The Precursor knew that he was now the only one in the universe. He knew it when the spacecraft passed over Pluto, and from here, the Sun was a faint star, just like when he had flown out of the solar system thirty years earlier. But the parallax measurement just made by the spacecraft's computer told him that Pluto's orbit had shifted much outward, and from this it was possible to calculate that the Sun had lost 4 compared to when he set off. 74% mass, from which another conclusion can be deduced that made his heart tremble and then freeze.

It's already happened.

In fact, by the time he set off, humans already knew that was going to happen, and by launching tens of thousands of probes through the sun, astrophysicists determined that the sun was going to have a brief blink of energy and lose about 5% of its mass.

If the sun had a memory, it wouldn't be upset by it, having experienced much greater changes over billions of years. When it was born from the vortex of the nebula, the dramatic changes in its life measured in milliseconds, and in that glorious moment, the collapse of gravity caused the flames of nuclear fusion to illuminate the darkness of the nebula bastard...... It knows that its life is a process, and although it is now in the most stable period of this process, occasional, small mutations are always inevitable, like a small bubble on calm water that rises and bursts from time to time. The loss of energy and mass is nothing, it's still it, a medium-sized star with an apparent magnitude of -26. 8 of stars. Even the rest of the solar system will not be affected too much, Mercury may be melted, the dense atmosphere of Venus will be stripped away, the outer planets will be less affected, the color of Mars may change from red to black due to the melting of the surface, the Earth, but the surface temperature will rise to 4000 degrees, which may last for about 100 hours, the oceans will definitely evaporate, and the rocks on the surface of the continents will melt a layer, but that's all. In the future, the sun will soon return to its original state, but due to the loss of mass, the orbits of the planets will move back slightly, which will have a smaller effect, such as the Earth, where the temperature may drop slightly, to an average of about -110 degrees Celsius, which will help the molten surface to re-condense and allow some water and atmosphere to remain.

There was a joke about a man's conversation with God: God, how short 10,000 years is for you! God said, "Just for a second." God, how little 100 million is for you! And God said, "Just a penny." God, give me a penny! God said, "Wait a second."

Now, the sun has made humans wait "a second": the predicted time of energy flickering will be 18,000 years later.

This is indeed only a second for the sun, but it can make the human beings currently living on Earth adopt a detached attitude, even a philosophical concept, towards what will happen "in one second". The impact is not without it, and human culture is becoming cynical day by day, but human beings still have at least four or five hundred generations to calmly think of ways to escape.

Two centuries later, humanity took its first action: the launch of a starship to search for stars with immigrating planets within 100 light-years of the planet. The spacecraft was named the Ark, and the astronauts were called the Forerunners.

The Ark has passed sixty stars, and it has also passed sixty hells. One of the stars has a moon, which is a drop of molten iron in an incandescent state with a diameter of 8,000 kilometers, which is constantly changing shape in its orbit because it is in a liquid state...... The only result of the Ark's trip was a further demonstration of human loneliness.

The Ark sailed for twenty-three years, but this was "Ark Time", and since the ship was traveling at nearly the speed of light, Earth time had passed twenty-five thousand years.

Originally, the Ark could have returned at the scheduled time.

Since it is impossible to communicate with the Earth at close to the speed of light, the speed must be reduced to less than half the speed of light, which requires a lot of energy and time. Therefore, the Ark usually slows down once a month to receive information from the Earth, and when it slows down the next time, it will receive a message from the Earth more than a hundred years later. The time between the Ark and the Earth is like looking at a target from a high-powered scope, and with a slight movement of the scope, the target in the mirror spans a huge distance. The last message the Ark received was sent from Earth 13 years after the start of the "Ark Time" and 17,000 years since the start of the Earth Time, and the Ark slowed down again a month later to find that the direction of the Earth had fallen silent. More than 10,000 years ago, there may have been a slight error in the calculation of the sun, but that happened in the month of the Ark, more than 100 years on Earth.

The Ark has really become an ark, but it is already an ark with only Noah. Of the other seven Precursors, four died from radiation from a nova that suddenly erupted four light-years from the spacecraft, two died of illness, and one (a man) shot himself while listening to the silence in the direction of Earth during the last slowdown communication.

Later, the only forerunner kept the Ark at communicable speed for a long time, and then he accelerated the ship to the speed of light, and the faint flame of hope in his heart caused him to quickly slow down and listen, and the return journey was delayed as the deceleration became more and more frequent.

The silence continued.

The Ark returned to the solar system 25,000 years after its departure in Earth time, 9,000 years later than scheduled.