The Martial Unity

Rui was only aware of the immediate star systems in the surroundings of the Sol, and that too only because of the twenty missions that the Panamic Space Organization had prepared for over the past six years. “That’s a good question, Your Majesty,” Director Brenner remarked, zooming into the Orion Arm to a hundred light-years around Sol. “And I feel bad to say this a second time, but unfortunately, even within the Orion Arm, we are still country bumpkins.”

BZZZT

The image featured a circle with a large number of shining spots—stars—that circled one star at the very center.

It was Sol, their solar system.

Rui frowned as he immediately understood why the Director had said what he had said. “Why is our locality strangely empty?”

There was no denying it.

Everybody could see that the interstellar neighborhood, when stretched out over a large distance, was more sparse than the rest of the Orion Star Strand.

“Good question, Your Majesty,” Director Brenner nodded. “The answer to your question is simply that we are currently in the Local Bubble. It is a cavity in the interstellar medium where stellar density is lower than in the rest of the galaxy. Most likely so low that we are deemed not even worth exploring by any power that may or may not exist in the Orion Star Strand.”

Rui wondered if the good director was intentionally trying to offend the pride they had as Gaian Civilization. Rui wasn’t even a particularly nationalistic person, but even he felt pricked by the description of the director.

Gaia not even being worthy of being explored? Bullshit, she was a magnificent planet with the mass and volume of a small star. An astronomical miracle, as far as he was concerned.

“Don’t listen to him,” he told the ground beneath him with a gentle tone of voice, speaking to Gaia directly as he patted the floor. “You’re very special to us.”

RUMBLE…

A momentary tremor washed over them as Director Brenner looked queasy at the notion of having offended a planet that was allegedly conscious, according to the Emperor of Water. “What I meant was that the alien species in our star strand simply don’t have the eyes to appreciate Gaia’s extraordinary magnificence!”

“Good that you corrected yourself.”

Mother Alicia turned towards Rui with a hint of exasperation. “Enough with this farce. This is important. Please continue, Director Brenner. You were telling us about our Local Bubble.”

“Correct, Mother Alicia.” He nodded. “We exist in a cavity in the Orion Star Strand with fewer stars. It would explain why we have been left alone if there do exist any hegemonic powers within the Orion Star Strand. It would be the equivalent of the many minute tiny islands the size of a small town that exist spattered across most of the oceans around the world. They are so small and irrelevant that no nation even cares to claim them as territory or even visit them. That is what we would be. And it would explain why we have not had any alien visitors.”

“Although even then, we have had alien visitors in the recent and distant past,” Rui remarked with a knowing tone. “Is this the likeliest solution to the Fermi Paradox? That we are simply not worth their time?”

The Fermi Paradox was an apparent contradiction that emerged when one looked at the fact that aliens hadn’t visited them and compared it to the probability of such a thing happening, which could be conceived to be potentially quite high.

There were hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy that were discovered. Of them, a good dozen billion were in the goldilocks zone.

Even if the probability of intelligent life was one in ten billion, then one would still expect there to be several planets in the Milky Way Galaxy that harbor intelligent life like the homo sapien species and its seven genetic descendants. They would take perhaps a few dozen thousand years to establish modernity, as the homo sapien species had, and eventually began moving to space.

Even with limited technology, they could travel the Milky Way Galaxy over the span of just a hundred thousand years. And yet, prior to very recent events that happened under exceptional circumstances, there were no aliens in the sky. This was especially unfathomable given how incredibly common life turned out to be. Out of the twenty star systems that they had visited, ten of them had life. And of the ten, four of them had complex lives. Life was extremely common, and even complex life was remarkably frequent. Even if one detracted the colonial outposts in the form of the astralites, the mechanical entities, and Garg the gargantian, they still ran into one complex form of life out of twenty star systems.

At that frequency, there would likely be more than a billion forms of complex life independently developed across the Milky Way. This wasn’t even including non-terrestrial forms of life.

Life was mundane.

It was omnipresent.

Then it begged the question, why didn’t it come to Gaia before? Why didn’t he come to Earth when he was still John Falken?

“Most likely, your suspicions are correct, Your Majesty,” the man heaved a deep breath. “The reality is that Sol is within a cavity in an already isolated star strand. We are the equivalent of one of the countless microscopic islands far away in the Great Void Ocean, where nobody even bothers going because there is nothing to see or obtain. That would be the likeliest reason. Especially so since…”

He zoomed out around the solar system even more. “Most of the stars in our vicinity are red dwarf stars. These are the lowest of value. Their energy output is very low compared to stars like our Sun. Thus, there is even less interest in coming here.”

“Hahaha…” Rui chuckled with a bittersweet tone of voice. “I don’t know whether to feel grateful or feel insulted, but…”

His eyes sharpened. “They will regret it when they realize just how strong we are.”

He had already made up his mind, turning towards the two directors of the Panamic Space Organization and the Panamic Space Forces, respectively. “Prepare a proposal for a plan to conquer and colonize every star within a hundred light-years over the next ten years.”

Every single person in the room turned towards him with a stunned expression. “…What?”