"Click~"
The hatch slowly opened, revealing a passage about one meter in diameter and two meters long, with the space station right on the opposite side.
Cao Ge stood at the entrance of the passage and nodded to Kupa and Brand.
They didn't say anything either, just nodded back at Cao Ge, then bowed their waists and half-crawled, half-walked through.
The reason Cao Ge let the two of them go first was that he was unfamiliar with this space station.
Seeing that the two had already entered, Cao Ge then crouched down and crawled over.
A few seconds later, he stood on the deck of the Jerusalem.
With a "click," the hatch behind him also closed in time.
Looking at the corridor-like space station, many memories about this drama quickly surfaced in Cao Ge's mind.
The story of the movie "Interstellar" started because Earth's crops often failed to harvest due to climate change and blight, and over time, human society began to experience severe famines, an unprecedented crisis emerged with continuous natural disasters, food shortages, and the population underwent a cliff-like negative growth. In just a few years, Earth's population plummeted from seven billion to several hundred million and was still declining.
In order to alleviate this situation, governments of various countries adjusted the investment in different industries drastically, even cancelling many high-tech projects. Aerospace was among these, as the government redirected funds towards agriculture-related areas, hoping to find the cause of the gradual extinction of crops.
Kupa had once been an engineer and space shuttle pilot for NASA, but was forced to become a farmer to help solve the food crisis.
Cooper had a 10-year-old daughter named Murphy, who one day suddenly discovered that the books on her room's bookshelf had inexplicably fallen to the floor. Murphy, greatly influenced by supernatural culture since childhood, believed that it was the work of an ethereal ghost.
However, Kupa, who had received a higher education, naturally did not believe his daughter's absurd tales. After a series of analysis and deduction, he obtained a set of coordinates, which he found marked on a map.
Driven by curiosity, Kupa drove to the location, only to discover that it was the secret base of NASA that had been long thought to have vanished ten years ago.
Old Brand, the head of the base, revealed to Cooper that a wormhole had appeared near Saturn, and they believed that extraterrestrial intelligent life intended to assist humans in relocating to distant star systems. They wanted to invite him to join and explained that about ten years earlier, the agency had sent twelve scientists through the wormhole, each landing on different planets thought to be potentially habitable. Data sent back indicated that in a planetary system centered around the black hole "Cagantuya," three planets might be suitable for colonization.
After some persuasion, Kupa, who was always drawn to the stars, agreed to this most arduous task in human history.
This space station was both a station and a spacecraft, only its flight speed was not fast.
Cao Ge looked at the pitch-black space station and walked slowly, quickly arriving at the lobby, where he saw the two preparing to awaken Luomi.
"Hey!" Cao Ge greeted them and then slowly walked over.
"Miller, take a seat for now; we need to wake up Luomi first," Brand said.
Cao Ge nodded and didn't say much else.
Kupa crouched down, twisted a button, and the hibernation pod hidden in the deck slowly rose.
A few seconds later, a long, coffin-like metal box appeared in front of them.
Although different, Cao Ge still had clear memories of these types of closed metal boxes.
Kupa activated the hibernation pod's computer, the screen lit up, displaying the sleeper's information, the set hibernation time, the elapsed hibernation time, and the remaining hibernation time.
Sleeping person's information: Luomi Ramos
Set wake-up time: None
Duration of hibernation: Two years and eight months
Kupa briefly scanned the information on the computer screen and then pressed the wake-up button.
After the wake-up button was pressed, the information on the computer screen disappeared instantly and a spinning, flashing circle appeared in the middle.
A long wait followed, as awakening a person from hibernation is a complex task. It requires the computer to gradually wake up each organ of the body and get them back to working.
It was not like in the original movie where you could simply open it up and smack them awake.
During the waiting period, Cao Ge did not disturb them. He went to the window of the space station and looked at the huge black hole in the distance.
From here it looked like a celestial body the size of a mountain range, appearing to be very close to them, but Cao Ge knew there was a vast space between them.
Cagantuya, that celestial body's name.
It was a massive black hole, one that Cao Ge had never seen such a beautiful celestial body before.
Black holes were first seen in the context of modern general relativity, an amazing kind of celestial body. Its gravitational pull is extremely strong, making the escape velocity within its event horizon greater than the speed of light. So a black hole is an object where spacetime curvature is so great that even light can't escape from within its event horizon.
In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild, a German astronomer, obtained a vacuum solution to Einstein's field equations which postulated that if a static, spherically symmetrical body has a radius smaller than a certain value, peculiar phenomena would occur around it: there would exist a "horizon," beyond which even light could not escape. This value is known as the Schwarzschild radius and such 'unbelievable celestial bodies' were later named "black holes" by American physicist John Archibald Wheeler.
The black hole, a celestial body, was initially conjectured, but more and more people came to believe in its existence.
However, no one had ever seen one with their own eyes. Now, Cao Ge was fortunate to be among those who had witnessed it.
Black holes cannot be directly observed; one can only know they exist and have mass by observing their effects on other objects. By the "edge information", which is the x-rays and gamma rays emitted by the friction caused by the acceleration of objects being pulled in just before they are sucked in, one can get messages about the existence of black holes. The existence of black holes can also be inferred by indirectly observing the orbits of stars or interstellar gas clouds, which allows for determination of their position and mass.
In Cao Ge's previous life, humanity had obtained a photo through computer simulation, and it wasn't very clear.
So Cao Ge's curiosity about the celestial body in front of him reached its peak, let alone the fact that within it was a tesseract created by High-dimensional Humans that he could not yet understand.
He had reason to believe that the High-dimensional Humans who had drawn them to this extragalactic star system possessed technology far beyond what Cao Ge had ever encountered.
It was a technology of the Three-Body civilization in the Three-Body World, and of the human civilization of Elysium Space, unattainable by others.
This was a civilization existing in higher dimensions, one that could even manipulate time.
This was technology beyond Cao Ge's imagination.