flstandardbreds Chapter 146 The Returners and the Risk Mitigators
Chapter 146 The Returners and the Risk Mitigators
The universe is dying.
time.
Time is something that never changes; it is the axis of everything, driving all life from birth to death.
At that time, the universe will also be destroyed, and only Death will live forever!
At the midpoint of the universe, there are two civilizations that have been fighting for an unknown amount of time, seemingly existing since the very beginning of the universe.
Centered on their battlefield, a dead zone has already covered 500 star systems within a radius. This is only because they deliberately controlled the scope of the battlefield; otherwise, the destroyed areas would have been even more numerous.
The Dead Zone is the deadliest thing in the universe; it is composed of countless lines of death, covering the entire battlefield.
Within the Dead Zone, the speed of light is reduced to 0, and no life can survive there.
Maybe, but that wouldn't make any difference.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, time slows down when an object approaches the speed of light.
In such a dead zone, even standing still would allow one to exceed the speed of light.
In that case, time would theoretically reverse, and life in the dead zone could even travel through time and space.
But the universe is dead.
It went from birth to development to destruction.
Everything will be different, but time is eternal.
They cannot go back to the past; like the grandfather paradox, in the river of time, they can only move forward.
However, the speed of light in the Dead Zone is zero, so from the outside, it looks like time has been paused.
In a region where the speed of light is zero, any life is meaningless.
They are all merely specimens in the dead zone, forever bound to the chain of time.
The cause of all this is two civilizations in the universe—the Zeroers and the Risk Eliminators.
Those who return to zero and those who eliminate risks were once old subjects of the universe.
Ultimately, they came from the same civilization, but on the path of evolution and ascension, they developed vastly different ideologies, which led to their split into two.
Risk takers are the administrators of the universe's rules. The universe has rules, whether they are physical rules or something else. Everything in the universe operates according to certain rules, but no one knows who created these rules. Perhaps everything was already predetermined when the universe was created.
We are all insects, turkey scientists.
We might get excited about discovering a certain rule of the universe and think we've found the truth.
In reality, it was just a subjective speculation by turkey scientists based on the farmers' feeding times.
Discover the rules, and utilize the rules.
This is what most civilizations are doing. Even advanced civilizations as powerful as the Zeroers and Risk Eliminators are still just insects bound by rules.
How to transcend?
Unable to transcend!
We are all born into a world governed by rules, and we are all dependent on those rules; this is dependency theory.
Like the Dark Forest Theory, Dependency Theory also has two self-evident axioms.
First, higher-level civilizations establish rules for lower-level civilizations through knowledge transfer, and lower-level civilizations gain favor from higher-level civilizations by learning these rules.
The Confucian principle of "excelling in studies leads to officialdom" has long been provided in the principles of governance.
Within a country, who are the most ardent supporters of the interests of the upper class? Is it the chivalrous and patriotic individuals? Or the eloquent and persuasive merchants and laborers?
neither.
Those who most support the upper class are invariably scholars.
The reason why officials were required to study the Four Books and Five Classics was itself a manifestation of the rules governing lower-level civilizations over higher-level ones.
Those who live within the rules are naturally the most supportive of those rules.
This leads to the second universal axiom.
"The prerequisite for technological explosion is the accumulation of humanities and social sciences, and the enlightenment of thought guides the future of science and technology."
This is not hard to understand. The improvement of one's thinking and cognition is itself a way of transcending the rules. The more one's thinking transcends the constraints of the rules, the higher the possibility of a technological explosion.
However, just like the first axiom, the advancement of thought can only infinitely approach higher rules, but can never transcend them, because everything we are rooted in is based on rules from the very beginning.
We are a branch on the tree of rules; no matter how high we stand, our feet are still connected to the roots below.
Rules are like layers upon layers enveloping us; even if our thoughts reach their highest level, we can only get infinitely close to the people who made the rules.
Does the grand unified theory of the universe exist? Perhaps it does…
But we will never know, because there are still new rules surrounding it.
What is the purpose of the universe?
Perhaps it will trap everyone.
Dependency theory is the root of everything; it applies not only to the universe and civilization, but also to civilizations with each other.
Is it possible for civilizations to unite?
The answer is yes. When a civilization exists entirely within the rules set by another civilization, it locks away the ability to transcend those rules.
However, there are always exceptions. The restriction of rules is a kind of restriction that one civilization imposes on another. It is not simply to suppress the development of the other, but to create a one-way blockade on the other that is only imposed on oneself.
When a third party appears, even if it is a civilization restricted by the rules set by the rule setter, it will still not be weaker than the original civilization.
This is precisely why the Dark Forest Theory can coexist.
The social relationships between these cosmic civilizations can be described in the simplest terms.
The vassal of my vassal is not my vassal.
Just as the Dark Forest Theory cannot apply between civilizations of different dimensions, Dependency Theory also has certain limitations.
Or rather, it should be called a method that can break the dependency theory—the knowledge sealing principle!
The essence of rules is to restrict cognition. Just as the Sophon locked down Earth's technology, the Trisolarans were not familiar with the complete dependency theory. In addition, their lack of human emotions meant that their technological blockade did not lock down humanity's lifeline.
It's not that Zhizi's blockade wasn't strong enough, but rather that this blockade was too easily broken.
If a third party were to intervene in the vassal state of both sides, the theory of dependence would be directly undermined.
This is another taboo in the universe: no advanced civilization may transmit knowledge to an inferior civilization, because this would cause the social relationships based on dependency theory, which have been painstakingly established in the universe, to collapse.
At that time, the universe will be dominated by war.
This is a phenomenon that risk mitigaters absolutely do not want to see.
The Risk Eliminators are the highest civilization in the universe. Their existence, based on theories, will lock down the development of civilizations throughout the universe, one after another.
The collapse of dependency theory means that any civilization is capable of uncontrolled technological explosions.
This could very well shake the Risk Takers' dominant position in the universe.
Therefore, they need to rectify all of this in order to ensure that their position in the universe is secure enough.
Only when rules exist can the universe be orderly.
But over time, another school of thought emerged among the risk-takers—the Zeroers.
They attempted to reduce the universe to zero dimensions, thereby restarting the entire universe.
The universe was once eleven-dimensional.
It was a universe in an idyllic era, where everything was so beautiful.
At that time, although the total amount of matter in the universe remained constant, the resources required by civilizations in different dimensions were completely different.
Therefore, the dark forest law does not apply to them; they can even help each other and get what they need.
The eleven dimensions are like eleven highways. When there is a traffic jam on one highway, people will automatically change lanes to other side roads.
For civilizations at level 4 and above, ascending or descending to a higher dimension is as easy as eating or drinking.
If properly coordinated, the dark forest phenomenon will not occur at all.
Shifting the perspective from macro to micro still verifies the correctness of this theory. If the Dark Forest Theory existed among all individuals, there would be no life in the universe, because the first thing any living being would do upon seeing another living being like itself would be to shoot at it.
No cooperation can take shape in the face of the Dark Forest Theory.
This means that the Dark Forest Theory did not apply during the idyllic period of the universe.
But then the Zero One appeared, and everything changed.
Their initial appearance was entirely an experiment within the Risk Takers organization.
Risk takers are also a product of the Cosmic Dependency Theory, but they are more pathetic than other civilizations. Other civilizations, if any of them do not abide by the knowledge sealing principle, may break through the rules set for them by the vassal civilization.
But the Risk Removers are the old subjects of the universe, and the civilizations that can break their deadlock simply do not exist... or to be more precise, the Risk Removers cannot allow them to exist.
After all, greed is in the nature of living beings.
Perhaps for that civilization, even if they knew that cooperation would bring greater benefits, they would still choose to wage war against the risk-takers without hesitation.
After all, no one knows what the future holds, so we might as well focus on what we can do now and try to eliminate the risk-takers as quickly as possible.
This is a fundamental flaw in the nature of living beings; they prefer to plunder others rather than cooperate.
The subsequent events involving the Zero-Based Civilization proved this hypothesis to be true.
After the Zeroers left the Risk Remover civilization, they rapidly expanded to the same level as the Risk Removers in a short period of time.
But the first thing they did was to reduce the universe from eleven dimensions.
In that instant, all civilizations in the eleventh dimension were instantly destroyed. They had no time to adapt before being subjected to a dimensional reduction attack.
Next comes ten dimensions, nine dimensions, eight dimensions...
All civilizations realized the impending crisis and began to transform themselves, downgrading their dimensions layer by layer.
To avoid the loss of matter after the dimensional reduction, and also to reduce the number of enemies, they began to frantically launch continuous dimensional reduction attacks on their surroundings in an attempt to kill everyone else.
The total amount of matter in the universe remains constant, but the space available for living in the universe is gradually decreasing.
Civilization can no longer adjust its resource allocation through dimensional advancement; the idyllic era of the universe has ended, and the Dark Forest era has begun!
Hide yourself and clean up the mess.
This is a consensus among all advanced civilizations.
They have become part of the frantic escape in this battle royale.
The frantic launch of the Dark Forest Strike was solely for the survival and longevity of their own civilization.
This is why no one ever tries to counter-track the targets of a Dark Forest attack, because it's pointless.
Putting aside the question of whether it can be tracked, since the initiators of the Dark Forest Strike generally do not launch attacks on their own home planet, but rather use spaceships to carry out random strikes.
But the most crucial reason is that the prerequisite for launching a Dark Forest Strike is that one is not afraid of Dark Forest Strike in this dimension.