Death's End

The advance warning system that was still being constructed could only provide a warning window of about twenty-four hours. If a dark forest strike really arrived, there wasn’t enough time for any spacecraft to go from the Earth to Jupiter, the nearest barrier planet. In actuality, the Earth dangled over a sea of death. Rationally, everyone understood this, and the ugly fights that broke out during the false alarm were nothing more than meaningless mass madness driven by a survival instinct that overwhelmed rational thinking. Currently, about fifty thousand individuals resided at Jupiter—most of them were space force personnel at the Jupiter base, along with some staff doing preparatory work for the Bunker Project. They had plenty of justification for being at Jupiter, and the public did not begrudge them their place. But once these secret stellar ships were completed, their wealthy owners would be able to hide in the shadow of Jupiter indefinitely.

Legally—at least right now—there was no international or national prohibition against the construction of stellar ships by organizations or individuals, and hiding out behind the gas giants wasn’t the same as Escapism. However, the inequality here was seen as the greatest in human history: inequality before death.

Historically, inequality mainly manifested itself in areas like economics or social status, but death basically treated everyone the same. To be sure, such equality wasn’t absolute: For instance, access to medical care wasn’t evenly distributed; the wealthy fared better in natural disasters than the poor; soldiers and civilians had different rates of survival in war; and so on. But never before had a situation like this presented itself: less than one-ten-thousandth of the population could go into safe hiding, leaving billions on Earth to die.

Even in ancient times, such manifest inequality would have been intolerable, let alone now.

This led directly to international skepticism about the plan for lightspeed ships.

Although spaceships hiding permanently behind Jupiter or Saturn could survive a dark forest strike, life on those ships would not be enviable. No matter how comfortable the ecological cycling systems made the shipboard environment, the occupants would be living in the cold, desolate regions of the outer Solar System in isolation. But as observations of the Second Trisolaran Fleet revealed, spacecraft powered by curvature propulsion could achieve lightspeed almost instantaneously. A lightspeed ship could go from the Earth to Jupiter in less than an hour, and the advance warning system would be more than sufficient. Powerful and wealthy individuals who possessed lightspeed ships could thus live in comfort on the Earth and then escape at the last minute, without regard for the billions left behind. This was a prospect society simply could not tolerate. The terrifying sights from the false alarm remained fresh in the public’s mind, and most people agreed that the appearance of lightspeed ships would lead to worldwide chaos. Thus, the plan for developing lightspeed ships faced unprecedented resistance.

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The false alarm was the result of the explosive amplifying effects of a hyper-information society when fed sensitive news. Its source was an anomaly detected by the first observation unit of the advance warning system. The anomaly was real, though it had nothing to do with photoids.

Excerpt from A Past Outside of Time Space Sentries: The Solar System Advance Warning System

The Earth had observed photoids only twice in the past: the destruction of 187J3X1 and of the Trisolaran system. Knowledge about the phenomenon was thus limited. All that was known was that a photoid moved at close to the speed of light, but there was no data concerning its volume, rest mass, or relativistic mass as it approached the speed of light. A photoid was certainly the most primitive weapon capable of attacking a star, since it relied only on the enormous kinetic energy generated by its high relativistic mass to damage the target. Once a civilization possessed the technology to accelerate an object to near the speed of light, a “bullet” with very little mass possessed immense destructive power. This was indeed “economical.”

The most valuable data concerning photoids was obtained right before the annihilation of the Trisolaran system. Scientists were able to make an important discovery: Due to a photoid’s ultrahigh velocity, powerful radiation ranging from visible light to gamma rays was emitted as it collided with the few atoms scattered in space and interstellar dust. The radiation had distinctive characteristics. Since the photoids were extremely small, direct observation of them was impossible. But the characteristic radiation could be detected.