65 million years ago, Venus
Nikola Tesla's so-called solution could only be described as a last resort. Dean Abbott wasn't happy at all. He knew the plan seemed theoretically feasible, but it would be difficult and dangerous to carry out.
Jupiter was drawing ever closer, and Venus's rotation was slowing. The Venusians in the Solar System would have nowhere to hide. Tesla's plan was risky, but at least it had a chance of succeeding. They couldn't just sit around and wait to die.
One key step in the plan was to blow up Mars, shattering its crust and hurling vast quantities of debris into space. Nearly a million rocks and chunks of ice, large and small, would form a band between Jupiter and Mars, orbiting the Sun. The larger objects could be called asteroids, and the band itself could be called the "asteroid belt."
"Nikola, the planets, including Mars, formed in the early days of the Solar System, when matter in the protoplanetary disk repeatedly collided and clumped together. Existing theories don't support the idea that a planet could simply explode," Abbott said.
"That's true. Once a planet forms, its gravity holds tightly onto the material on its surface," Tesla replied. "But things are different when we pour the enormous energy of superluminal waves into Mars's core and subject it to repeated cycles of expansion and contraction caused by heat."
"Injecting extra energy could upset Mars's natural balance, so an explosion is possible. I'm not questioning you," Dean Abbott added as he worked through the calculations in his head. "But we have to calculate the total energy required, its intensity, and the corresponding blast area and volume."
Nikola Tesla offered a vivid analogy. An egg took about seven minutes to boil in water, but peeling it while it was still hot wasn't easy, because the shell and the egg itself had heated evenly and were almost stuck together.
The clever trick was to take the hard-boiled egg out of the boiling water and immediately plunge it into cold water. The shell cooled quickly while the egg remained hot, making the shell more likely to crack and easier to separate from the egg.
Dean Abbott's analogy was even more interesting: it was like making soup in an earthenware pot. If you suddenly added a large amount of cold water after the soup came to a boil, the pot might crack.
To get precise figures, Tesla connected to his external brain through a Lightning Ball. The external brain excelled at memory, searching, and logical analysis based on calculations. The human brain, on the other hand, excelled at expansive, divergent thinking and linking events that seemed unrelated.
In recent years, Nikola Tesla had deliberately trained his external brain so that it could produce not only precise solutions to mathematical and logical problems, but also fuzzy probability estimates based on situational analysis—in other words, so that it could think more like a human brain.
But this time, when he connected to it about the problem of blowing up Mars, Tesla hoped it would provide precise figures. Instead, it kept leading him to think about a technical difficulty, rather than any of the other quantifiable data.
The question that kept circling in Nikola Tesla's mind was this: to make Mars explode, they had to turn it into a "pressure cooker." Mars was a sphere made up of several layers, which could be simplified into three parts: a liquid metal core, a mantle, and a crust.
Once energy was injected, the metal core would heat up and expand, and the mantle and crust would expand along with it. When the energy injection stopped, the crust would cool faster than the mantle and the metal core.
After this happened repeatedly, multiple cracks would form in the crust and it would burst apart, like a pressure cooker exploding when the pressure inside became too great. But there was one condition: the pressure cooker's lid had to be tightly sealed. It couldn't leak.
"What do you mean, the pressure cooker is leaking?" Abbott asked.
"We'll build a Superlight Wave Power Station in a volcanic crater and channel all the energy it receives into the underground magma. But that crater and the surrounding area are like the pressure cooker's vent," Tesla explained.
"Once the energy is driven into the core, molten metal will erupt back out of the crater. Then Mars can't become a pressure cooker under enormous pressure." Abbott had also realized the problem.
Mars had four large volcanic craters, one major and three smaller ones. The largest was on Olympus Mons; the three smaller ones lay in a row, also in the Martian highlands.
Tesla's aim was to blow up Mars, so the previously proposed network of "vessel-like" power stations encircling the planet was no longer suitable. What they needed now was to build a structure 180,000 kilometers tall directly above the great crater at the summit of Olympus Mons. The structure would be longer than the wavelength of superluminal waves, allowing them to strike it fully and transfer a large amount of energy.
The captured heat would no longer be used to generate electricity. Instead, it would be fed directly into the metal core at the center of Mars. As the core heated up, scorching magma would erupt from the crater. What could they do about that?
Nikola Tesla furrowed his brow. Then, a sudden flash of inspiration made him understand the answer his external brain had been hinting at. He muttered, as if to himself, "Expansion bolts. Expansion bolts."
"What does that mean? Expansion bolts? What do they have to do with blowing up Mars?" Abbott asked, puzzled.
"Our goal is to make Mars's outer shell strong enough to contain the enormous pressure generated by the heat in its core. If we 'screw bolts' into the area around the crater, we can solve the problem," Tesla said.
Abbott finally understood the solution Tesla and his external brain had come up with. "Expansion bolts" was obviously a metaphor; it didn't mean the little objects, just a few inches long, that you screwed into a wall.
Although the volcanic crater lay on Mars's surface, it was the weakest point in the crust and mantle. It could be thought of as directly connected to the molten core. To keep this weak point from releasing the core's pressure prematurely, they had to reinforce it.
There were many ways to reinforce it. For example, they could drive long, deep piles down through the ground around the volcano. These could be made of wood or metal.
Dean Abbott immediately thought of another problem. "That's not feasible from an engineering standpoint. Never mind that we don't have enough long wooden piles or metal rods. Even if we did, how many powerful pile drivers would we need?"
Tesla smiled mysteriously. "That's why they're called expansion bolts, not piles. We only need drilling rigs, not pile drivers. It'll be much easier to build."
The answer Tesla's external brain had helped him think through was to drill down through the rock across the volcanic crater and an area extending hundreds of kilometers around it, boring countless holes 10,000 meters deep. Each hole would then be filled with a highly expansive polymer.
Once heated, these dense polymer columns would expand, greatly strengthening the surrounding rock. They would reinforce the mountains stretching hundreds of kilometers around Olympus Mons, turning them into the lid of a pressure cooker with tremendous resistance to pressure.
"Now that we've solved the problem of the pressure cooker leaking, did your external brain give you any other suggestions?" Abbott remembered that the external brain thought differently from humans and continued, "Last time, wasn't its answer that the Venusians had no right to drive the dinosaurs to extinction?"
Tesla admired Abbott's memory. "The external brain really does think differently from humans. When the Solar System and humanity itself are on the brink of destruction, no one would bother thinking about the dinosaurs. But the external brain has its own logic."
The external brain had guided Tesla's thinking about the dinosaurs this way: in its underlying logic was a classic philosophical thought experiment.
Suppose someone could foresee the future. He stood beside a railway track as a train came roaring toward him. It would turn right and crash, killing fifty people. If he pulled the switch, the train would go left instead, killing one person. Should he pull the switch?
Different people would answer differently, creating a dilemma involving ethics and the law.
For instance, if he pulled the switch, would he be guilty of murdering the person who died? Or could one life be sacrificed to save more people, as an act of necessity?
Now replace the person on the left-hand track with a group of dinosaurs, and that was the choice Tesla's external brain faced. Its answer was beyond what Nikola Tesla had expected: pull the switch, and don't worry about the dinosaurs.
That was because the situation now required saving more than the fifty people on the right-hand track. It also meant saving the tracks, the station, the train, and everything else.
Law, morality, ethics—even philosophy itself—all had conditions and limits to their existence. After humanity perished and the Solar System collapsed, they would become meaningless.
So, to a computer external brain, this supposed moral dilemma had a simple answer. There was no need to agonize over it.
A poem assembled to close the chapter:
How could one know life and death would go against one's wish? — Xue Xuan, Ming dynasty
Originally, there was nothing, nor was there any return. — Wang Ao, Ming dynasty
In peaceful times, grief and joy in human relationships are slight. — Liu Yi, Qing dynasty
The old art of slaying dragons was no longer worthwhile. — Ni Zan, Yuan dynasty
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