Chapter 286: The Great Filter
1.8 trillion credits was a colossal sum of money, especially considering the global GDP at the time was only about 120 trillion credits!
Almost all major conglomerates, international banks, global governments, and ultra-wealthy elites participated in this massive gamble. If they succeeded, the economic returns would be astronomical. Thus, the elite class was more than willing to roll the dice.
Countless ambitious minds also joined the initiative, eager to contribute their intellect. Great Sage Baxter had truly given his all. He exhausted a lifetime of political connections, staked his flawless scientific reputation, and pushed government support to its absolute limit.
It is worth noting that while fundamental disciplines like physics had almost completely stagnated within the Nix Civilization, biology had experienced a golden age. The Great Sages who came after Oppenheimer had virtually eradicated all known diseases, leading to unprecedented leaps in medical technology.
Breakthroughs in life extension, such as organ cloning and free radical inhibitors, had significantly prolonged the Nix lifespan. Baxter himself was the inventor of the free radical longevity serum, a patent that had generated unimaginable wealth.
After all, longevity is the ultimate desire of any sentient species and holds the highest economic value in any market. Every Nix citizen was willing to pay a premium for a longer life. Consequently, biological research received the most funding and advanced at breakneck speeds.
By this era, the average lifespan of a Nix citizen had skyrocketed to 150 years! The most affluent and well-maintained individuals could even live past two hundred.
This was exactly why, despite a declining birth rate across the planet, the total population continued to surge, the mortality rate had simply plummeted. Whether this artificial lifespan extension was a blessing or a curse was entirely up for debate...
During a civilization’s slow slide into entropy, there will always be heroes who attempt to halt the inevitable decline. Baxter was undoubtedly one of these heroes. He sold his immensely valuable shares in his biotechnology empire, boldly abandoned his lifelong career in biology, and pivoted entirely to nuclear physics to begin a new research career.
At the time, he was already ninety years old!
Controllable nuclear fusion is fundamentally an engineering project fraught with immense technical hurdles, but it doesn’t present any insurmountable theoretical impossibilities. The Nix reasoned that with a massive concentration of elite technical talent and a bottomless budget, they could drastically accelerate progress and guarantee success.
But money cannot solve the fundamental laws of the universe.
The final saviors of the Nix Civilization soon learned this brutal lesson. They initially focused on the most mature and widely studied magnetic confinement device: the tokamak.
Logically, their ancestors had studied this exact concept for seven hundred years. Given that much time, even a room full of simpletons with limited funding should have figured something out.
The brightest minds of the Nix gathered to frantically debate their approach. 1.8 trillion credits seemed like an infinite budget, but it had to be spent wisely. In reality, bleeding-edge scientific research is a money furnace—it burns cash until there’s nothing left. The researchers had to choose the right path from the start.
The concept of "magnetic confinement" presented three main technical bottlenecks for controllable fusion:
First, the energy output had to exceed the energy input, meaning the triple product must be sufficiently high.
Second, the first wall material had to withstand extreme thermal shock, 14MeV neutron irradiation, and constant hydrogen-helium ion bombardment for extended periods.
Third, the production of tritium was astronomically expensive, requiring a self-sustaining tritium breeding cycle.
Previous tokamak experiments had indeed solved some minor issues over the centuries. They could sustain a plasma ignition for a few minutes, with the energy output roughly equaling the input. However... this was lightyears away from generating commercial electricity!
Commercial power generation requires absolute, unyielding stability. A reactor needs to run smoothly for months at a time, not just a few hours or days!
Therefore, out of the total 100% progress required to build a working reactor, they had only completed about 1% or 2%... and the system was so fragile it could regress at any moment. If this project were truly rushed into production, fusion would become a volatile, dangerous mess.
The final goal was like a carrot dangling on a stick in front of a donkey. It swayed back and forth, looking like it was just one step away... but they could never actually take a bite!
The core principle of a tokamak is utilizing the coupling between an external magnetic field and the magnetic field generated by the plasma current itself. If the plasma becomes unstable, the entire magnetic confinement system collapses, destroying the reactor. Scrapping a single prototype meant literally burning billions of credits.
So, could plasma be stably controlled?
The historical data left by their ancestors gave a grim answer: it was practically impossible! Controlling plasma at ultra-high temperatures (exceeding 10 million degrees Celsius) and ultra-high currents (over one million amperes) was an engineering nightmare. There simply were no materials or technologies stable enough to handle it.
Furthermore, the inherent turbulence of plasma made it a chaotic system. It was a formidable physical obstacle that had stumped physicists for centuries. They could only run approximate simulations using quantum computers. But an approximation is just that—a guess. It offered no exact mathematical solution.
After running preliminary tests, Baxter and his colleagues felt a cold chill run down their spines. For the first time, they truly comprehended the sheer impossibility of the problem.
If the reactor breaks down after a few minutes, how do we fix it?
If their brilliant ancestors couldn’t solve this over hundreds of years, the engineering difficulties must be fundamentally impractical.
Time was running out. It would be impossible for these scientists to overcome such a monumental hurdle in just a few decades. So, they decided to try an alternative approach: the stellarator!
Or rather... because they had a massive budget and a surplus of technical talent, they developed the tokamak and the stellarator simultaneously. They threw money at both! They would use whichever one succeeded first!
The stellarator was an alternative fusion reactor design. Because the internal plasma currents of a tokamak were too violent and unpredictable, the stellarator discarded them entirely. Instead, scientists attempted to create a closed, twisted, ring-shaped magnetic cage using incredibly complex external coils.
In other words, they shifted the difficulty from controlling chaotic plasma currents to designing and fabricating a hyper-complex, three-dimensional magnetic field. The resulting stellarator looked like a tangled, twisted mess of metal, and its manufacturing process was a logistical nightmare.
As the years passed, news about the nuclear fusion project gradually faded from the headlines, and the public stopped caring. Ordinary Nix citizens continued to party and binge entertainment, maintaining the hedonistic standard that had defined their society for centuries.
An interesting incident occurred that year. A famous celebrity was involved in a car accident, drawing tens of thousands of onlookers. The massive crowd caused a gridlock that blocked emergency ambulances—a scandal that dominated the global news cycle for weeks. Nix citizens engaged in heated online flame wars, either expressing deep sympathy or sarcastically gloating. Internet pundits constantly published think-pieces calling for a return to public morality...
Unbeknownst to the bickering public, the world’s final saviors were fighting a bloody, desperate war inside their laboratories.
This elite group of the smartest master scientists in Nix history stood alone, bewildered and panicked, facing a Great Filter that seemed insurmountable on a cosmic scale.
Every single task was met with monumental, nearly impossible obstacles. Plasma turbulence was brute-forced through quantum computer approximations; radiation-damaged materials required constant, expensive replacement. It seemed like many minor issues were barely band-aided together, yet combining all these flawed fixes still couldn’t generate stable electricity. There were simply too many variables, some of which defied physical solutions.
Great Sage Baxter, a genius with an IQ over 220, mastered the cutting edge of nuclear physics in just three years. Yet, even he could not conquer this towering mountain.
As the failures mounted, his temper worsened, and he became ruthlessly demanding of his subordinates. He worked tirelessly into the dead of night for years on end, but... he achieved absolutely nothing.
The researchers felt like they were scaling a jagged mountain. The summit always looked so close, but every time they painstakingly conquered a peak, they found themselves staring at an impassable precipice. By this time, they were exhausted and broken, finally realizing their ultimate goal was nothing but a mirage.
They had climbed the wrong path; they had gone completely astray!
It was a staggering tragedy: 1.8 trillion credits and decades of grueling labor had only proven that one specific engineering path was a dead end. They produced zero usable results.
Department Heads were fired and replaced multiple times, the massive budget was rapidly evaporating, and the research team was now facing bitter complaints and intense skepticism from the entire world.
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