Traces of Civilization
With the help of Level 4 Civilization- stage Type IV civilization travel technology, humanity's journey across the spiral arm went relatively smoothly. Although they had to devise a relay travel method to cross the two most distant stars, there were no unexpected incidents along the way.
After emptying the Antimatter from the transport ships, the human Great Fleet completed the remaining journey in just thirty years and arrived at the star on the other side.
Within this Star System, however, humanity has surprisingly discovered traces of civilization.
Humanity originally planned to blast a Rocky Planet here to replenish resources, then use these rocks as Heavy Nuclear Fusion fuel to produce Antimatter, and after replenishing the Antimatter fuel, head directly towards the Perseus Arm.
But when the Probe Spaceship arrived at the Target Star System and reported back on the situation inside the Star System, all the high-ranking officials of humanity couldn't help but shudder.
This Star System is Main Sequence Star by a Red Dwarf Star, one of the most common stars in the universe. Humans, who have not encountered a single -Star System for a long time, find it very rare. Scientists explain from the perspective of the evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy that it may be because the matter density here was low in the distant past, and the mass of the Star System was insufficient to form multiple stars.
This Red Dwarf Star is one-third larger than Proxima Centauri, which is well-known to humankind, but it still falls into the category of Red Dwarf Star. As Main Sequence Star, it has four planets bound to it by its Gravity, two of which are Rocky Planet and the other two are Gaseous Planet.
However, these two Gaseous Planet are not typical Jovian planets. They both have beautiful rings similar to Saturn's rings. One of them is very small, only about 600 times the size of Earth, which is considered small for Gaseous Planet. Compared to Jupiter, it is less than half the size of Jupiter.
The two gaseous planets are located on the outermost two orbits of the Main Sequence Star, and they complete one revolution in about twenty years.
The first and second orbits are those of two Rocky Planet, but they are very close to the Red Dwarf Star, much closer than Mercury is to the Sun, falling within the Tidal Lock range of the Red Dwarf Star. Because they are so close, the average surface temperature of the side of one of the planets facing the star is around 800 degrees Celsius, making it extremely unsuitable for mining.
The temperature reached the melting point of granite. The magma formed by the melting of granite is acidic, so most of its surface is a magma ocean, and only a small portion of rocks, such as andesite, can retain their rock properties.
The other one is even hotter, with the side facing the star reaching temperatures of over a thousand degrees Celsius, essentially making it a half-molten lava planet. However, the side facing away from the star remains at around minus one hundred degrees Celsius year-round.
On one side is the intense heat of magma, and on the other is a frigid world—a world of contrasting extremes.
The images transmitted back by the probe are quite spectacular, especially the dividing line between hot and cold, which is also the dividing line between day and night.
Because one side of the planet is constantly exposed to intense heat, both planets have extremely hot cores, resulting in frequent volcanic eruptions on the side facing away from the Red Dwarf Star.
Logically, volcanic eruptions should have brought a lot of gas to the surface of these two planets, forming planetary atmospheres. However, the reality is that these two planets are too small, and their Gravity is not strong enough to hold an atmosphere. As a result, over the long years, their gas has escaped into space and was then blown into the vastness of space by the occasional Stellar Wind from the Red Dwarf Star.
And because both planets are semi-magmatic planets with intense internal activity, they have expelled all the gas they were supposed to expel, leaving only rolling magma.
In such an environment, it would be very troublesome to use Planet Destroyer Cannon to blast a planet and extract minerals, because they are too close to their stars. Bombing them would expose the entire planetary fragments to the star's flames, turning them into clumps of magma in space. Larger structures would even recombine into a magma ball under the influence of Gravity.
Therefore, the best way to obtain mineral resources from these two planets is to send mining equipment to their far side for mining and excavation.
However, it seems that humans no longer need to carry out mining operations on these two planets, because a large group of asteroids has been discovered in the orbit of the outermost Gaseous Planet.
It's that Gaseous Planet, less than half the size of a tree. Its inner and outer orbits are filled with asteroids of varying sizes, some thousands of kilometers in size, others tens or hundreds of kilometers.
It resembles Asteroid Belt, but it lies within the orbit of Gaseous Planet. Without anyone pointing it out, human scientists immediately recognized the anomaly.
Logically, such Asteroid Belt should be in planetary orbit, not in the orbit of Gaseous Planet's satellite.
Sure enough, the scientists quickly discovered the anomaly under the probe's investigation.
They discovered that these asteroids were distributed very unevenly; they were not all distributed in the satellite's orbit, but rather concentrated on one side.
This kind of wood distribution is very familiar to humans, just like the distribution of planetary fragments that were blasted out when they used Planet Destroyer Cannon to mine.
Sure enough, after a close-up on-site investigation by the Probe Spaceship, people discovered that these asteroids should now be put in quotation marks, because they are not asteroids at all, but fragments of a planet.
This clearly couldn't have been caused by the planet itself exploding; it was the work of some civilization. A civilization arrived here and destroyed the two Rocky Satellite of this Gaseous Planet using Planet Destroyer Weapon.
So why don't they want to destroy the only two planets on this Gaseous Planet?
The answer is obvious, just like humanity's past struggles with Heavy Metal minerals, energy, and various resources.
In other words, a long time ago, there may have been a civilization that traveled across spiral arms just like humans do now, except that humans traveled from the Orion Arm to the Perseus Arm, while that Unknown Civilization did the opposite.
This now-wandering, planetary fragment, resembling a pile of asteroids, is a trace of their resource extraction efforts back then.
"It seems that it's not just humans who would use Planet Destroyer Cannon for mining for convenience; other civilizations do it too!"
Seeing this, many people silently muttered a phrase to themselves.
That makes sense. After all, there's no absolute ruler in this universe to constrain the behavior of all civilizations. No one cares about things like Bombing Planets, so each civilization naturally does whatever is convenient for them.
Judging from the mining methods and the act of crossing the spiral arm from this location, the technological level of that civilization should have been similar to that of humans today; otherwise, they would either have crossed it directly or they wouldn't have been able to get across.
Now, these planetary fragments... after exploration, humanity has discovered that they haven't been fully utilized; spectrometers have detected spectral information of some Heavy Metal. For civilizations that have achieved Heavy Nuclear Fusion, rocks themselves are a type of combustible fuel for energy extraction, so these planetary fragments are a ready-made resource extraction site.