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Chapter 285: 285

Over the following period, Chen Chen closely monitored the status of the inertial confinement reactor every day .

Fortunately, with Little X managing the operation, the handful of minor hiccups faced during the operation of the reactor were quickly addressed without resulting in any loss .

After half a month had passed, the final modified version of the inertial confinement reactor had been operating without any fault for 168 consecutive hours . It was at that point when Chen Chen decided to connect the reactor to the power system of the Spire .

The next step was to figure out how to miniaturize the reactor since the most suitable use for the inertial confinement reactor was to function as aircraft engines . Using magnetohydrodynamic generation, the plasma engine could be directly driven to produce continuous propelling force .

However, Chen Chen would at least require his very own laser components assembly line to achieve miniaturization . The complexity involved in this operation should be no lesser than that of the lithography machines . Chen Chen would need intricate planning to set his plans into motion .

Meanwhile, the announcement of Project Xingtian during this period had also incited major responses all across the world .

Xingtian was the prosthetic brand which Chen Chen had announced . The goal was to service the disabled members of society via bionic prosthetic technology . Meanwhile, Project Xingtian stretched further into Chen Chen’s strategic timeline as the goal of the project was to prepare for the future when humans would be able to partake in prosthetic head operations .

The current advertised bionic prosthetic was merely an approach to test the waters .

The plan was to start by pushing prosthetic limbs to the public to service the disabled . After that, they would gradually shift to products such as bionic organs and bionic spines, slowly and subtly pushing the bottom line of societal acceptance . This was a wiser approach than immediately launching a head switching technology that essentially transformed the entirety of the human body except for the brain to a mechanical counterpart . A technology like this would surely cause a mass uproar .

Therefore, the slow and steady approach was the best .

To be clear, bionic technology was still in its infancy . When implanting a bionic prosthetic into a disabled person, Neuralink company’s lace electrode would also have to be implanted into the brain .

This was the latest brain-machine interface technology introduced by Elon Musk in 2019 .

It was general knowledge that there were hundreds of millions of neurons in the brain and the connections between neurons constituted a neural network . The signals on the neurons were mainly transmitted through electrical impulse signals . That was to say, these impulse signals reflect our “actions” and “thoughts” . In essence, being able to decipher these impulse signals was the equivalent of reading a person’s soul .

This was how the brain-machine interface technology came to be .

The lace electrode developed by Neuralink was a multi-point flexible electrode acting as an interface for the brain . It was thinner than a regular strand of hair, measuring just 27 . 5 microns .

The thinner the implemented electrode, the lesser damage it may pose to the brain . To help implant this sort of electrode into the human brain, Neuralink had specifically invented an operating machine that inserted the electrode into the human cerebral cortex like a sewing machine . The machine was designed to avoid frisking the arteries during the process and allocated a special location for the electrode, which helped with minimizing the risk .

All of the electrodes would be buried deep underneath the skin layer and shift with the brain structure, alleviating any concerns of harming the brain . It was like embedding hundreds of thousands of strands of “hair” inside the brain . Finally, all of the logged impulse signals would be transmitted across these “hairs” to the sensor .

The sensor integrated into the lace electrode technology was quite peculiar as well as the sensor chips were designed to be lodged into the skull . There were two distinct advantages to this design choice . The first being that it was a solution to anchor the electrode and prevent any accidental dislocation . Secondly, performing the digital-to-analog conversion at the closest distance possible helped with reducing noise .

In the end, the designated algorithm within the chip should convert the brain signals of the host to a functional program, allowing the host to effortlessly control his or her body only by channeling “thoughts” . This should result in the bionic prosthetic limbs functioning just as nimbly as actual organic limbs .

To buy the rights to use the lace electrode technology developed by Neuralink, Blacklight Biotechnology shelled out a total of one billion U . S . dollars .

Naturally, Chen Chen could easily recoup the losses here with his other sources of income revenue . At the moment, Chen Chen’s bionic prosthetics had yet to receive the stamp of approval of the other countries, therefore, the operations for implanting the prosthetics and brain-machine interface could only be conducted in Eco Science City . In spite of that, it had ushered a new crowd to the gates of Eco Science City . Apart from the people who wanted to restore the glory of their youth, there were also disabled members .

The majority of the disabled community spread across the Earth were still observing from a distance .

After all, this was a brand new technology and without the endorsement of their respective countries, they could only wait and observe if there would be any negative feedback or news coming from the first batch of participants .

No matter how unreliable a technology proved to be, there would always be the first batch of lab rats at the end of the day .

Conversely, if the technology was proven to be as reliable as it claimed to be, news of it would spread sooner or later . There was still plenty of time to make a choice by then .

On the other end of things, Mark Dawson had not been able to complete the newly assigned task ever since designing the M-1 model drone .

A more accurate way of putting it would be that the prerequisite of the task created a major deadlock in the operation .

Back then, Chen Chen had hoped that he could manufacture the aircraft seen in Elysium . He specifically raised the issue with Mark Dawson: if he were to provide a sample of the aircraft, would it be possible to simplify its structure and create a replica?

At the time, Mark Dawson had told him: we would need a customized wind tunnel .

With that, Chen Chen promised that he would put together a large, customized wind tunnel for Mark Dawson to proceed with the research .

However, the materials needed for constructing the customized wind tunnel had given Chen Chen a resentful headache . He also lacked the experience of constructing a wind tunnel and had to resort to finding engineering experts from all across the world who were able to build one . The problem was that such treasured talents proved to be extremely difficult to acquire and Chen Chen’s search had not yielded any results even till now .

Still, it was no trouble . If he could not find the suitable talents for the job, the worst that could happen was that the construction of the wind tunnel would take longer, perhaps several years until completion . Chen Chen could afford the wait .

Moreover, Chen Chen had also birthed a new idea over this period – apart from compensating for his lack of maneuverability by using aircraft which eclipsed the current technological stage of the Earth Federation, he still had other options available to him .

For instance… Sci-fi movies that enabled human teleportation .

The Fly, Doom, Terminator, Gantz, and Star Trek .

These were the five movies that immediately came to mind .

In The Fly, the protagonist Brundle Seth had invented a space-time transmission device, which essentially enabled the seamless teleportation of an item from one point to another .

However, when he was experimenting on himself, something had gone terribly wrong . A fly flew into the experimental cabin which caused the gene of the protagonist Brundle and the fly to fuse . In the end, he turned into a gigantic human-sized fly… It was a horror movie .

Doom was adapted from a video game but the plot was different from its video game variation . It was set in the future when humans had migrated to Mars but they were met with a terrible virus exposure . A rescue team was dispatched and teleported over to Mars to help them . This was also a horror movie .

Terminator and Gantz were both similar and were more or less categorized as horror movies as well .

Four out of the five selected movies were horror movies . There were not many options left…