Galaxy Domination Guide

Bai Zhongqi adapted to his role as Chancellor quite swiftly. After the whirlwind operation, he had consecutive meetings with several officials and offered some "guiding opinions" regarding the situation of the Empire, although essentially, the fleet continued following the previous policies.

However, it wasn't that he did nothing concrete—having been with the fleet for less than 24 hours, Bai Zhongqi had already announced a significant decision for the United Empire.

"Although Earth is already fully occupied by Earthlings, Earth's moon remains an undeveloped virgin land.

Despite the moon lacking an atmosphere and liquid water, making it not a strictly habitable celestial body, the Empire has developed over a hundred similar celestial bodies before, so technologically there are no issues." Bai Zhongqi created a three-dimensional visualization of a colony on the moon in Iridium Star using holographic imaging to show Du Peng and Xu Lanzhou.

Du Peng supported Bai Zhongqi's decision. He said, "The fleet had previously conducted some exploration of the moon. The satellite's resources are fairly abundant. Although its metallic minerals are not particularly complete, it's rich in Helium-3. Developing the minerals here and building a colonial city couldn't be more perfect."

In many mineral-rich planets, the Iridium Star United Empire had established colonial cities convenient for engineering personnel to live in. The size might not necessarily be large, but in terms of living experience, it wouldn't differ much from living on a habitable planet.

The technology to establish colonial cities on celestial bodies unsuitable for human habitation is actually that of Ruyi City's space city technology, only without the need to make these cities capable of interstellar travel. Colonial cities can effectively adjust gravity; for example, on the moon, the gravity is too small for Iridium Star's people and Earthlings, making life inconvenient.

Colonial cities can increase gravity to a value humans are accustomed to. Combined with an ecological system, Iridium Star also possesses powerful microbial technology, which can transform the soil at an extremely high speed, making it suitable for the growth of green plants. People from Iridium Star could also breed various animals and create highly realistic weather phenomena.

Bai Zhongqi's plan involved initially establishing a relatively small colonial point on the moon, about ten square kilometers in size. As the population here increased, the United Empire could continually expand the colonial city around the original site, eventually transforming it into a gigantic city.

Xu Lanzhou was very interested in this city, the empire's first in the new universe, and asked, "Your Majesty, what do you plan to name this city?"

Bai Zhongqi smiled slightly and suggested a very orientalized name, "Lunar Palace City."

Then Du Peng asked, "Your Majesty, do you have any intention of moving the capital of United Empire in the new universe to Lunar Palace City?"

Bai Zhongqi shook his head, "There's no need for that right now. The foundation of the empire is still the fleet, and it's more convenient to set up the administrative center at Ruyi City."

Xu Lanzhou said, "I've also heard of some civilizations setting up their capitals in space cities, but such civilizations are usually nomadic."

Nomadic civilizations are those without a mother planet, where all members of the civilization live in the fleet. Such civilizations either have peculiar spiritual beliefs or are too weak and have been forced to flee after their mother planet was taken away. For Iridium Star, having a space city as the capital still didn't quite fit the identity of an empire.

Bai Zhongqi also detected the subtext in Xu Lanzhou's words and said, "This is also a provisional measure. The territory of the empire will continue to expand, and we will find a better habitable planet than Earth or even Iridium Star as our capital star in the new universe."

Those words were essentially Bai Zhongqi's way of reassuring Xu Lanzhou. Actually, as an Earthling, the new mother planet of the United Empire could only be Earth. And as for where the nominal capital star of the United Empire was, Bai Zhongqi didn't care much.

Strictly speaking, the resources and conditions of Iridium Star actually weren't as good as those on Earth. Even among the over two hundred Administrative Stars of the United Empire and the habitable but yet-undeveloped planets it occupied, Earth was still among the top.

In the universe, there were certainly planets larger and richer in resources and better in conditions than Earth, but they weren't particularly numerous. Of course, assessing the habitability of a planet is subjective; some intelligent life forms cannot live in an oxygen-rich environment such as that of Earth, preferring methane or even atmospheres toxic to humans.

The people of Iridium Star and Earth actually belonged to a kind of intelligent life, so the standards of judgment were similar.

At least in the First Universe where Iridium Star was located, Earth definitely counted as a uniquely blessed planet.

First, not to mention the many intelligent species born on planets with harsh natural environments, compared to more habitable planets, very few places like Earth had been tinkered with by 7.5 billion humans to the point where human traces could be seen almost anywhere on the planet's surface. A common trait among most high-level civilizations was a low birth rate and low desire to reproduce.

Taking the people of Iridium Star as an example, like humans from Earth, the average lifespan of Iridium Star people was 266 years, generally entering old age only after 200, with even a possibility of delaying it using special body modification techniques. However, Iridium Star people reached sexual maturity no differently from Earthlings, at the age of 18.

Logically speaking, Iridium Star people should have been reproducing more offspring than Earth people.

But in reality, the people of Iridium Star were far busier than those on Earth, as most of them during their youth, exposed to too many choices, harbored various dreams.

Whether joining the military, exploring the stars, or conducting scientific research, since the volume of knowledge established by Iridium Star people was magnitudes greater than that established by Earthlings, acquiring necessary knowledge could take decades.

Furthermore, with an extremely perfect social security system, there were no worries about survival, so the biological reproductive desire of Iridium Star people had drastically declined. This was evident even in Western developed countries on Earth, where almost every developed nation faced issues with aging populations and declining population rates.

Averaging one child per male-female pair meant the population of the next generation was halved.

Iridium Star people still felt young, thinking nothing of waiting another hundred years to have a child, or even deciding it wasn't a big deal not to have children at all (akin to modern people thinking it's not late to have children at 30), despite Iridium Star having policies encouraging childbirth, the effects were not very good.

Another issue was that Iridium Star was constantly at war, even experiencing entire planets being conquered, which had a tremendous impact on the population. Earthlings might lose tens of millions of people in a world war, but Iridium Star people could see the extinction of hundreds of millions with the fall of just one planet.

Earth had no external cosmic invasions; it was merely engaging in conflict with itself. At least by continuously conquering other planets, Iridium Star could slightly increase its population, otherwise, the population of the United Empire of Iridium Star would have been sharply declining.

The development of technology also played a crucial role in this process. The emergence of bionic humans and artificially created humans completely convinced Iridium Star people that relying on childbirth to increase population was an inefficient method.

Efficiency-oriented Iridium Star people would rather spend a few hours cultivating a bionic human with various functions set, or directly creating a human controlled by a brain chip through genetic technology.

This also led to the number of bionic individuals in Iridium Star being nearly a hundred times the population of Iridium Star, and the number of artificially created humans twenty times that of the Iridium Star people.

Even for the government and military, it was the same; expending so much effort to convince a citizen to take a job or join the military couldn't compare to commanding a bionic human for hundreds to thousands of years, paying no wages, and also it being convenient and quick, without demands for human rights or daily protests.

The interstellar civilization of Iridium Star, based on mechanized and intelligent technology, had lost much of its vitality by this stage of development. Many scientists and scholars of Iridium Star had noticed this issue.

It was only because of the ongoing Supreme Command from Bai Zhongqi, which required them to do this or that and followed a relatively clear technological roadmap, that Iridium Star kept growing. Otherwise, this civilization might have already encountered its bottleneck period.

Even without Bai Zhongqi's direct intervention, Du Peng and other visionary Iridium Star people would certainly have strived to integrate such a group as the Earth humans/Chinese, a nearly rare breed with a strong desire to reproduce and a race similar to that of Iridium Star, into the Empire to inject new vitality into it.

Only true humans were the ultimate driving force that continuously pushed a civilization forward. Perhaps in the eyes of Earthlings, technology was the most important thing in an interstellar civilization, but in reality, it was people.

At its root, technology was still created by humans, and humans, with their ability to explore the mysteries of the universal laws, were the most valuable entities in this universe. Interstellar civilizations that waged wars to capture large populations of high-quality intelligent beings were numerous. Only within a galaxy, the population scale of Iridium Star was considered moderate.

But high-level civilizations that had accumulated populations into the hundreds of billions or even trillions had all undergone lengthy periods of development, the developmental histories of many races stretching back hundreds of millions of years. In this process, countless civilizations had fallen.

Any planet in the universe that harbored hundreds of millions of creative, quality intelligent beings, in a relatively safe environment, would ultimately develop into a high-level civilization (provided there was no interference).

This is not to say that Earth was certain to become a standout victor in the cosmic arena; on the contrary, the future projections by Iridium Star AI were rather pessimistic. Earth people were succeeded by their complex makeup and creativity but were failed by the political structures of the planet.

The likelihood of humans self-destructing was far greater than that of eventually stepping beyond Earth to become an interstellar civilization. This was also a main reason why many populous planetary civilizations were eventually eliminated in the "preliminary rounds".

Bai Zhongqi had directly settled the United Empire of Iridium Star on the moon, and his decision to gently absorb Earth's human resources was readily accepted by Du Peng and others, not only because of Bai Zhongqi's authoritative position as Chancellor but because, after calming down and analyzing the issue, every sufficiently intelligent Iridium Star person could see the tremendous benefits to the development of the United Empire of Iridium Star.

At present, compared to Iridium Star people, Earth people were behind in every aspect, whether it was physical fitness, intelligence, lifespan, or knowledge reserves, except in creativity, where Earth people were not lacking at all. Iridium Star people had also experienced what Earth people were currently going through, which meant that Earthlings had enormous potential for development.

The technological explosion on Earth over nearly two hundred years had proven this. Of course, Iridium Star people had always been in a state of technological explosion, which was unique in the universe.

Only Bai Zhongqi knew the real reason, which was that Iridium Star people had emerged from an incredibly magical game, controlled by him as a player, essentially giving a civilization a god-mode cheat. Thus, Iridium Star had been all about technological explosions and military dominance all the way to where it was today.