Hearing the engineer's assessment, Jason felt a massive headache coming on. How had an astronomical observation problem suddenly morphed into a supercomputing crisis? He acutely felt the intricate, tangled web of modern scientific disciplines, and the suffocating limitations of humanity's current depth of knowledge. These limitations seemed to plague them at every turn.
The path of scientific development is never a straight, broad highway; rather, it is a complex, sprawling network of overlapping trails. Mathematics is the absolute foundation, branching out into physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, which then splinter into thousands of hyper-specialized sub-fields.
Because the Federation's population was so small, many seemingly niche scientific fields were simply abandoned due to a lack of manpower. It was a tragic reality. Millions of research papers sat untouched in the Noah's databanks, quietly waiting for someone with the right background and the free time to discover them.
