The news was so momentous that it was hard to believe at first, plunging the conference room into silence.
Lin Mo seemed to hear his own heartbeat, each beat thudding against his eardrums.
Ninety-nine years sounded like a long time.
But for a civilization, that number was suffocatingly short.
Elder Li, the old man surnamed Li, was the first to break the silence, saying gravely:
"Academician Qian, hadn't we already prepared ourselves for Blue Star falling toward the sun? It's just happening sooner."
"Now that we have heavy nuclear fusion technology, could we push Blue Star away before then if we devoted the entire nation's resources to building planetary engines?"
Qian Zhenhua glanced at him and shook his head.
"There isn't enough time."
He switched to a conceptual diagram of a planetary engine.
"My colleagues at the Engineering Academy and I have done the calculations."
"Given our current technological capabilities and industrial capacity under population decline, along with environmental factors such as nuclear winter and extreme equatorial heat."
"Even if we went into full-scale production of intelligent robots to build a global planetary engine array, completion would take ninety years at the earliest."
"That's already the absolute limit."
"But ninety years from now, Blue Star will be approaching Mercury's orbit."
"It will be too close to the sun, and the gravitational pull will be too strong."
Qian Zhenhua drew a simple force diagram on the screen.
"Suppose the engine array has a total thrust of ten billion tons."
"When it was designed ninety years earlier, the sun's gravitational pull on Blue Star was nine billion tons, so the thrust was sufficient."
"But ninety years later, Blue Star will have drawn close to the sun, and the gravitational pull will have surged to tens of billions of tons."
"Ten billion tons