Chapter 565 Inconceivable

Chapter 565 Inconceivable

Captain Trishan Das continued gazing into the void of space, something that caused his lips to quirk up into a slight smile as he wondered whether Nietzsche would roll over in his grave or not. After all, he was definitely misusing the idea, despite space being just as endless as the abyss spoken of by the German philosopher.

Still, he was in a philosophical mood and couldn’t help but think back on all of his struggles growing up poor in rural India. In fact, if it weren’t for the efforts of Jai Chakrabarti, the Coeus Foundation’s CEO, he would still be living in a mud hut with a rusty corrugated steel roof over his head. So Captain Das had good reason to be thankful for the Terran Empire, as it had personally uplifted both him and his family.

His mother, father, and little sister were some of the first to design their home in a fortress city, and Trishan himself was here, the captain of one of the largest spaceships ever built. He had to admit that, if his younger self knew where he would be today, he would probably laugh himself to death and accuse whoever told him his future of being the most outrageous liar he’d ever known.

Shaking himself out of his daze, he brought up his monitoring screens and got to work.

......

Everything that was considered valuable on Earth, like gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, and many others, was actually quite common in the vastness of space. In fact, most scientists believed that Uranus literally rained diamonds! The methane in the atmosphere would break down thanks to the sun’s rays, creating carbon atoms. The resultant carbon would then fall deeper into the gas giant’s atmosphere, where the pressure would compress them into diamonds.

Whether or not the mining ships that people were now busily designing could actually gather those diamonds was another question entirely. But even if they couldn’t collect them now, that didn’t mean they would never be able to.

If the empire hadn’t already announced strict controls on importing resources from the depths of the solar system, the economy would have already spiraled into a recession. But by the simple expedient of limiting the amount of mineral commodities from space and prohibiting any mining on Earth itself, the disaster had been staved off. Any surplus over and above the mandated import limits would be sold to the empire, and the process was automatic. As mining ships dropped off their loads at the processing stations, the empire would take it from there and everyone would be satisfied with the outcome.

The empire would receive vast stocks of mineral resources, the miners themselves would be handsomely paid for their efforts and finds, investors could rest assured that the commodities market would remain stable, and manufacturers that relied on those raw resources would be able to purchase them from the empire at a reasonable price. It was a flexible model and would easily transition from an empire that was bound to a single solar system all the way to a galaxy-spanning empire that stretched from one edge of the Milky Way to the other.

And one thing ensured that smuggling wouldn’t exist: quarantine. Sure, there were indeed greedy people, but the only people licensed to mine in space would be those who passed the most stringent of security checks that included personality scanning via brain data. Part of the processing that was done at the processing stations in the Trojan asteroids was a scan that detected and eliminated any possible microorganism, preventing potential disease outbreaks that humanity wasn’t equipped to handle.

After all, H.G. Wells had thrust the idea that aliens could be defeated by something as simple as the common cold. Thus, it was obvious that the same concept could work in reverse, wiping out humanity just as easily as an earthly virus had wiped out the invaders in War of the Worlds.Updated from novelb(i)n.c(o)m