Solution to the Fermi Paradox

Alfred only calmed down after several minutes, when Lu Yuanming asked him a question.

"Can you still contact the Material World?"

Alfred was struck speechless. After a long while, he unexpectedly started bawling, too.

Once Alfred had calmed down, Lu Yuanming called over the organization's administrators...

It still puzzled him. These white people, along with a few Black people, refused to take orders from anyone—including one another—unless guns and violence were involved. Yet as soon as they joined the organization, they immediately followed those who claimed to be his Disciples. Now, apart from the original Disciples, the only administrator in the organization who was an exception was Charlie.

At that moment, Lu Yuanming stood face-to-face with Alfred in the vault, accompanied by the Disciples and Charlie.

Alfred was eating and drinking: a bite of bread, a sip of Mineral Water. After polishing off two loaves of bread and a whole bottle of Mineral Water, he patted his chest and said, "I nearly starved to death... Damn MXG Person. We should've finished building the wall around Nader's place back then!"

Father Edward smiled. "Would you like some more, Mr. Alfred?"

Alfred shook his head. "No, supplies are hard to come by... So, are you willing to tell me what that whole ruse was about? Let me guess... You went outside the city, then came back alive? And you were lucky enough to find another civilization's graveyard and recover devices that work in the Dark Matter World, right?"

There was so much information packed into those words that everyone looked baffled. They turned to Lu Yuanming, who spread his hands in confusion. He had no idea what Alfred meant.

But Alfred took their reactions as an attempt to deceive him. He immediately turned to Father Edward in displeasure. "Father, we've been friends for over thirty years. Surely you're not going to hide the truth from me, too?"

Father Edward could only smile wryly. He made the sign of the cross over his chest, then said to Alfred, "Mr. Alfred, I swear by my faith, by the Father in Heaven, by Jesus Christ, and by the Messiah, who bears witness to my oath: everything I say is what I saw with my own eyes, and it is true. The man standing beside me is the Messiah of this apocalypse, and he is also..."

Alfred waved a hand, cutting him off. "We've discussed faith and religion plenty of times over the past few decades. You know my family has been Puritan for generations. I'm a devout believer who goes to church every week. But we've already come to an understanding about whether God exists. God exists in a spiritual sense, and so does faith. They give us morals and a sense of belonging, so there's nothing wrong with that. But what we're discussing now is the survival of all humanity and human civilization!"

Then Alfred turned directly to Lu Yuanming. "Hey, Asian kid. I know they've put you out front, but you're obviously not the one making the decisions. Uh, I guess they chose you because you're tall and built like a tank—you look intimidating. But now, bring out whoever's really pulling the strings and let me talk things over with them. I'm not joking around. This concerns the survival of humanity and human civilization."

Lu Yuanming smiled wryly. He stopped the Disciples from getting angry and Charlie from reaching for his gun, then stepped forward. "Let me introduce myself. I'm Lu Yuanming, from Z Country. I'm not Chinese American or Asian American. I'm from Z Country."

Alfred froze for a moment, then reflexively said, "An undocumented immigrant... That's fine, getting a green card is easy, as long as you can—"

He broke off and gave a wry smile. "It doesn't matter anymore. Go on."

Lu Yuanming told Alfred everything he had told Father Edward and the others: where he came from, what he could do, and everything else.

The more Alfred listened, the stranger his expression became. When Lu Yuanming had finished, Alfred immediately said, "Impossible. You're lying. How could that be? Time travel, too? When was the time you came from?"

"I became vegetative in July 2023. Then I was trapped in the darkness for five or six months, at least. I don't know the exact date I traveled through time," Lu Yuanming said earnestly.

"No... Wait. Five or six months after July 2023..."

Alfred's expression turned grave. He studied Lu Yuanming closely, but Lu Yuanming met his gaze with complete sincerity. Alfred immediately asked, "Then, Mr. Lu, could I watch in person the next time you return to the Mortal World?"

"Sure." Lu Yuanming smiled.

Father Edward stepped forward. "Mr. Alfred, shouldn't you answer our questions now? Or do you think this is some kind of state secret, something that would cause social unrest if you told us? Are you still planning to keep quiet?"

Alfred shook his head. "There are barely a hundred people here. What social unrest could there be? It happened in late January 2024. I remember it was January 31 when I heard about it..."

Lu Yuanming's heart lurched. He instinctively felt that what Alfred was about to say was important to him.

"They discovered Dark Matter at the Super-Kamiokande Detector in the Little Sun Country," Alfred continued.

Seeing the confused expressions around him, Alfred explained without concern, "I didn't know what it was at first, either. I read up on it later. It's a scientific facility located a thousand meters underground in a mine, containing fifty thousand tons of pure water and all kinds of advanced observational equipment. It's used to detect neutrinos. In late January 2024, researchers there reported that they might have found Dark Matter."

"Wait," Ang said, raising a hand. "As far as I know, Dark Matter is still just a theoretical hypothesis. We know a few things about its properties. First, aside from gravity, it barely interacts with any other forces and hardly interacts with photons at all. Second, Dark Matter is highly stable. It's even believed not to decay, break down, or change. Those two things alone mean Dark Matter is practically beyond the reach of our current level of science. It's basically the Dragon in the Garage. Even if the Super-Kamiokande Detector really had captured Dark Matter, they couldn't possibly have detected it."

Alfred gave a wry smile. "Right. That's how it should have been. But the researchers there discovered Dark Matter because of an accident. They also discovered something that could interact with it..."

"What was it?!" Ang immediately asked, excited.

Alfred recalled the details as he spoke. "In late January 2024, more than thirty people from the Little Sun Country arranged to commit mass suicide in a remote area. That place happened to be not far from the Super-Kamiokande Detector. The researchers saw souls for the first time, and we learned for the first time that souls—no, only the souls of Sentient Life—could interact with Dark Matter."

Alfred paused to let everyone take in the information, then continued. "Do you know how incredible a discovery this was? Forget Dark Matter for a moment. This alone was the discovery of the century. If true, it could push science forward by leaps and bounds after half a century of stagnation. And the key was the soul! Do you know how many billionaires are on the verge of death? How many powerful people long for a long life, or even immortality? When we all realized death was unavoidable, how badly did we want to know what happens after we die?"

"So, at the end of January 2024, we moved the entire Super-Kamiokande Detector to the USA, exactly as it was, and placed it in a secret research facility beneath New York. We conducted all kinds of research on Dark Matter and souls."

At this point, Alfred seemed to drift off. After a long while, he suddenly asked, "Everyone, do you really think souls are supposed to exist?"

Father Edward replied, "We have the evidence right in front of us now, so I have no reason to doubt it."

Several others nodded in agreement. Only Ang glanced cautiously at Lu Yuanming before saying, "Personally, I think the existence of the soul itself is irrational. To start with, we humans can think because we have a brain to serve as the vessel for thought. Whatever the concept of 'me' comes from, without the hardware of this biological supercomputer we call the brain, we wouldn't even be able to think. So once we become souls, what serves as the vessel for our thoughts? And where does the energy to sustain them come from? None of it makes logical sense."

Alfred smiled. "What you just said is exactly what Dr. Tang Zhean said."

"Tang Zhean... You mean the one who briefly appeared ten years ago, the super-mathematical genius supposedly boasting an unprecedented IQ of 260? Didn't he get into a car accident?" Ang asked, puzzled.

Alfred's smile stiffened. He cleared his throat. "Let's get back to the soul... So, in theory, souls shouldn't exist. Unless, at the moment a person dies, all their information is reconstructed using Fundamental Particles that humanity has yet to discover and cannot detect. And those particles couldn't be just one kind; they would have to be something like the particle model of the Material World we're familiar with. Only then could something theoretical like the soul come into existence..."

Ang considered this. "So, at the moment a person dies, their soul leaves their body and enters the Dark Matter World from the Material World. Then isn't the Dark Matter World just the afterlife?"

"No!"

Alfred gave a cold laugh. "Our research on that piece of Dark Matter showed that there was no Dark Matter on Earth before January 2024! When people died, they were dead. Even if they had souls, those souls vanished the moment they left the body, dissipating completely! Only within ten thousand meters of that piece of Dark Matter could souls appear and enter the Dark Matter Plane."

The others looked at one another, unable to understand why Alfred wore an expression that was both coldly amused and terrified. Alfred continued, "Our research on that piece of Dark Matter showed that it interacted not so much with souls as with consciousness. Its existence even let us uncover the source of the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics and solve the mystery of the Double-Slit Experiment. Many wealthy people who learned about it began investing in secret, hoping they could manifest as souls after death and enter the Dark Matter Plane... Everything was heading in the right direction. All of this happened in just one year. Just as we were preparing to make great strides and make the USA great again, that piece of Dark Matter grew larger. We found traces of Dark Matter in multiple places across New York, then across the USA, then around the world. And at the same time, those things began to appear..."

Lu Yuanming immediately asked, "Were they curses? And those monsters that couldn't be killed?"

Alfred was silent for a long time. Then he nodded and suddenly asked, "You all know about the Fermi Paradox, right?"

Only Lu Yuanming, Ang, Father Edward, Dr. Cthulhu, and Teacher Martha nodded. Everyone else looked confused.

Lu Yuanming spoke up, too. "Where are they? That's the question, right?"

"Right. That's it." Alfred's expression turned distant. "The universe is more than thirteen billion years old. In that time, humanity took only a few hundred thousand years to reach the point where we could send spacecraft into space. Why haven't the aliens who emerged millions or billions of years before us come to Earth?"

"We have the answer now. As any intelligent civilization develops, the more people die, the more Dark Matter appears on its planet. Once it reaches a critical point, the entire planet, the nearby planets it has colonized, and even the remnants of its people trying to flee aboard spaceships will all be dragged into the Dark Matter Plane by the resonance of their souls."

"And everything in the known universe is dragged in along with them. I don't know if you've read The Three-Body Problem. It's one of my favorite Sci-Fi novels from Z Country. It describes an alien weapon called a Two-Dimensional Foil that can reduce a three-dimensional world to two dimensions. The reduction is irreversible and spreads across the entire universe at the speed of light. Unfortunately, we've encountered the 'Two-Dimensional Foil' that every civilization is bound to face: the reduction into Dark Matter caused by death, which is likewise spreading throughout the universe at the speed of light."

Everyone was dumbstruck. Even those who knew nothing about science felt a chill run through them. Ang suddenly shouted, "Cosmic Voids and Supervoids!?"

Alfred paused, then nodded. "Right. Dr. Tang Zhean did mention those terms."

Ang immediately explained to Lu Yuanming, who still didn't understand. "There are several hypotheses about how our universe came into being. The most successful is the Big Bang. Under any of those hypotheses, if the universe formed naturally, then stars and galaxies must be distributed according to natural laws. The distribution wouldn't be perfectly uniform, but there shouldn't be places of absolute density or absolute emptiness. But in reality, our universe has many empty regions, including so-called Supervoids. I remember the largest is over a billion light-years across, with nothing in it—not a single star. That shouldn't be possible unless..."

Lu Yuanming finished the thought for Ang. "Unless everything there has already turned into Dark Matter, right?"

Once everyone had fallen silent, Alfred said, "And that is the fate awaiting humanity, human civilization, the entire Earth, the Solar System, and the Milky Way: falling from the Material World into the Dark Matter World. Everything..."

"Disappears. Humanity dies. Human civilization dies. And then... the universe dies, too."