Deciphering and Analysis

"That's right. It seems we'll only know what's going on once we decipher this message."

Discarding useless guesses, all communications experts, cryptographers, linguists, and related physicists and mathematicians on the Hope's bridge joined the decryption work.

The strings of coded information displayed on the Signal Receiver screen were converted into visual codes by communications experts and then sent to all personnel involved in the decryption work via the internal network.

The coded information is very long; if printed on A4 Paper, it would be at least 500 pages long.

However, things went much more smoothly than Yue Yuan had imagined. Just over ten minutes later, Taliya Sinskaia, who specializes in cryptography, exclaimed with delight, "Chief Yue, the first large part of the unknown signal's encoding is very likely a complete dictionary sequence, and the latter small part should be a short text."

"Oh? You mean the other party sent the dictionary before speaking, and the contents were deciphered?"

"Judging from the coding pattern, it's most likely a dictionary, but it's just a preliminary guess. Deciphering the content won't be that quick, my Chief Yue!" Talia spoke in a Russian -accented Chinese, but her words had a TVB feel to them.

"Chief, although they sent us a dictionary, it may take us several weeks or even months to decipher it," Lu Xiaofen added.

"Can't 'The Tianhe Light' help?" Yue Yuan asked.

"We can help with calculations, but we'll have to handle the dictionary logic deductions and text comparisons ourselves," Lu Xiaofen said, before returning to studying the first part of the dictionary.

Yue Yuan nodded to indicate that he understood.

This is the first time humanity has encountered a truly extraterrestrial signal. It's quite remarkable that they were able to immediately recognize it as a dictionary and a short passage.

While the Artificial Intelligence 'Tianhe Light' is called Artificial Intelligence, it is not a true intelligent life form. It can be used to translate languages from various countries or languages that humans have already recorded, and it is quite accurate. But to ask it to decipher an alien language from scratch is nothing short of a pipe dream.

Of course, once humans decipher the dictionary contained in the signal and enter it into the 'Tianhe Light' database, the Tianhe Light can directly and accurately translate the alien language corresponding to the dictionary without having to manually look it up every time.

"Old Liu, what do you think?" Yue Yuan walked to the porthole, looked at outer space, and Liu Miyan, who had walked over with him.

Liu Miyan touched his beard and replied, "Sending a dictionary before speaking indicates that this message is indeed broadcast. Moreover, two things are certain: First, the sender wants us to know the content of the message. Second, the other party does not have our language information."

Yue Yuan nodded affirmatively first, then added, "There's a third point: the other party is very likely not 'Silver Mist'."

"The Chief of Staff is saying that the 'Silver Mist' might have obtained information about us humans by killing them during their brief contact with the landing crew? That's impossible!" Liu Miyan shook his head, seemingly feeling that his words were not accurate enough, so he added, "It's not that it's impossible to obtain information by killing humans, but that if the 'Silver Mist' has this ability, then they are not just mining tools, but Sentient Life."

But they're still lying there motionless, seemingly controlled by some kind of mining program. So I'm more inclined to believe it's something else. The fact that we couldn't detect anything before only means our technology was too primitive. Besides that, I can't find any other explanation for the relationship between the 'Silver Mist's' current state and this strange signal.

"That makes sense." Yue Yuan pondered for a moment.

He had just suddenly thought of this possibility and mentioned it as a reminder; he hadn't given it much thought.

In recent years, scientists have offered two explanations for the state of the 'Silver Mist'.

The first explanation is that the 'Silver Mist' has the ability to fly away from the planet, but since no humans were found in its orbit, its mining process was not triggered.

There's a flaw in this explanation: given the advanced technology of the 'Silver Mist,' there's no reason it wouldn't have discovered humans in planetary orbit. Scientists explain this by suggesting that the 'Silver Mist' is likely limited by its own mining processes, restricting its search to planets.

The second explanation is that the Silver Mist simply lacks the ability to leave the planet. In this explanation, the 'Silver Mist' is merely a mining tool, and the civilization that created it did not endow it with this capability.

For seven years, humanity has had various speculations and explanations about the 'Silver Mist', but due to the limited information, none of the explanations have been ultimately accepted.

Humans are indeed afraid of the 'Silver Mist', but it is precisely because of this fear that we need to study and understand it in depth.

Liu Miyan thought for a moment and then said, "Chief, the signal transmitter sent us a dictionary, which means they haven't contacted us before. Otherwise, they would probably have used our human signal language directly. The technological strength of Ross 154-4 Planet can't be any worse than 'Silver Mist'."

It seems that Liu Miyan does not believe the signal source is 'Silver Mist', but rather another entity.

Yue Yuan neither confirmed nor denied this.

After a day, humans discovered that the signal, which had been sent every half hour, had disappeared. Scientists believe this indicates that the other party was either under some kind of restriction or was giving humans time to analyze the situation.

Over the past day, the communications analysis team led by Zhao Youqin discovered the characteristics of another unknown signal.

That's the signal strength.

Although the signal is very similar to a broadcast, its strength is clearly not strong enough to guarantee that it will not be distorted when traveling over light-years. It is more like a broadcast from within Star System.

Based on this discovery, scientists concluded that the unknown signal was specifically sent to humans.

This terrified everyone.

What does this mean? It means that the unknown entity that sent the signal, or aliens or Alien Civilization, has already discovered humanity.

Based on this assessment, Yue Yuan almost stubbornly led all of humanity on another long voyage. However, humanity could no longer withstand such a gamble; even at 1% of the speed of light, they might not survive to reach the next Star System.

The existence of the 'Silver Mist' has indeed made leaving this star system a consensus among all humanity, but at least Controlled Nuclear Fusion must be achieved before we can leave.

Humanity never wants to experience that kind of perilous voyage again. Unable to escape, humanity has no other choice but to do its utmost to accelerate development here.

At the same time, they were also curious and nervous as they analyzed the unknown signals.

One week, one month, two months.

It took humanity two and a half months, thanks to the efforts of hundreds of experts and scholars, to decipher the unknown signal.

I finally saw the message content.

On this day, the bridge of the Hope was once again filled with people.