If Saigō Homura was negating both routes, then humanity had no chance at all!
Within that world, although Saigō Homura didn't know the reaction of the billions of gods, he knew how his companions in the Salvation Team would react. So he patiently explained.
"Before this, we accepted the results of the Dystopian Demon Lord's experiments and their life factor library, which they've been researching to this day. We planned to use this data to fill the gaps in the gene pools of the satellite ecosystems."
"That's right. Isn't that a good thing?" Izayoi asked, puzzled.
The reward for overcoming the Dystopian Demon Lord the right way was a nearly complete life factor library.
The highest authorities had invested heavily in the Dystopia Project, developing a way to model the biological structures of Earth's existing lifeforms and store their genetic information as electronic data.
With enough storage capacity, they could theoretically record the life factors of every living thing on Earth, creating a comprehensive genetic database.
With this genetic database, they could recreate all of Earth's lifeforms after finding a new habitable planet.
Theoretically, although this project was a massive undertaking, it had no fatal flaws and no possibility of failure.
"I also thought this project had a high success rate before, but we've just discovered a huge problem."
Saigō Homura shook his head and displayed the experiment's results on the screen.
"Our researchers found that it's nearly impossible to cultivate organisms using only the information in the genetic database. Even when we succeed, the specimens wither and die within an extremely short time, or they simply mutate."
"After numerous tests and multi-species trials, we've discovered that we underestimated the effect of Earth's environment on life—specifically, the effect of the planet's internal Third Stellar Particle radiation on stable gene expression."
"On Earth, no matter how many times we run the experiment, we can never succeed."
Saying this, Saigō Homura shook his head.
"In other words, trying to replace an ecosystem with a genetic database is completely impossible."
No one had imagined that Earth's internal Third Stellar Particle radiation was so crucial to building an ecosystem. Once you got too far from the planet, the genetic database would be rendered completely useless.
If that was the case, then the future starship civilization would only end up on an evolutionary path similar to that of vampires, doomed to destruction.
Clearly, this did not align with the Salvation Team's expectations.
Hearing Saigō Homura say this, Izayoi pondered for a few seconds and asked.
"Can't we use ERA to simulate Earth's Third Stellar Particle background radiation?"
If it's a natural environment, there should always be a way to simulate it artificially, right?
"It's possible, but we can't do it."
Saigō Homura shook his head.
"The Third Stellar Particle's radiation acts on the building blocks of life in the form of gravitational waves. To imitate gravitational waves, simply increasing power like with electromagnetic waves is useless. You need an immense amount of mass."
"But considering the minimum requirements to bring the genetic data to life, do you think that's even possible?"
Forget about now; even in a future where humanity had become like the pantheons, it would be impossible to build a satellite that large.
Saigō Homura's research findings were a death sentence for the escape route.
Instead of proving the escape route was viable, it directly proved it was impossible.
If they couldn't solve the problem of needing a sufficiently large mass to generate the simulated gravitational waves, the escape route would become the vampire route—a path of no return.
"..."
Looking at Saigō Homura's calculation results, faced with this ironclad fact, Izayoi's expression completely changed.
Even he understood that altering the amplitude of gravitational waves was completely beyond his power.
This wasn't a negation of the speed of human technological development; even in a future where humanity had fully become like the pantheons, it would be absolutely impossible for them to unlock this branch of the tech tree.
It wasn't because they were underestimating humanity; future humans could descend upon the present and solve the Wind of Decline with a wave of their hand.
And obviously, that was impossible.
To escape, they had to overcome a supreme technological hurdle. But once they overcame that hurdle, there would be no need to escape in the first place. Faced with this deadlock, the probability of the escape route ensuring the continuation of civilization dropped to zero.
If not for the fact that the vampire route could at least allow human civilization to barely hang on, they would have had to stop all research on this project after it was proven to be completely unviable.
"Then... what about the research on the End Emptiness? What are the current patterns of geological activity in Japan?"
Realizing that the escape route was almost completely impossible, Izayoi took a deep breath and asked about the second route.
"...That one's no good either."
Saigō Homura shook his head again, casting a shadow over everyone's hearts.
"Just like the escape route, this one is also impossible. And we now have reliable methods to prove it."
After a sigh, Saigō Homura explained.
"With the aid of Laplace's Child's calculations, we've even been able to fit a reliable mathematical model."
"Isn't that a good thing?" Kudō Asuka asked, confused.
If you've already built a mathematical model, doesn't that mean you can make predictions?
"But the final result is based on a chaos model, and the resulting range of values exceeds the maximum margin of error allowed by the chaos model itself."
Saigō Homura shook his head.
"In plain English."
Kudō Asuka gave a concise command.
"The conclusion is that it's unpredictable. It's unsolvable, just like the three-body problem."
Saigō Homura spread his hands.
Unsolvable didn't mean we haven't found a solution yet; it meant a solution could never be found.
In other words, forget about detecting the epicenters of the energy bursts in advance; we couldn't even predict the specific time the End Emptiness would erupt.
"We can't escape, and we can't face it head-on... Doesn't that mean we're finished?!"
Percher's eyes widened.
"Why is it all such terrible news today? The kind that makes you lose all hope!"
Hearing this, Saigō Homura said grimly.
"At least, these two things aren't the worst news we have right now."
"What?!"
Hearing this, everyone looked up in unison, their faces filled with utter astonishment.
Humanity's future was almost completely cut off, yet Saigō Homura was saying this wasn't the worst news. Could things possibly get any worse?