Final Ending

Alfred, seeing the puzzled expressions on everyone's faces, said indifferently, "I didn't know what that was either, until I looked up information later and found out that it's a scientific device placed a kilometer underground in the mines, containing fifty thousand tons of pure water and various cutting-edge observation instruments. It's a scientific instrument for detecting neutrinos, and in late January 2024, the researchers there reported that they might have found dark matter."

"Wait a minute," Ang immediately raised his hand and said, "Mr. Alfred, as far as I know, dark matter is still a hypothetical existence in theory, right? The known properties of dark matter include, first, besides gravity, dark matter basically doesn't interact with any other forces and hardly interacts with photons, and second, dark matter is highly stable, even considered to be non-decaying, non-decomposing, non-changing. These two points already suggest that dark matter is almost beyond the scope of our current scientific capabilities. It is essentially the dragon in the garage. Even if Super Kamiokande did capture dark matter, it would be impossible for them to detect it."

Alfred then gave a bitter smile and said, "Yes, that should be the case, but the researchers there discovered dark matter because of an accident and also found something that can interact with dark matter..."

"What is it?!" Ang immediately perked up and pressed on.

Alfred, recalling the memory, said, "In late January 2024, more than thirty ordinary Japanese citizens arranged to commit collective suicide in the wilderness, which happened to be near the Super Kamiokande detector. Then, for the first time, the researchers saw a soul, and we also learned for the first time that a soul, no, it should be said only the soul of an intelligent being, can interact with dark matter."

Alfred paused for a moment, waiting for everyone to absorb this information, and then said, "Do you realize how astonishing this discovery is? Setting aside dark matter for the moment, this itself is the discovery of the century. If it's true, it could propel stagnant science forward by a great leap. The key point is the soul. Do you know how many billionaires around the world are on the brink of death? Do you know how many leaders yearn for longevity or even immortality? Do you realize how much we all wish to know what the afterlife is truly like when we face the inevitability of death?"

"So, at the end of January 2024, we moved the entire Super Kamiokande detector intact back to America and placed it in a secret research facility underground in New York, where we conduct all sorts of research on dark matter and souls."

At this point, Alfred fell into a kind of reverie. After a long while, he suddenly asked, "Ladies and gentlemen, do you really believe that souls are meant to exist?"

Father Edward said, "Now there's evidence, so I have no reason to doubt."

Most of the rest nodded in agreement, but Ang looked carefully at Lu Yuanming before saying, "Personally, I find the existence of souls to be irrational. First of all, that we humans can think is because we have a brain as the carrier of thought. No matter where the concept of 'I' comes from, without the brain as this super biological calculator, we wouldn't even be capable of thinking. When we become souls, where is the carrier for our thoughts? And from where does the energy consumed by thinking come? It simply doesn't make sense."

Alfred then laughed and said, "What you're saying is exactly like what Dr. Tang Zhe'an said."

"Tang Zhe'an... are you referring to that super-genius in mathematics who made a brief appearance ten years ago, supposedly with an unprecedented IQ of 260? Didn't he die in a car accident?" Ang asked, puzzled.

Alfred's smile stiffened, and after a cough, he said, "Let's continue with the souls... Theoretically speaking, souls should not exist unless, at the moment of a person's death, all their information is reconstituted by an as-yet-undiscovered and undetectable fundamental particle, and this kind of particle cannot be just one type, but rather must be like the particle model of the material world we are familiar with. Only in this way can the theoretical concept of the soul become a reality..."

Ang thoughtfully said, "So when a person dies, their soul leaves the body and then transitions from the material world into the Dark Matter World, isn't that Dark Matter World essentially the afterlife?"

"No!"

Alfred chuckled coldly and said, "Through that piece of dark matter, we discovered that before January 2024, there was no dark matter on Earth! Everyone who died, just died, and even if souls existed, they would disappear in the instant of detachment, completely dissipating! Only by approaching within ten thousand meters of that piece of dark matter could souls emerge and enter the dark matter dimension."

People looked at each other, not understanding why Alfred was smiling coldly but looked afraid, and then Alfred spoke again, "And through the research on this piece of dark matter, we found that it's not so much interacting with souls as it is with consciousness, and thanks to the existence of dark matter, we even uncovered the source of the observer effect in quantum mechanics, unraveled the secrets of the double-slit experiment, etc. Meanwhile, many wealthy individuals who learned of this information began to secretly invest, hoping that their souls would emerge and enter the dark matter dimension after death... Everything was developing in a good direction, and it all took just one year. Just when we were planning to launch a grand scheme to make America great once again, the piece of dark matter expanded, and we found traces of dark matter in multiple places in New York, then across many places in America, and then across the world. At the same time, those things began to appear..."

Lu Yuanming immediately asked, "Is it curses? And those monsters that can't be killed?"

Alfred was silent for a long time before nodding, and then he suddenly asked, "You all must know about the Fermi Paradox, right?"

In the room, only Lu Yuanming, Ang, Father Edward, Doctor Keson, and Teacher Marsha nodded, while the others were completely clueless.

Lu Yuanming also said, "Where are they? Is that it?"

"Yes, that's it," Alfred responded blankly, "The universe has been born for such a long time, over thirteen billion years, and in that period, we humans took only a few hundred thousand years to reach a civilization capable of launching spacecraft. So why haven't the aliens who were born hundreds of millions or even billions of years before us come to Earth?"

"The answer has already emerged, because every intelligent civilization in its developmental process, as the number of deaths increases, more dark matter starts appearing on their planet. When a critical point is reached, the entire planet, as well as neighboring colonized planets or remnants of races attempting to flee on spaceships will all be dragged into the dark matter dimension by the resonance of souls."

"Moreover, this dragging includes all known matter being pulled in as well. I don't know if you have read 'The Three-Body Problem,' a sci-fi novel from China that I'm quite fond of, which describes an alien civilization's weapon named two-dimensional foil, capable of reducing three-dimensional worlds to two dimensions. This reduction is irreversible and will spread at the speed of light throughout the universe. Unfortunately, we have encountered the inevitable 'two-dimensional foil' of civilization, as the dark matter reduction caused by death is also spreading at the speed of light throughout the universe."

Everyone listened, stunned; even those who didn't understand science felt a chill, when Ang suddenly shouted, "Cosmic voids and supervoids!?"

Alfred paused, then nodded and said, "Yes, Dr. Tang Zhe'an indeed mentioned these terms."

Ang immediately explained to the still confused Lu Yuanming, "There are several hypotheses about how our universe was born, the most successful of which is the Big Bang. And according to any of those hypotheses, if the universe is naturally born, then stars and galaxies should naturally be distributed throughout the universe. While they might not be absolutely uniform, it's highly unlikely that we would see areas of absolute density and absolute voids. But in reality, our universe has many voids and so-called supervoids; I remember the largest being over a billion light-years of empty space, with not a single star within it. Such a situation is impossible unless..."

Lu Yuanming picked up where Ang left off, "Unless that space has already turned entirely into dark matter, right?"

Alfred waited until everyone fell silent, then said, "And this is the fate of human beings, human civilization, and the entire Earth, the Solar System, and the Galaxy: falling from the material world into the Dark Matter World, everything..."

"Disappears without a trace. Humanity dies, human civilization dies, and then... the universe dies along with it."