Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones-Chapter 397: Success

Currently, the construction of this detector was being handled by two gigantic factories, each as vast as a mountain.

Both of these ’mountains’ had extremely flat bases and were interconnected.

Under the supply of numerous external materials and energy, it quietly began to operate, then the two mountains separated, pulling out a thin column in between them.

This column was only one centimeter in diameter, insignificant compared to the massive mountains, but it was produced by the two mountain-sized giant factories operating at full capacity, utilizing Tom’s most advanced technology to date.

Inside each of the two giant factories, there was a series of extremely complex machinery that, through a complex mechanism, converted conventional materials into this Strong Nuclear material, building it up like building blocks from both ends of the column, making it longer and longer.

After a series of complex treatments, this section of the construction process was completed, and it could then be ’discharged’ from the body.

When this column was pulled out to a length of over ten meters, some robots quickly approached and carefully inspected the state of the column.

What appeared before Tom now seemed not to be a Strong Nuclear column made with advanced technology, but rather a mirror.

A circular mirror.

Its surface was so smooth that it had an almost 100% reflectivity. Any light hitting its surface would be reflected back.

Thus, Tom saw the vast galaxy, one robot after another, factories as huge as mountains, and spaceships parked in the distance from this column.

It had no color of its own, nor a form of its own. Whatever color was placed near it, it became that color. Whatever object was placed near it, it took on the form of that object.

After a check, confirming everything was normal, the robots immediately brought two spherical shell-like outer casings and joined them around this section of the column, carefully protecting it.

Having passed the initial debugging period, the speed at which the two mountain-like factories pulled out this column increased, reaching an average speed of 1,000 meters per second.

This speed was not slow, but compared to its designed length of 1 billion kilometers, it would still take about 32 years to complete the construction of this column.

This was too long, and Tom did not want to wait that long, but there was no other way.

He could not manufacture this column by having multiple factories work simultaneously and then connecting different columns together.

Because of its special atomic arrangement, this column simply could not be ’welded’. Even if other methods were used to forcibly connect them, it would inevitably lead to a drastic decrease in detection accuracy, rendering it meaningless.

The only thing Tom could do was to honestly build it using only two factories.

Of course, it wasn’t just this one detector that was under construction.

At different locations, Tom simultaneously built ten such columns, which meant ten gravitational wave detectors.

Time quietly passed, and soon, this thin column extended to a length of 100 million kilometers.

Even at such a great length, it still maintained an almost perfectly straight state, with virtually no curvature.

Tom could confirm this without any detection devices.

The reason was simple: once the curvature exceeded a threshold, the column itself would disintegrate, with no way to salvage it.

At this length, Tom became even more cautious, fearing that the movement of the two giant factories might deviate even slightly.

To achieve such high precision and ensure that the pulled column would not have any curvature, Tom even had to build an entire high-precision positioning system.

By using 360,000 positioning satellites operating together, with stars, planets, distant neutron stars, and other celestial bodies as positioning sources, Tom could ensure that even if the two giant factories were constantly flying at a speed of 500 meters per second, totaling 1 kilometer per second, and even if they flew continuously for 100 years, the deviation would not exceed one-tenth of a proton’s radius!

It was with such a powerful and precise positioning system that the construction of this column became feasible.

But even with such high precision, among the ten columns under construction, one column still instantly disintegrated when its length extended to 260 million kilometers.

At this moment, having lost its self-stability, this 260 million-kilometer-long column, with a total mass of 1.43 billion tons, instantly disintegrated into its most basic atoms, and after a violent release of energy, turned into interstellar dust and disappeared.

Tom sighed.

This was not a technical factor, nor was it something Tom could solve with carefulness. He could only blame bad luck.

Fortunately, the other nine units were still proceeding smoothly.

While continuing the construction of the other nine units, Tom then began building a new gravitational wave telescope.

Time slowly passed, and during this process, accidents continued to occur, causing all previous accumulations to instantly vanish.

Whenever a ’column’ disintegrated, Tom would immediately start new construction to make up for the deficit.

This continued for more than 30 years. Out of the original ten detectors, nine failed, with only one succeeding. And even if everything went smoothly, the remaining newly built detectors would not be completed until at least 8 years later.

"That’s fine, having one built successfully and being able to start observations first is enough."

At this moment, the outer casing built around this column, meticulously encasing it, had also been laid, and various observation equipment had been installed.

Under the gaze of countless eager eyes, Tom finally issued the command everyone had been longing for.

"Gravity One Detector... activate!"

In an instant, inside the pipeline, all the space surrounding that almost perfectly straight column was filled with a soft, pale red light.

That was the light from various detection devices observing the changes in this column.

Once a strong enough gravitational wave, carrying energy and capable of interacting with matter and spacetime, passed through, causing the corresponding changes in this column, these detection devices could immediately detect it.

Tom and the scientists could then infer various properties of the graviton through the changes in this column.

Compared to before, Tom’s gravitational wave detection technology had greatly advanced, and the current detection accuracy reached a level of 10^{-24}. At such detection accuracy, even if a light-year length extended or shortened by just one hundred-millionth of a meter, it could be detected.

And gravitational wave events of this magnitude were not uncommon in the universe. Not to mention violent physical events like neutron star collisions, black hole mergers, or supernova explosions, even planetary-level collisions could potentially be detected.

After its completion, Tom began to wait.

He did not wait too long. Soon, the first gravitational wave event occurred.

The spacetime distortion caused by this gravitational wave event was approximately 5 times 10^{-23}, roughly equivalent to a change of only one fifty-millionth of a meter in a light-year length.

Applied to this 1-billion-kilometer-long column, this gravitational wave event caused it to shorten by 2 nanometers, lasting approximately 0.3 seconds.

So...

What happened internally when a column made with Strong Nuclear technology, extremely dense, with a tightly ordered atomic arrangement, shortened by 2 nanometers out of thin air?

What kind of changes in atomic arrangement did this change cause? What about energy? What about the arrangement method?