, the biggest challenge is that Mars’s gravity is only one-third of Venus’s. That will be the hardest thing for Venusian humanity to adapt to. If only we could make Mars’s gravity greater.”
Inspired by Tesla, Abbott finally proposed, half in jest, that utterly absurd idea:
Without changing Mars’s mass, how could they greatly increase the surface gravitational acceleration on Mars?
Ninety years earlier, Nikola Tesla had submitted the paper “The Dynamic Principles of Gravity.” In that paper, he proposed the superluminal wave hypothesis, which was verified by later experiments.
Tesla had a different understanding of gravity. After deriving the formulas, he discovered that within the same gravitational field, the gravitational force experienced by an object was proportional to the intensity of the energy it displaced, and that centripetal acceleration was proportional to the constant of that gravitational field multiplied by the energy intensity at a given distance.
Then what about different gravitational fields? Through studying the mass-luminosity relationships of several thousand stars, he discovered that the linear mass-luminosity relationships of different stars were not straight. Red stars with lower surface temperatures had longer peak radiation wavelengths and relatively higher mass-to-light ratios, while high-temperature blue stars were exactly the opposite.
The longer the peak wavelength of a gravitational source—a star—the relatively greater its gravity?
Thus Tesla concluded: In any gravitational field, the gravitational force experienced by an object depends on the peak radiation wavelength of the gravitational source and the energy intensity at the distance where the object is located.
Make bold hypotheses, verify them carefully, allow them to be falsified, and be able to make predictions.
Nikola Tesla observed the map of the Moon’s surface gravity distribution. The gravity of the mountains was anomalous, lower than average; the gravity of the lowlands was also anomalous, higher than average. Wasn’t this the opposite of common sense?
The Moon, as a radiation source that reflected sunlight, had shorter wavelengths at the mountains and longer wavelengths in the lowlands.
The mountains had higher temperatures and shorter wavelengths, so their gravity was relatively smaller; the lowlands had lower temperatures and longer wavelengths, so their gravity was relatively greater. The Moon’s surface gravity distribution map could perfectly overlap with its infrared thermal imaging map! What so-called gravitational anomalies were there?
To verify what gravity actually was, Nikola Tesla designed an experiment, which he called the Moon’s “mass tumor” experiment.
“Mass tumor? As a biology expert, why have I never heard of such a disease?” Maria asked.
“It isn’t a real tumor, just a metaphor. It refers to the phenomenon of gravitational anomalies on the Moon’s surface,” Abbott explained before Tesla could answer.
The lunar surface gravity probe launched by Venusian astronomers orbited ten kilometers above the lunar surface and mapped the Moon’s complete surface gravity.
“The Moon’s surface gravity distribution is uneven. Guess which produces greater gravity: the mountain regions of the Moon, or the lowlands—also called lunar maria?” Tesla asked Maria with a smile.
“Of course the gravity of the mountains should be greater than that of the lowlands, because there are more rocks in the mountains!” Maria answered without thinking.
Tesla explained to Maria with great interest that the gravity distribution on the Moon’s surface was exactly the opposite of common sense. The surface gravity of the mountains was lower than average, while the gravity of the lowlands—the lunar maria—was higher than average.
Scientists believed there was only one reasonable explanation for this abnormal phenomenon: beneath the lunar maria, there were highly dense metal masses, which the academic world called “mass tumors.”
Nikola Tesla did not agree with this explanation. He believed that the Moon, as a gravitational source, produced gravity not according to mass, but according to the intensity of the energy it emitted and the peak wavelength of its radiation.
All of the energy emitted by the Moon came from its reflection of solar radiation. The Moon rotated slowly relative to the Sun, with a period of 27.32 days, and its surface temperature was extremely uneven. The mountains were warmer and emitted shorter radiation wavelengths, while the lowlands—the lunar maria—were exactly the opposite.
“Maria, if we filled in a lunar mare pit six kilometers deep—in other words, artificially increased its mass—would the gravity in that region become greater or smaller?” Tesla presented his experimental proposal.
“The lunar mare already has a mass tumor underground, and with the newly added mass on top of that, of course the gravity would only become greater,” Maria said.
Tesla’s prediction was that if the lunar mare were filled in, the gravity in that region would not only fail to increase, but would instead become even smaller than before it was filled. The gravitational anomaly of the lunar mare would return to normal, and the “mass tumor” would miraculously disappear completely!
Because gravity was not caused by mass, but determined by energy intensity and peak radiation wavelength. Once the lunar mare was filled in, its temperature would rise, the wavelength of the radiation it emitted would shorten accordingly, and its gravity would then decrease, no longer anomalous.
Abbott had long since learned of Tesla’s experimental proposal. Puzzled, he asked:
“Nikola, then what material do you plan to use to fill in the target lunar mare?”
Nikola Tesla pointed into the air, then meaningfully pointed toward the distant heap of space debris, and said with complete confidence:
“Space debris!”
Abbott and Maria cried out almost at the same time:
“You want to use a lunar mare as a new landfill for space debris?”
&
Chapter-closing cento poem:
Beneath the moon, clogs rise and fall, Ming, Qian Chengzhi
Brushing off dust, one recognizes an old inscription. Song, Lin Jizhong
Not drawn along by things, Qing, Hongli
Again and again I arrive, yet still lose my way. Qing, Tian Wen