Chapter 44

On a piece of reddish brown sand, an uncontrolled six pair wheel small electric vehicle is driving.

The background is a dark starry sky, in which the brightest is a red and yellow fireball.

It is small and powered by solar panels.

Although it can't hold people, there is another key accessory in its body, a special electromagnetic furnace.

The unmanned car shuttled through the sand, dug up a handful of red sand from time to time and poured it into the electromagnetic furnace. Then the red sand was completely melted by the high temperature of 2000 degrees.

Next, the car came to a construction site that seemed to be half built, came to the wall along the slope, and neatly covered the melted sand on it.

The melted sand soon merged with the wall, and it was obvious that the whole construction site was the masterpiece of this car.

But now it is far from complete. The car still needs to go back and forth, and finally complete a sealed building.

Although less than half of the building has been completed, it can be seen that the final shape of the building is similar to the Eskimo's semi-circular ice house. Only such a design can ensure that the car can go freely on the unfinished wall at any time in the whole process.

At present, all this is completed under the control of the car's own program. Judging from the completed quantities, the whole process has been carried out for at least a few months.

But suddenly, in the process of digging sand, after passing through a complex terrain, the car was trapped there and became at a loss.

Then in the starry background of this reddish brown land, a window was hit and a ladder came down.

Two staff members in spacesuits climbed down the ladder and came near the car to observe the situation.

This is not Mars, but a test base built somewhere on earth to imitate the environment and terrain of Mars.

The whole base is completely sealed. Both the internal gas composition and the composition of sand are similar to Mars. From time to time, a sandstorm will be deliberately created.

The purpose is to simulate the current situation of the real Martian surface as much as possible, and test various equipment here for a long time. Various facilities including this site belong to SpaceX, a space exploration technology company. Their ultimate goal is to let humans migrate to Mars.

At present, the content of the test is the pioneer program before manned landing on Mars.

SpaceX has various detailed ideas and plans for landing on Mars. Mars is very far from the earth, much farther than the earth and the moon.

Not only that, Mars can't go whenever you want. The distance between earth and Mars will "meet" every two years. In this state, the distance is a little closer, and then the distance begins to get farther. This distance is so far that it can't be achieved by long-time real-time communication.

In other words, landing on Mars is different from landing on the moon. It can't return immediately after landing.

Once aboard a rocket to Mars, the next time you return to earth will be at least two years later.

During this period, people who go to Mars must live there for two years, and the materials and oxygen that need to be consumed in these two years, the demand and weight are huge.

In short, landing on Mars cannot be completed at one time. Before people come to the surface of Mars, they must build all kinds of supplies and houses needed for long-term survival there in advance.

For this reason, there is the pioneer plan.

The content of the pioneer plan is to transport a batch of small robots, or cars, to Mars in advance. These robots have a wide variety and do not need to be manually controlled. They are completely decided by the internal AI according to the actual situation, and use solar energy.

Different robots have different tasks. Some of them are responsible for obtaining local materials, using their own induction cooker to melt the sand that can be found on Mars, and finally pile it up into a house.

The purpose of these houses is not only to live, but more importantly, the atmosphere on Mars is dominated by carbon dioxide, which can not be used to breathe.

Although plants will eventually convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, agricultural planting cannot be carried out where there is little oxygen. Plants consume oxygen to maintain life like animals during germination and at night.

So these sealed houses also have another important use to prevent oxygen leakage and grow plants.

The oxygen in the first house needs the compressed oxygen transported from the earth. After that, the first room can be used as the oxygen production base to gradually deliver oxygen to other houses.

But in short, farming on Mars must rely on closed rooms, and countless such rooms are needed to produce food and oxygen to supply the first immigrants.

Therefore, these robots used to build houses have a large workload, and their reliability is also very high.

The first step of the pioneer plan is to send the construction robot to Mars first, and then don't care about anything. Then all you need is to wait slowly. I don't know how many two years have passed, one day, an area on Mars will be full of houses piled up by construction robots.

At that time, the second batch of robots used to automatically plant crops will be transported to Mars. Finally, when all living resources are available, people will be considered to be sent to Mars.

Although the final amount of work is huge, the computing cost from earth to Mars is not cheap, and it is impossible to send robots endlessly. In that case, the service life and reliability of the past robots are very important.

Therefore, SpaceX, a space exploration technology company, spared no expense to establish a fully closed simulation base on earth.

Their current progress is fairly smooth, but they have encountered a small problem. Both the internal lines and various parts of the construction robot have withstood the harsh conditions simulated on Mars, especially the electromagnetic furnace. After repeated use, its performance is still stable.

The hardware has withstood long-term tests, but the company's most proud artificial intelligence software has encountered challenges in this task.

The higher ranking of the two staff in fully enclosed uniforms is the engineer and the other is his assistant

"Damn it, why did you stop at this place? There should be no difficulty crossing that small slope." After a period of observation, the engineer took the lead in expressing his opinion, "first retrieve the data, and then manually control it. Let's have a try. I don't see any difficulty, but there is a problem with the software. This is the fifth time this month.

Artificial intelligence can't completely replace human beings after all. "

Then the assistant echoed, "isn't this algorithm in the company doing well on the road?"

The engineer continued to explain: "although in our eyes, driving a sports car on the road and driving a mining car in a complex environment seem to be similar tasks.

But it's different for AI. The latter is much harder than the former. "

Then they reported the current situation to their superiors. In a dark and secret conference room, a man received a phone call to understand the current situation and reported to the people around him: "judging from the current progress, the work of recovering relics may slow down. At the same time, another bad news is that we also have a potential competitor."