Answering Jason's question, Professor Roman explained, "It's because the Viridian spaceships don't launch from a standstill. This unmanned probe was likely fired from their mothership like an artillery shell, using an electromagnetic railgun... that's why it achieved such incredible speeds."

"Its internal energy reserves and onboard ion thrusters are only used for deceleration and course correction..."

Jason took a moment to visualize the scenario and immediately understood.

It was similar to how ancient aircraft carriers back on Earth used steam or magnetic catapults. By utilizing a catapult system, fighter jets achieved a high initial velocity before their own engines fully engaged.

Electromagnetic railguns had a wide range of applications. Beyond firing kinetic slugs, they were perfect for launching drones. Railgun technology was already a major research focus aboard the Noah; their ion cannons and Gauss cannons were essentially just variations of the same underlying electromagnetic principles.

He wondered if the Federation should develop a massive railgun array capable of launching nuclear payloads and high-speed interceptors... just like the Viridians did.

Given their recent breakthroughs in room-temperature superconductors and advanced alloys, building such a weapons platform was entirely feasible, even if its power consumption would be astronomical...

Professor Roman continued, "Captain, if we ever need to alter the Noah's trajectory, I believe we could use these new ion engines to maneuver the mothership. It would be far more efficient and controllable than our old method of detonating nuclear warheads."

"However, given the Noah's unique physical properties, plasma still has mass. Venting it outward to generate thrust would inevitably bleed off some of the ship's overall momentum..."

"...Alternatively, we could deploy the engines and the reaction mass outside the hull beforehand. It's doable, but it would still result in a net loss of velocity."

Professor Roman fell into deep thought, silently calculating the variables.

Alter the ship's trajectory? This remark struck a chord with Jason. According to their internal shipboard clocks, it had been a year and a half since they fled the Solar System. But factoring in time dilation from their near-light-speed travel, roughly seven or eight years had already passed in the outside universe!

The Noah was cruising at 0.98 times the speed of light, meaning humanity was already seven to eight light-years away from the ruins of Mars!

At that distance, they were incredibly far from the remains of their home star. Furthermore, after so much time, the chaotic energy released by the sun's destruction had dispersed, drastically reducing the chances of high-energy gamma rays interfering with the ship's sensors.

He recalled a proposal from an astrophysics summit a while back: the cosmic environment was finally clear enough to reboot the Gravitational Wave Telescope and scan the cosmos!

Realizing this, a sudden wave of anxiety washed over him. This was, after all, a matter of absolute life and death for the entire human race; they desperately needed to find a habitable planet to settle on.

Without hesitation, Jason wrapped up the spacecraft design meeting with Austin and the engineering team, then rushed straight to the central observatory to meet with the astrophysics department.

After confirming the conditions with the experts, he gave the immediate order to initiate the Gravitational Wave Telescope's deep-space scanning protocol!

Naturally, waking the massive array from its dormant state required several days of rigorous preparation and calibration.

Three days later, a crowd of high-ranking Federation officials and senior scientists gathered in the primary observation deck aboard the Noah.

Today was the day they finally brought the Gravitational Wave Telescope back online.

People clustered in small groups, murmuring quietly. Their voices were tight, and their movements were noticeably jittery. Although these were the intellectual and political elite of the Federation, polished and professional, their polite facades couldn't mask the deep-seated anxiety gnawing at them.

In truth, they didn't hold out much hope for this scan.

The universe was incomprehensibly vast. The gulf between star systems was measured in light-years, a scale so grand it was terrifying.

If the supernova explosion hadn't imparted the Noah with such terrifying kinetic energy, no one would have ever dreamed humanity could escape the Solar System...

Even with their technology advancing at an explosive rate, where a single year of progress now rivaled decades back on Earth, they still lacked the sheer power required to significantly alter the Noah's course. At best, they could only nudge its trajectory by a microscopic fraction.

Everyone, including Jason, could only leave it up to fate and pray to Lady Luck. They were blindly hoping that the ship's current, unalterable path would happen to pass near a habitable exoplanet.

The statistical probability of such an intersection was astronomically small...

Yet, the results of this scan would dictate the Federation's long-term survival policies!

If the nearest habitable world was so far off their flight path that reaching it would take thousands or even tens of thousands of years, the Federation would be forced to enact draconian austerity measures. They would have to implement extreme rationing, strict family planning, and harsh population control!

They might even be forced to rely on mass stasis. By putting the majority of the population into cryogenic hibernation, they could minimize resource consumption and simply sleep through the eons-long voyage. The military had been secretly researching stasis pods for years, though the public remained blissfully unaware.

It wouldn't necessarily mean extinction, but it was a grim prospect. A single catastrophic malfunction while the ship slept could wipe them all out. Absolutely no one wanted to resort to mass stasis.

Jason felt a knot twisting in his gut. Tens of thousands of years was just too long. Recorded human history didn't even span that much time!

However, wishful thinking couldn't alter the cold, hard physics of the universe. Even if the results were devastating, they would have to face reality. If cryogenic sleep was their only path to survival, then so be it.

The moment the command to boot the telescope was issued, Jason's racing mind inexplicably settled. It was the calm of a man who had completely resigned himself to fate.

Cascades of code and numerical data scrolled across the massive display screens, tracking the telescope's environmental diagnostics and sensor calibration. It was similar to a standard computer booting up, only this process would take roughly an hour to complete.

During the countdown, the assembled scientists chatted amongst themselves, using idle conversation as a shield against their mounting anxiety.

They discussed astrophysics, shifting star charts, sub-light travel, and relativistic mechanics. It was incredibly dense, academic chatter, yet fascinating in its own right.

Given Jason's extensive self-study over the years, he could easily follow the high-level jargon, standing off to the side and listening intently.

Two researchers nearby were debating the visual phenomena of sub-light travel—effects the Noah's crew could now observe firsthand.

Looking out the viewport of a ship moving near the speed of light was a surreal experience. Due to stellar aberration, the starfield appeared to compress towards the front and rear of the vessel. Thanks to the Doppler effect, stars in their forward arc shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, while the stars trailing behind them shifted into the red.

Naturally, because the Noah's sensor arrays were shielded behind its massive forward hull to protect them from interstellar dust impacts, humanity could currently only observe the starfield to their sides and rear.

Occasionally, a stray star would break from the compressed cluster of light at the bow, streaking rapidly across the dark void alongside the ship. As it passed, its color would visibly shift from stark blue to green, then to yellow, and finally deepening into red as it fell behind them.

This was a textbook demonstration of light waves stretching, a phenomenon known as redshift.

Furthermore, if an observer aboard a sub-light vessel were to look back at Earth through a powerful enough telescope, they would see events unfolding in extreme slow motion, as if the planet's clock had ground to a halt.

When the observer reached a distance of one light-year, the image they saw wouldn't be the present, but Earth exactly one year in the past. Time, from the observer's perspective, had been stretched across the void; it was an optical illusion dictated by the fundamental limits of the speed of light.

"It's a fascinating optical phenomenon," one of them remarked.

"Indeed..." the other agreed softly.

As the idle chatter filled the room, the countdown timer silently ticked down to zero. The Gravitational Wave Telescope fully initialized and began its deep-space sweep!

The moment that would dictate the future of the human race had finally arrived!