Chapter 407 Legacy of Wisdom

A gamma-ray burst is the largest and most devastating cataclysm in the known universe.

One prominent theory suggested that Earth’s first mass extinction event, which occurred over 600 million years ago during the Ordovician period was triggered by a gamma-ray burst originating from a star 6,000 light-years away.

At the time of the impact, two suns would have appeared in the Earth’s sky. The burst instantly stripped away 70% of the ozone layer, collapsing the foundation of the marine food chain and wiping out 85% of all species on the planet.

Fortunately, 6,000 light-years was a significant distance, and Earth had only been grazed by the beam rather than taking a direct hit.

Because the extinction event wasn’t absolute, the surviving vertebrates eventually evolved to become the dominant species on the planet.

However, even in the final years before Earth’s destruction, humanity had remained deeply terrified of such cosmic events.

Astronomers had been horrified to discover that WR104, a massive Wolf-Rayet star located 8,000 light-years from Earth, was on the verge of going supernova.

There was a very real possibility that its gamma-ray burst would intersect with Earth’s orbit... and no one knew exactly how devastating that impact would be.

Humanity had been terrified of a threat 8,000 light-years away.

The Tark Empire had been sitting a little over a hundred light-years away, staring straight down the barrel of a hypergiant star’s rotational axis.

If they didn’t run, they were dead.

The text decoded from the back of the metal phonograph disk continued to scroll across the screen:

"After confirming this horrifying reality, we expedited the launch of these probes, praying they could escape the blast radius intact. They carry a fraction of our dying hope."

"Simultaneously, we have committed the entire economic and industrial output of our empire toward developing controlled nuclear fusion.

We intend to burn through every ounce of our remaining fossil fuels to construct generation ships capable of evacuating a massive portion of our population. In tandem, we are frantically constructing deep-subterranean super-shelters... We are pursuing both plans simultaneously."

"We just pray we have enough time. We pray the universe... we pray that the dying star grants us a few centuries of grace. Time... oh, time. We are so desperately out of time..."

"Recorded by the Tark Empire, in the year 011110011011 AD. Probe designation: 00011010100."

The message ended there.

A profound sense of unease settled over the room, specifically triggered by the mention of "controlled nuclear fusion."

Everyone present understood the staggering, almost insurmountable engineering hurdles required to achieve that technology.

Even humanity hadn’t managed to perfect it before fleeing Earth.

"Their future doesn’t look very bright... The sheer scale of industrial engineering required to build generation ships capable of evacuating an entire planetary population is beyond comprehension... The deep-subterranean shelters would have been their only realistic option,"

one senior scientist muttered, trailing off and shaking his head.

It was obvious he held zero hope for the Tark Empire’s survival plans.

"...Even if they managed to build super-shelters," Jason said, shaking his head grimly,

"a gamma-ray burst from that distance would completely strip away their atmosphere and instantly collapse the global food chain. The survivors underground wouldn’t last more than a few years before starving. A hundred light-years is practically point-blank range for a supernova."

Time was a merciless, fleeting arrow.

150 million years. An unimaginably vast gulf of time had passed... and an entire civilization’s sprawling history had been reduced to this: two hundred etched metal plates and a crude phonograph disk.

In the endless, grinding river of time, the greatest historical figures were reduced to mere names. Even the most powerful, galaxy-spanning empires were relegated to a brief footnote.

How much had happened on that world?

People had cried, laughed, fallen ill, and fought desperate struggles for survival. All their monumental historical events, all their political wars, all their joy and rage—none of it mattered in the face of deep time.

When all physical traces of their existence were eventually erased, what did their ancient tears and laughter amount to?

The ultimate fate of the Tark Empire would likely forever remain a mystery.

Even with the Federation’s advanced star charts, the astronomical diagrams etched onto the plates were useless.

The Milky Way was constantly in motion; 150 million years of stellar drift meant the astronomers had absolutely no way of reverse-engineering the location of the Tark homeworld.

"We can’t triangulate their origin because the galactic spiral arms have shifted entirely since then... the orbital drift is too severe to extrapolate backwards," Professor Thomson, head of the Astronomical Observatory, said, waving his hand in deep regret.

The command room fell dead silent.

Looking at the battered, crude probe and reading the final, desperate testament of a doomed species, a profound, chilling sense of panic suddenly gripped everyone present.

If the Federation ever faced a truly inescapable, extinction-level catastrophe... would they do the exact same thing?

Would they compress all their knowledge and hurl it into the dark, hoping the next civilization would remember them?

Wasn’t that exactly what the Precursors had done by leaving the vault on the Moon?

The realization was terrifying and disorienting.

Faced with guaranteed annihilation, the Tark Empire had chosen to cast their genetic legacy and their cultural spirit into the void...

It was impossible to judge their actions; it was the ultimate act of desperation. Yet, witnessing it firsthand triggered an uncontrollable existential dread among the crew. They didn’t even fully understand why they were panicking.

Suddenly, the screen flickered as the analog reader began processing the next data sector from the metal disk.

The subsequent files were densely packed with fundamental theorems in physics and mathematics. Naturally, given their primitive era, the information did not exceed the Federation’s current technological base.

While some of the theoretical approaches were novel, they were ultimately just alternative proofs for established scientific laws. Several experts in the room quietly debated the alternative methodologies.

The Federation was vastly superior to the Tark Empire in terms of technology, and they already possessed almost all of this knowledge.

The text scrolling across the screen rapidly progressed from foundational calculus to higher algebra, topology, functional analysis, and real analysis. Entire university-level courses were ruthlessly condensed into just a few sentences.

The Tark Empire had systematically listed what they considered the most critical mathematical theorems in the universe, entirely omitting the proofs due to severe data storage constraints.

For a primitive civilization, launching even a single extra kilogram of payload into deep space required a crippling expenditure of economic resources. Therefore, they had been forced to compress, compress, and compress their data even further.

While some of their foundational mathematical definitions differed from humanity’s, the overarching logic was remarkably similar, heavily mirroring Hilbert’s axiomatic approach.

At the very end of the mathematical archive, the Tark scholars heavily emphasized the paradoxes inherent in dealing with infinite sets, as well as the profound foundational crisis triggered by set theory.

They expressed deep, lingering regret that even as they launched the probes, they had failed to resolve these core mathematical contradictions.

These were the exact same paradoxes that had historically plagued human mathematics—an era known as the Third Foundational Crisis of Mathematics.

Even today, the Federation hadn’t fully resolved the crisis, as many critical issues regarding the absolute foundation of mathematical logic remained fundamentally unanswered.

In fact, modern mathematicians knew that completely eliminating these paradoxes using current methodologies was mathematically impossible.

Because G?del’s Incompleteness Theorems had irrefutably proven the inherent limitations of any formal axiomatic system. G?del had mathematically proven that it was impossible to use a formal system to permanently solve its own paradoxes.

In simpler terms, the entire bottom-up approach to scientific theory might be fundamentally flawed...

Perhaps, relying strictly on this framework, humanity would never be able to solve every problem. They might never be able to fully comprehend the entire universe.

As the final page of data scrolled past, the transmission from the ancient empire finally came to an end.

The screen went blank, followed by strings of corrupted gibberish. It was impossible to tell if the data had degraded over the eons or if the metal disk simply ended there.

"That’s it, then." The senior scientists in the room sighed in collective disappointment.

"There are no actual engineering schematics or applied technologies. It’s purely theoretical knowledge."

Even though they hadn’t gained any groundbreaking new tech, everyone in the room felt the crushing, profound weight of history radiating from the primitive probe.

It was a desperate mission—a mission to pass on the spark of wisdom, even in the face of immediate, inevitable destruction.

When disaster strikes, what choices will humanity make?

Just then, the lead biologist overseeing the micro-ecosystem analysis sent a priority ping to the command terminal.

"...There are zero living organisms within the biological spheres. We have only found the fossilized, degraded traces of life. We detected zero intact genetic material or complex organic compounds... the vast majority of the biological matter has been completely hydrolyzed."

"There is absolutely no way to sequence or reconstruct the DNA. The proteins themselves have completely broken down."

The final lab results perfectly matched their grim predictions.

Without a sustained energy source, no biological organism could survive 150 million years in a vacuum. Everything that could biologically decompose had long since turned to dust.

"The Tark Empire’s genetic legacy failed... but their spirit will remain in this universe forever. They taught us an incredibly important lesson today."

"Let’s not be too pessimistic," one researcher argued. "Judging by the serial number on the chassis, they launched thousands of these probes. Perhaps one of them successfully seeded a habitable world? It’s even statistically possible that their descendants survived and eventually evolved into an interstellar empire of their own!"

Scientists weren’t typically prone to romantic sentimentality, yet they found themselves desperately trying to spin a positive narrative. Who knew what the ultimate outcome of the Tark Empire really was?

But deep down, they all knew that utter tragedy was the most statistically probable outcome...

What did the joys, sorrows, or desperate struggles of an individual or an entire civilization, matter to the indifferent universe?

However, at that exact moment, a startling new string of data suddenly popped onto the main screen.

There was something else hidden at the very end of the metal disk’s data track! A final encrypted file!