Chapter 264: Nyx Civilization
The cold, hard truth was... the Federation simply didn’t have enough manpower!
Currently, their staggeringly low population was the single greatest bottleneck to their expansion!
Jason was practically pulling his hair out over the unsolvable population crisis. He had debated with sociologists and demographers for hours, but they couldn’t produce a viable short-term solution.
Educating and integrating the reptilian natives required manpower. Strip-mining the Arctic required manpower. Excavating the ancient ruins required manpower. Where the hell were they supposed to find all these people?
It had been over nine years since Earth was destroyed. The total population aboard The Ark had grown to roughly 80,000 but nearly 30,000 of them were children!
With the High Council aggressively incentivizing childbirth and providing massive welfare subsidies, many families had finally agreed to have a second, third, or even fourth child! The population growth rate was practically redlining.
But raising children required massive amounts of energy and resources. Even with heavy incentives, families couldn’t pop out kids every nine months like livestock.
These 30,000 children, the oldest of whom were only eight were at their most demanding developmental stages. The massive influx of infants placed a crushing logistical burden on the colony’s childcare and education sectors.
Even with the widespread deployment of automated nanny-drones, robots couldn’t do everything. Human psychological and emotional development still required intense human intervention.
Consequently, these children tied down a massive percentage of the adult workforce. If Command sent too many adults down to the surface to pioneer the colony, The Ark’s society would grind to a halt.
The Ark was humanity’s true home. Its absolute stability had to be guaranteed so the pioneers operating in the brutal surface conditions could work with peace of mind. Many of those pioneers were parents; they were risking their lives in the freezing dark specifically to build a better future for the next generation.
Therefore, The Ark had to remain an impregnable, flawless sanctuary. There was zero margin for error or safety hazards.
Jason crunched the numbers and realized he only had an absolute maximum of eight to ten thousand personnel that he could freely deploy!
That was it. Not a single body more!
If he deployed more than ten thousand adults, The Ark’s internal logistics would collapse under the weight of the childcare crisis. He couldn’t exactly draft all the adults for surface duty and leave 30,000 toddlers home alone, right?
Jason let out a heavy sigh, truly missing the early days of the exodus when there were zero children onboard... Back then, the entire population of 50,000 consisted of unattached adults who could be mobilized at a moment’s notice. When a single pioneer ate, their whole family was fed; there were no dependents to worry about.
Paradoxically, as the total population had grown, the available workforce had plummeted. It was an unavoidable demographic growing pain.
They simply had to grit their teeth and push through this generational shift. It would take ten to twenty years, but eventually, the population structure would balance out, the children would enter the workforce, and everyone could finally breathe easy.
Despite the crippling manpower shortage, Jason set his jaw, consulted his department heads, and finalized the operational plan.
They stripped non-essential administrative roles to the bone, funneling every available pair of hands to the front lines!
The Federation officially entered its next great era of expansion: The Era of Excavation.
They were going to mine the Arctic and dig up a lost city!
Aided by massive fleets of automated heavy machinery, the highly motivated human crews managed to excavate the entire buried city in just one month.
The engineering and science divisions were practically vibrating with joy; they could finally scavenge ancient tech.
This was a genuine metropolis, not some crude dirt village like the ones built by the lizardmen. It boasted massive, complex structures and an absolute wealth of fossilized mechanical components.
During the excavation, they even unearthed the physical remains of the civilization’s original inhabitants, fossilized skeletons!
The city covered an area of roughly 7.6 square kilometers, which seemed relatively small. It was built directly atop the extinct volcano essentially constructed inside the crater.
Unlike human cities, only a tiny fraction of its architecture was built above ground; the vast majority of the city was constructed deep into the bedrock to withstand Nyx’s freezing surface temperatures.
The "Forbidden Zone" feared by the lizardmen was actually the ruins of a massive nuclear power plant located on the city’s outer rim, which had supplied the metropolis with electricity.
Because the power plant had been destroyed likely through orbital bombardment or internal conflict, a catastrophic amount of nuclear waste had leaked into the surrounding bedrock. That explained why the lethal radiation had persisted for so long...
The city possessed a deep, three-dimensional layout, plunging nearly a kilometer underground. At its absolute base, the excavation teams found massive networks of industrial pipelines and thermal-exchange machinery.
The Senior Scientists hypothesized that the city utilized these deep-core machines to draw supplementary geothermal power directly from the active volcano.
Of course, the volcano was either dormant or extinct at the time of construction, making the probability of a catastrophic eruption extremely low. In the event of an eruption, the populace would have utilized emergency evacuation protocols. Volcanic eruptions always present seismic warning signs, which would have bought them enough time to escape.
However, after so much time, the majority of the subterranean architecture had collapsed, and the original machinery was crushed, stripping the city of its former grandeur.
Most artifacts had degraded into mineralized sludge, blending perfectly into the surrounding stone. Exposed metals, subjected to eons of microbial and oxidative decay, simply hadn’t survived.
"Based on deep-strata geological dating and carbon analysis, we estimate this city was constructed roughly eleven million years ago! The margin of error is no more than two million years. Therefore, we can safely date the extinction of this civilization to that same era."
A lead geologist, reviewing the final telemetry from The Ark’s mainframes, looked up with sheer awe in his eyes. "Eleven million years. This timeframe is incomprehensible to humanity; it proves this civilization vanished into the abyss of deep time."
He held up a heavy, fossilized biological specimen, the skull of one of the original inhabitants!
The isotopic decay rates within these fossils had provided the definitive timeline.
Hearing the number, Jason was profoundly shaken. He couldn’t help but marvel at the terrifying, uncaring vastness of the cosmos... Eleven million years!
Eleven million years was an eternity to humanity, and even on a cosmic scale, it was a staggering epoch.
Eleven million years had passed since the fall of this mighty civilization. Only today, thanks to Federation excavators, had this lost city seen the light again.
And even after eleven million years, the nuclear contamination was still lethal... It was a terrifying testament to the sheer scale of the original radioactive leak! (Many radioactive isotopes possess half-lives stretching tens of thousands of years. It would take roughly ten half-lives, or nearly 21 million years, for the zone to become completely safe for biological life.)
The Federation officially designated this lost, highly advanced society as the "Nyx Civilization."
They had been the true apex predators of this world.
To prevent confusion, the primitive reptilian natives were officially classified as the "Lizardmen Tribes."
"Judging from the cranial capacity and bone density of the unearthed fossils, the Nyx Civilization and the primitive lizardmen are two completely different species," the geologist explained, guiding Jason through the secure artifact vault.
The citizens of the Nyx Civilization also exhibited reptilian traits, but they were significantly larger and more robust than the lizardmen. They possessed six limbs, stood roughly 1.6 meters tall, and had cranial cavities comparable to humans. They also sported long, spiked tails measuring two to three meters, which likely served a distinct biological or social function.
Based on fossil morphology and fragmented DNA extraction, they shared absolutely no genetic lineage with the lizardmen.
They were two entirely distinct species.
The primitive lizardmen were likely a native offshoot species that naturally evolved millions of years after the extinction of the Nyx Civilization... Two completely separate intelligent species had arisen on the same planet!
It was absolutely mind-boggling!
Especially considering... Nyx’s biosphere was incredibly hostile. Compared to Earth, it was a miracle anything survived here at all.
However... the successive rise of two intelligent species terrified the Federation’s brightest minds. It proved a horrifying cosmic truth: Intelligence was not a rare anomaly in the universe!
In fact, civilizations were likely incredibly common!
Some scholars even began to wildly theorize: Did an ancient, advanced civilization exist on Earth millions of years before humanity evolved? Were humans just the second species to claim the planet?
After all, Earth’s ancient geological history still held countless unsolved mysteries and anomalous traces...
The universe was ruthlessly cruel. If the spark of civilization was common... then why were so many civilizations trapped on their home planets? Why was it so impossibly difficult to become a true interstellar empire?
This stark reality only proved one thing...
There was an incredibly high probability that humanity was hurtling toward a "Great Filter", a life-or-death cosmic barrier that was practically insurmountable!
Even a relentless optimist like Dr. Arthur Lambert had to grimly admit that the statistical probability of humanity facing a Great Filter event was terrifyingly high.
However, what exactly this ultimate filter was remained a complete mystery. Perhaps they would uncover the answer hidden within the ruins of the Nyx Civilization...
For now, the Federation remained optimistic. They refused to be intimidated by an apocalyptic theory that hadn’t even materialized yet.
