65 million years ago, Victoria Wetlands, Earth
"Maria, I need your help." The first thing Nikola Tesla said when he and Maria met again was this, and he sounded impatient.
"Nikola, what's happened now? I don't know anything about astronomy or physics. What do you need me for?" Maria asked Tesla, then teased her beloved, "Do you want me to help save the Solar System?"
Nikola Tesla smiled bitterly and pointed toward the warehouse where the space junk was stored.
"I'd like you and your friends to help me transport all this stuff to the Moon as quickly as possible. I need it for a crucial experiment."
Maria could tell that Tesla was serious, not joking. After a moment's thought, she said,
"The Space elevator is already here, and we have plenty of people. But transporting everything to the Moon will require a lot of spacecraft. You'll have to figure out how to get those."
"The Alliance has given me the highest special authorization to mobilize Venusian spacecraft and the resources we need. I was in a hurry to get to Earth because I wanted to assess your manpower first. If you don't have enough people, the Alliance can send a large number of robots, or even special forces," Tesla said.
Maria understood what Tesla had in mind and explained Earth's situation as a Venusian penal colony. The penal colony wasn't a prison, and there were no guards. Its fences weren't meant to keep the prisoners from escaping, but to keep dinosaurs out.
Once exiled prisoners arrived on Earth, they were free to go wherever they pleased, and all of them were equals. They provided for themselves, and sometimes did work for the Venus Alliance in exchange for supplies unavailable on Earth.
Maria and the hundreds of clones she had created lived together in a small village. They hunted, gathered, and farmed.
Maria didn't consider being exiled to Earth a punishment. Living among these clones, who communicated only through music and song, seemed to have given her a sense of physical and emotional freedom and happiness she had never experienced before.
"Nikola, not everyone here is a clone. I have a dear friend named Vinu. She used to be an accountant. I'll ask her to come help you with the calculations," Maria said. She took out an instrument Tesla had never seen before and played a series of melodious notes.
Vinu arrived, followed by a girl in her teens. Maria introduced Tesla and Vinu to each other, then took the girl by the hand and said to Tesla,
"This is our Cynthia, Vinu's daughter. Vinu came with Cynthia and me when we were exiled to Earth. She chose to follow us."
Cynthia had big eyes and seemed a little shy around strangers. She clung to Vinu's clothes, half-hidden behind her mother. If Maria hadn't told Tesla that Cynthia was a clone, he would never have been able to tell from her appearance that she was any different from an ordinary Venusian.
Vinu was a little plump, with straight black hair and a healthy complexion. There was no sorrow or sadness in her eyes. Smiling, she said to Tesla,
"Thank you, Mr. Tesla, for bringing the pickled bracken I made as a local Earth specialty to Brahma. How is he?"
Only then did Tesla realize that Brahma, whom he had met on Venus not long ago, and Vinu and Cynthia were a family.
After exchanging pleasantries, Nikola Tesla entered the figures Vinu had provided into the computer he carried with him. They included the amount of space junk, the manpower available at the Earth penal colony, and the maximum amount of work they could do each day.
Nikola Tesla had been granted priority access to the Alliance's emergency interstellar communications band. He could keep in touch with Venus by video call at any time, from anywhere on Earth or even Mars, using relay satellites.
The video call connected, and the image of Dean Abbott, far away on Venus, appeared before Tesla.
"Abbott, how are the transport ships between Earth and the Moon coming along? I've run the numbers, and we'll need at least a thousand," Tesla asked bluntly.
Abbott shook his head slightly, his expression grave. "We're short on transport capacity. We're trying to figure something out here. You left in such a hurry that you didn't explain what kind of situation we're facing."
Nikola Tesla paused before saying, "According to my theory and the calculations from the Lightning Ball, the explosion of a Saturnian moon will cause Jupiter to move closer to the Sun."
"Jupiter will move closer to the Sun, pushing Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars toward it as well. The habitable zone will disappear, and the structure of the Solar System will be completely destroyed?" Abbott said in shock, voicing the worst-case scenario.
"Like you, I don't want that to happen. I've never wanted so badly for my theory to be wrong. That's why I asked for the Moon mass tumor experiment to begin immediately," Tesla said, equally helpless.
"Nikola, whether your theory of gravity is right or wrong, I want to remind you that the results of the experiment can't change our predicament. Instead of going to all this trouble to conduct an experiment on the Moon, we should work together to find a way to solve the problem," Dean Abbott of the Venus Academy of Sciences said, rational and sincere.
"I'm not insisting on doing the experiment. It's just that my theory of gravity, and the untested solution I've come up with based on it, are so outlandish and risky that I don't even dare to say them aloud."
Tesla furrowed his brow and continued, "Even if I did, neither the Venus Alliance officials nor the Academy of Sciences researchers would accept my theoretical predictions or my plan to avert disaster. They'd just think I was crazy!"
"Then describe how this enormous ball of ice, formed after Saturn's moon Sedna explodes, will affect the gravitational relationships in the Solar System," Abbott said.
Nikola Tesla's theory of gravity truly was outlandish. He believed that the strength of the gravitational force acting on an object depended on the intensity of the energy it displaced and the radiation pattern of the gravitational source, or energy source. The radiation pattern could be represented and calculated using its peak radiation wavelength.
Within the Solar System, the Sun's peak radiation wavelength was constant. The acceleration of the planets toward the Sun depended only on the intensity of the energy each displaced. Mathematical formulas supported this, and the results were exactly the same as those given by the law of universal gravitation.
According to the blackbody radiation law, energy intensity decreased with the square of the distance. A planet's acceleration toward the Sun also decreased with the square of the distance.
Energy intensity was measured in watts per square meter. If a sphere were drawn around the Sun, centered on it and with a planet's semimajor axis as its radius, the total energy across that sphere's surface would equal the Sun's total energy. Ignoring orbital eccentricity, the planet's orbit was a closed circular line of equal energy on that sphere.
For example, Earth was closer to the Sun than Mars, so the energy intensity E along Earth's line of equal energy was greater than Mars's. Earth's acceleration toward the Sun was greater by the same ratio.
The laws of physics and mathematics were truly wondrous. The linear relationship between energy intensity and acceleration could also be translated into a linear relationship between the hypothetical photosphere temperature of the solar radiation where a planet orbited and the planet's average orbital speed.
The Sun's effective surface temperature was 5772 K. Its radiation temperature was 395 K at Earth, dropping to 319 K at Mars. 319/395 = 0.8076.
That ratio was also the ratio of Mars's average orbital speed to Earth's! Earth's average orbital speed was 29.78 kilometers per second. Multiply that by 0.8076, and Mars's average orbital speed came to 24 kilometers per second.
The effective radiation temperature received from the Sun was proportional to a planet's average orbital speed? Amazing!
According to Tesla's theory of gravity, the transfer of energy was the fundamental cause of an object's motion. Superluminal waves had extremely long wavelengths—170,360 kilometers—and extremely high frequencies, on the order of 10 to the 16th power and above. If an object's diameter, like the Sun's, was greater than 180,000 kilometers, it would be struck by superluminal waves.
The Sun absorbed enormous amounts of energy, which caused the hydrogen nuclei inside it to resonate at high frequencies, triggering nuclear reactions and releasing vast amounts of energy.
The largest celestial body in the Solar System apart from the Sun was Jupiter, with a diameter of about 143,000 kilometers, smaller than the wavelength of superluminal waves. The waves couldn't pass completely through Jupiter; they diffracted around it, so they didn't trigger intense nuclear reactions among the microscopic particles inside.
The fact that its nuclear reactions weren't intense didn't mean there were none. Nikola Tesla had discovered a strange phenomenon in the Solar System: Jupiter and Saturn were the only celestial bodies to show weak nuclear reactions.
The evidence was that the energy a celestial body absorbed from the Sun should exactly equal the energy it released into space. Observational data from Venus, Earth, and Mars supported this conclusion.
But observations showed that Jupiter and Saturn released twice as much energy into space as they each absorbed from the Sun. Venusian scientists explained that Saturn and Jupiter were larger in mass and volume, and that pressure in their cores produced mild nuclear reactions.
The flaw in that explanation was that pressure inside a gas giant was closely related to its density. Neptune and Uranus were also gas giants, with densities of 1.6 and 1.3 respectively—higher than or close to Jupiter's 1.3, and far higher than Saturn's 0.7. Yet their nuclear reactions were far weaker than those of Jupiter and Saturn.
Tesla's explanation was that although a celestial body's diameter was smaller than the wavelength of superluminal waves, its surface was spherical. When the arc length of its surface hemisphere exceeded the wavelength of superluminal waves, it could also obstruct their diffraction, absorb some of their energy, and produce a weak resonance.
Saturn's hemisphere arc length was 183,000 kilometers, and Jupiter's was 225,000 kilometers—both greater than the wavelength of superluminal waves. Uranus's, at 80,000 kilometers, and Neptune's, at 77,000 kilometers, were still smaller.
When two planets aligned with the Sun, the outer planet would block the superluminal waves. As the waves traveling toward the Sun diffracted around it, the planet would act like a lens, focusing waves that otherwise couldn't reach the inner planet onto it. Put simply: Saturn grew bigger, and Jupiter paid the price!
If the inner planet, Jupiter, had a hemisphere arc length greater than the wavelength of superluminal waves, it would receive more of their energy and produce a stronger energy reaction.
"In three years, Jupiter and Saturn will align with the Sun and Regulus. The enormous ice mass stretching from Regulus to Saturn will become a colossal lens, causing Jupiter to absorb more superluminal-wave energy." Abbott understood Tesla's reasoning, then cried out in alarm,
"Jupiter's internal temperature will rise, and the intensity of the energy it releases will rise with it. Its acceleration toward the Sun will increase, tightening its orbit and bringing it closer. Jupiter takes about twelve years to orbit the Sun. Once this starts, it'll only take a few orbits to push all the inner rocky planets—including us—into the Sun!"
"Then we won't have anywhere to live, will we?" Maria murmured.
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