2017: 90 global space launches 2018: 114 global space launches 2019: 103 global space launches
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, humanity's space-launch activity had been this lively for two consecutive years. Yet compared with the near-hundred launches per day that would become routine twenty years later, these numbers were barely a fraction.
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Academician Zhong Yuan was one of the rare technical leaders within the system. His usual institutional rigor, combined with a profound technical background, allowed him to immediately sense the immense potential value of Yan Ran's discovery. The immediate priority was to re-examine the specimens with comprehensive testing to completely rule out any possibility of forgery. Zhong Yuan assigned Academician Li Jinbo, director of the technical committee, to oversee the specimen analysis, raised the project classification from "internal" to "secret," and instructed Mo Yungui to return to Gandalin at once to secure the site while Yan Ran stayed behind to assist with the follow-up research.
The air in the corridor felt far fresher than the stuffy conference room, instantly clearing the mind. Mo Yungui pulled Yan Ran into the stairwell at the end of the hall, slapped two cigarettes out of a crumpled pack, and handed one over. While lighting up, he said:
"I just spoke with the director. These two objects are your discovery, and you were already one of the lead researchers on the Yushu project. So this new project must keep you involved from start to finish—you can't be pushed out. The director agreed. I have a gut feeling this is going to be big. Work hard, make something of it. A man only gets a few real chances in a lifetime—don't waste them."
"Understood. Thank you, boss. I'll push hard. Safe travels back, and please say hello to the brothers for me!"
"Yeah. Do well!" Old Mo gave Yan Ran's shoulder a firm pat, stuffed the rest of the half-pack into Yan Ran's pocket, and headed downstairs.
Mo Yungui was a southerner with a northerner's build—tall and broad-shouldered, with a powerful jaw and thick neck. He had organized and participated in several major domestic mineral explorations and possessed the simple, honest character typical of veteran geologists, like the vast Qinghai-Tibet Plateau itself—full of wisdom and conviction. In the road ahead, Yan Ran desperately needed that steady strength.
Soon, Li Jinbo's test results confirmed Yan Ran's hypothesis with even greater precision than the field measurements. The two specimens were perfect spheres with a density of 6.153 g/cm³. The large sphere measured 127.56 cm in diameter and weighed 6,552 kg; the small one was 48.78 cm in diameter and weighed 375 kg. Both were confirmed as room-temperature superconductors, most likely a special lanthanum superhydride compound. Their hardness reached 10 on the Mohs scale, they exhibited high diamagnetism, and they maintained superconductivity below 800 K. Manufacturing date: approximately 450 million years ago. The large sphere's diameter closely matched Earth's, and its surface etching was consistent with late-Ordovician Earth geography. The small sphere's diameter matched Mercury's, and its surface pattern was inferred to represent Mercury's terrain from the same period.
What lay before Zhong Yuan was not merely a special test report but a fiendishly difficult exam paper. Continuing would mean stepping outside the Institute of Geology and collaborating with other institutions. To any serious scientist, even the story of the Institute of Geology digging up Alibaba and the Forty Thieves would sound more believable than these two iron spheres. Now Zhong Yuan stood on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Fortunately, the Academy's director was no Aristotle; research could proceed. Following Zhong Yuan's suggestion, the Academy temporarily formed a joint research group under the innocuous title "Study on Rare-Earth Element Content and Distribution in Surface Soils of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau." The actual work would focus on the superconducting properties of the metallic spheres without touching other aspects for now. Personnel were drawn—two young experts each from the Institute of Geology, Institute of Physics, and Institute of Materials—with Yan Ran as group leader. At his request, Zhong Yuan also transferred Han Ting to the team to continue working with him, which also satisfied the director's strict need to limit the circle of people in the know.
Coincidence or accident is inevitable in the march of history, yet it is not always a benevolent Santa Claus. Yan Ran's discovery brought humanity a pleasant surprise, but the decoding of the Great Discovery would gradually turn that surprise into dread.
The six young researchers' fiery passion was soon frozen solid by the two ice-cold iron spheres. After half a month they had done nothing more than repeat Li Jinbo's test data. Every advanced instrument in the laboratory was almost helpless against these "trilobite eggs." This left Zou Jiasheng—the Materials Institute's "youngest national treasure"—utterly embarrassed. At the beginning of the month he had boasted to the newly arrived Yan Ran and Han Ting like a madam in a brothel, lavishly showing off every piece of equipment in the lab and slapping his chest (or rather his 95-kilogram belly) while declaring he would produce results in three days. The two had almost believed the国产 fatty.
Now Han Ting sat with legs crossed on the small iron sphere, smirking as he watched Zou Fatty on the floor hugging an air purifier, eyes vacant. From his O-shaped mouth he blew a ring of smoke and lazily asked the lean Yan Ran propped against the large sphere:
"Is this guy pretending to be a materials expert?"
Yan Ran took a deep drag of nicotine and answered with a straight face: "He might specialize in textual materials."
The indoor PM2.5 level skyrocketed. The purifier screamed pitifully as its reading jumped from 79 to 493; the screen flashed from green to red, turning Zou Fatty's face the color of pig liver.
"You two are the three major public hazards of Earth—bears, wild boars, and geological teams! Poisoning the air in the middle of the night—you'll choke yourselves to death!"
Yan Ran and Han Ting simultaneously took another deep puff, then blew the smoke straight at Zou Fatty. Zou Fatty covered his nose and mouth with one hand while groping for a slipper with the other and hurling it across the room. The slipper tumbled through the thick fog like a meteor streaking through interstellar dust, leaving a clear tunnel in its wake as it flew viciously toward them. Yan Ran shoved Han Ting aside, dodged behind the desk, snatched a laser pointer, and aimed it at Zou Fatty, shaking it back and forth until the fatty squealed like a pig. When he judged the punishment sufficient, Yan Ran released the button and straightened up, laughing so hard his sides hurt.
Zou Fatty lay motionless on the floor, glasses askew across his mouth, eyes fixed rigidly on the ceiling, breathing in but not out, as if on the verge of death. Yan Ran sauntered over, kicked the pile of flab, and asked in confusion, "You okay, fatty?"
"Laser," Zou Fatty said mechanically.
"We stopped, we stopped. Any more and you'd be cooked."
"Keep going! Don't let up!" Han Ting egged him on. "Once he's roasted we can have a group dinner."
Zou Fatty suddenly rolled upright, pushed his glasses back, and stared blankly at the two iron spheres, muttering to himself: "Laser… is the switch."
Yan Ran sat on the floor beside him, puzzled. "Didn't we already do laser spectroscopy at the beginning?"
Zou Fatty had recovered his breath and once again wore his sly-merchant expression. He pinched his voice into a high squeak: "Is our institute's laser the same as yours?" A strange smile curled at the corner of his mouth. Han Ting—descended from eight generations of poor peasants—immediately charged over and delivered five minutes of patient proletarian education with his iron fists. Only under Yan Ran's sincere cries of "Don't stop! Don't stop!" did Zou Fatty finally become honest.
"Previously we used every method—atomic spectroscopy, X-ray irradiation, spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy, plasma spectroscopy—to test the two metallic spheres. Because of their extreme stability and bizarre properties, we could never determine their exact structure or composition. Fire cannot extinguish water, but it can boil it. Similarly, although laser spectroscopy cannot reveal the composition of these metallic spheres, it can exploit the optical amplification effect of superconductors to seek other breakthroughs. Specifically, we can try using ultra-short femtosecond-pulse lasers with pulse widths of several femtoseconds to irradiate the spheres, then observe the nonlinear optical and electromagnetic effects of the superconducting spheres via pump-probe methods. Perhaps we will discover something unexpected."
"Speak like a human!" Han Ting growled again.
Zou Fatty gave him a disdainful glance and explained slowly and clearly: "Think of a blind man who cannot see a candle's shape but can feel its heat."
"Have you already found something?" Yan Ran pressed.
"Terahertz radiation. I'm not entirely certain, but with these two trilobite eggs, nothing is impossible." Zou Fatty turned mysterious again. "First we need to figure out how to boil the water."
Terahertz belongs to frontier technology. It refers to electromagnetic waves in the frequency range 0.1–10 THz, with wavelengths between 3 mm and 30 μm—lying between millimeter waves and infrared. It is the transition zone from macroscopic classical theory to microscopic quantum theory, and from electronics to photonics, often called the "terahertz gap" in the electromagnetic spectrum. Current terahertz research focuses on terahertz radiation sources, communication, imaging, and detection. Using ultra-short-pulse lasers as terahertz sources and quantum-well detectors, high-electron-mobility transistors, or high-temperature superconducting Josephson junction detectors, the temperature, resistance, or electron-distribution changes produced when superconducting materials absorb terahertz radiation can be converted into electrical signals for analysis. Under high-energy laser irradiation, superconducting materials themselves can also become terahertz radiation sources, possessing unique properties such as high radiated power, moderate frequency band (300 GHz–2.4 THz), and continuously tunable frequency. During his PhD at Nagoya University, Zou Jiasheng had participated in the discovery of the optical amplification phenomenon in high-temperature superconductors, studying the use of laser nonlinear optical effects to analyze superconducting mechanisms. He had touched on terahertz technology but had never achieved a breakthrough due to humanity's immature superconducting material preparation techniques. These two iron spheres from the Ordovician might bring an unexpected surprise.
The 200-terawatt femtosecond laser was indeed different from the institute's small laser—it looked like a side-by-side double-door refrigerator, while theirs resembled a compact household microwave. Zou Fatty first fired a 3 TW, 2.5 GHz high-energy laser at the large sphere for 5 fs. The terahertz signal collector showed no response; the screen remained blank. Zou Fatty habitually slapped the collector; still nothing. He increased the power to 10 TW and extended the irradiation time to 15 fs. Before he even looked up, the surrounding equipment began beeping wildly. On the collector screen, dense blue waveforms surged above a broad orange spectrum, with values refreshing constantly. The terahertz radiation frequency reached 6.9 THz. Zou Fatty hit the fake-spectrum clear button, but the waveforms remained tight, almost free of noise. He leaned close to the screen, pushed up his slipping glasses. The bizarre spectrogram looked like a group of volcanoes about to erupt, trembling with anticipation.
Yan Ran and Han Ting crouched on either side, barely daring to breathe. Zou Fatty turned to look at them, his voice trembling slightly:
"Boss… this thing… it's not just a superconductor. It might be… it might be a memory body."
Yan Ran looked up at the dark, hulking iron sphere in front of him and suddenly felt a chill run down his spine.
"The terahertz radiation spectrum of the superconducting metal sphere shows clear carrier-frequency superposition characteristics. The electronic signals are interleaved by frequency and transmitted on the same carrier, very similar to our television signal spectrum, only far more complex." Zou Fatty waved his phone. "We need a terahertz signal modulator-demodulator and a communications expert."
Forty minutes later, Zheng Da and Dai Xiaosheng—noses red from the cold—pushed in a cart of equipment. Yan Ran and the others rushed to help. After much fuss they finally assembled the receiver, terahertz modulator-demodulator, decoder, and other devices. Zheng Da re-separated the acquired radiation signal, corrected the sub-carrier frequency formula, and spent half an hour hammering away at the computer to update the decoder's software. He beckoned to the group with a wicked grin: "Boss, excited?" Without waiting for an answer he slammed the Enter key.
A bright blue planet floated against a pitch-black background, slowly rotating counterclockwise, then gradually shrinking. The Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and their satellites entered the frame from both sides, silently following their respective orbital paths. As the view continued to shrink, the solar system receded. The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud gradually blurred. Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri, Beta Centauri, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Lalande 21185, UV Ceti, Sirius, and Epsilon Eridani, along with dust clouds, flew in from all directions, presenting a three-dimensional map of the space surrounding the solar system. The scale kept expanding, the contraction speed increasing. The Orion Arm, the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy… until the Triangulum Galaxy—countless galaxies raced inward, finally forming a flocculent cosmic panorama like an enormous purple glowing jellyfish floating silently in the deep sea. Suddenly the image expanded dramatically again; all the galaxies shot outward like rays. After a blinding white flash the screen dimmed, leaving one large and one small planet hanging alone in the center.
The large one was Earth, the small one Mercury. They had come from the distant Ordovician…
In the following month, the supervising unit for the research was upgraded from the Institute of Geology to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, then transferred from the Academy to the Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, and finally became a top-secret project directly under the Central Military Commission Science and Technology Committee. Yan Ran, Han Ting, Zou Jiasheng, Zheng Da and the others remained in the research group. The two metallic spheres were officially named "superconducting memory bodies," and the decoding of the Great Discovery continued. Zheng Da restored and improved Zou Jiasheng's laser-excited superconducting terahertz radiation source experiment. In the frequency band adjacent to the memory body's radiated electronic signal they discovered an uplink channel, mastering the method of interacting with the memory body and opening a door for humanity to the ancient civilization.