Chapter 265: Striking It Rich
Beyond studying the fossilized remains, many Senior Scientists were also conducting extensive quantitative analyses on the various pieces of unearthed machinery...
Hard work pays off. After a month of sifting through the ruins like scavengers in a gold mine, the teams had uncovered an incredible haul of artifacts.
Studying these recovered items was more than enough to gain a profound understanding of the Nyx Civilization.
Dozens of research papers were currently being drafted and were undergoing final peer review! The Federation desperately needed to pinpoint the exact technological ceiling of the Nyx Civilization to justify the massive resource cost of the upcoming, large-scale excavation.
"Just as I hypothesized! Haha! We’re rich! We’re absolutely rich!"
A sudden burst of wild, hysterical laughter erupted from one of the isolation rooms in Central Command.
This was the dedicated laboratory of Dr. Harrison, a senior physicist.
The room was cluttered with all sorts of advanced diagnostic equipment and excavated, rusted scrap metal, leaving barely enough room to stand.
In front of a scanning electron microscope, the sixty-year-old physicist was waving his arms and shouting at the top of his lungs. Anyone passing by would have thought the man had completely lost his mind.
After a long bout of manic cheering, Dr. Harrison finally stopped shouting and collapsed into his chair, panting heavily. However, his face was still flushed bright red, a clear sign of his overwhelming excitement.
"We hit the jackpot! We finally hit the jackpot!"
He sprang up from his chair, desperate to share his groundbreaking discovery with his colleagues. In his haste, his boot caught on a pile of rubble, and he fell flat on his face.
Fortunately, he was wearing his powered armor, so the impact was negligible. Ignoring the slight jolt, he pushed himself up, threw open his laboratory door, and rushed into the main hallway.
"A quantum computer! These are the logic gates of a quantum computer! A commercially available, civilian quantum computer!"
"They had already advanced to this stage!"
"Their baseline technology is almost identical to ours!"
Dr. Harrison shouted urgently, waving a diagnostic read-out in the air. "This component is the definitive proof we needed!"
In truth, after a month of meticulously combing through the ruined city, the expedition teams had recovered a wealth of metallic artifacts. The preliminary metallurgical and structural analysis all pointed to one undeniable fact: the technological level of the Nyx Civilization vastly surpassed humanity’s capabilities during the old Earth era!
However, compared to the current technology of the Federation, the two civilizations seemed to be on roughly equal footing, each possessing unique strengths and glaring weaknesses.
Definitive conclusions couldn’t be drawn until the entire city was fully excavated and analyzed.
The reality was that the Federation’s technology tree was wildly unbalanced. Due to their reverse-engineering of alien artifacts, their advancements in fields like superalloys and room-temperature superconductivity had skyrocketed to an interstellar tier, far exceeding what humanity could have naturally achieved!
However, their foundational technologies had lagged severely behind, remaining only slightly more advanced than standard Earth tech.
Furthermore, countless foundational technologies had been completely lost when Earth was destroyed...
The Federation’s Lunar Archives simply didn’t possess the data capacity to back up every single commercial and industrial patent ever filed on Earth. Without those blueprints, reconstructing baseline technologies was incredibly difficult.
Lacking millions of patented designs, the Federation’s mechanical engineering had increasingly shifted toward a rugged, purely utilitarian model: simple, crude, and brutally effective, prioritizing function over finesse.
The engineers simply didn’t have the time or the manpower to focus on intricate design details or meticulous optimization.
To give a concrete example: the standard AA battery. Back on Earth, there were hundreds of active patents for chemical battery optimizations, closely guarded by various global manufacturers. The Lunar Archives never acquired those highly classified corporate schematics.
Consequently, even using the exact same raw materials, the AA batteries currently manufactured by the Federation were measurably inferior to the ones sold in convenience stores on old Earth.
It was a bitter truth that the engineering division had to accept.
It wasn’t that the Senior Scientists were incompetent; they simply didn’t have the luxury of time to reverse-engineer minor chemical optimizations. Forcing the brightest minds of a generation to spend months perfecting an "AA battery" would be an unforgivable waste of intellectual resources. And even a brilliant short-term research sprint couldn’t instantly replicate decades of slow, accumulated corporate R&D.
Therefore, the core issue lay in the structural gaps of their "applied technology."
When looking at the big picture, the Federation suffered from far too many blind spots in its foundational engineering.
Of course, the colony now utilized advanced aluminum-air batteries, leveraging higher-tier science to bypass the problem entirely and partially compensate for their lower-tier manufacturing flaws.
Another glaring example was silicon-based CPU architecture. The microchips currently produced by the Federation were vastly inferior to the processors manufactured by the legacy tech corporations of old Earth.
This had resulted in a painful, multi-year bottleneck where the colony’s standard workstations couldn’t be meaningfully upgraded. It wasn’t until the breakthrough in room-temperature superconductors and the subsequent mass production of quantum computers that the Federation’s digital infrastructure was finally overhauled.
This was yet another instance of utilizing cutting-edge science to forcefully bandage a gaping wound in their basic technology.
Even today, Federation engineers still couldn’t manufacture a silicon-based microchip that rivaled old Earth’s standard. How could they, when no one was actively researching the obsolete tech?
The rapid rise of the Federation was a desperate process of leapfrogging. They had no other choice... They had to aggressively copy alien artifacts to achieve massive leaps in capability, completely abandoning the slow refinement of older technologies. Doing it the traditional way would have been far too slow for their survival!
But!
This desperate strategy had birthed a critical, metastasizing problem: the foundation of their technology tree was dangerously unstable!
Normally, a civilization cannot unlock higher-tier technologies without first fully mastering the lower tiers. The Federation was an anomaly. They had gotten incredibly lucky, scavenging advanced alien wreckage and using it to forcefully catapult themselves into a higher technological bracket, completely ignoring the necessary stepping stones along the way.
This resulted in a bizarre reality where Federation engineers could construct a functioning quantum supercomputer, but struggled to properly manufacture a flawless integrated silicon circuit.
It was the absurd truth.
And silicon-based chips hadn’t been entirely phased out; they were still incredibly vital. They possessed immense physical stability and were capable of operating flawlessly in hyper-lethal environments.
Conversely, the delicate quantum entangled states required for quantum processors were extremely sensitive to environmental interference. In the harsh, highly radioactive, and magnetically unstable environment of Nyx, high-performance silicon chips were actually vastly superior for field work.
This foundational instability was a massive crisis that had plagued the engineering division for years, simply because there were too many gaps in the archives!
But the Federation’s top scientists couldn’t afford to waste time reinventing the microchip... there were always immediate, existential threats demanding their attention.
Now, a miracle had occurred. A discovery that sent every scientist into a euphoric frenzy: a collapsed, highly advanced civilization must have left behind a complete, sequential technology tree!
The Federation could perfectly patch the holes in their own scientific foundation by studying the ruins!
"This is phenomenal! Absolutely phenomenal!" When Dr. Harrison’s analysis was officially verified, every Senior Scientist in Central Command practically danced and cheered in the laboratories.
How much foundational science was required to mass-produce a civilian quantum computer?
It meant the Nyx Civilization possessed a flawless, comprehensive mastery of quantum mechanics! Their archives would contain detailed, proven pathways for quantum dots, nuclear magnetic resonance, quantum optical routing, and superconducting arrays! In these specific foundational fields, the extinct natives were far more advanced than humanity.
This was entirely different from blindly studying the Viridian Empire’s wreckage. Reverse-engineering hyper-advanced alien artifacts required humanity to take massive leaps of logic to even comprehend the basic physics at play. Even after years of study, much of it remained pure magic to them. For instance, the Federation could utilize room-temperature superconductors, but they still didn’t fully understand the underlying quantum theory making it possible.
But... this was different. If they could unearth the Nyx Civilization’s central databases, they could directly read and comprehend the foundational academic papers!
These theoretical frameworks were the absolute core of true science! What humanity desperately needed were the mathematical proofs, the universal equivalents of the E=mc² mass-energy formula, the raw logic that allowed a species to truly dissect and understand the mechanics of the universe!
Technology required generations of slow, methodical accumulation. A civilization had to patiently walk the path, allowing the tree of knowledge to grow deep roots before it could bear fruit.
Only when raw theory and applied engineering were perfectly merged could a species boast true "scientific power"!
This discovery was an unprecedented windfall! And it had practically dropped right into humanity’s lap...
When the news was officially broadcast up to The Ark, the entire population went absolutely wild!
Who cared about the name Nyx? It should be officially renamed the Scrap Planet! It was covered in glorious, invaluable garbage! No, wait—Treasure! The Treasure Planet!
Down in his quarters, Peter was cheering just as loudly as the rest.
Meanwhile, the alien memory parasite, "Black," residing in his mind was practically weeping tears of absolute disbelief...
It seemed that the most lucrative, overpowered profession in the entire cosmos was simply being a garbage collector!
However, this kind of miraculous, civilization-boosting scavenging wasn’t something just any low-tier species could pull off.
Early-stage civilizations lacked the capability for interstellar travel, meaning they would never naturally stumble upon the ruined scraps of other civilizations. For a species like the Federation, an infant civilization that had somehow been violently displaced over twenty light-years from its home system, finding a pristine, extinct civilization to scavenge was a statistical impossibility on a cosmic scale.
They were truly the luckiest garbage collectors in the universe...
