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It was inaccurate to say that the receipt of the extra-Trisolaran message had no influence on his life. After confirmation, Trisolaris would surely reduce the number of listening posts. And posts like this one, behind the times, would be among the first to be cut. Then he would be unemployed. A listener’s skills were very specialized, consisting only of some routine operations and maintenance. It would be very difficult to find another job. If he couldn’t find another job within five thousand Trisolaran hours, he would be forcibly dehydrated and then burnt. The only way to escape this fate was to mate with a member of the opposite sex. When that happened, the organic material making up their bodies would meld into one. Two-thirds of the material would then become fuel to power the biochemical reaction that would completely renew the cells in the remaining one-third and create a new body. Then this body would divide into three to five tiny new lives: their children. They would inherit some of the memories of their parents, continue their lives, and begin the cycle of life anew. But given the listener’s low social position, lonely and enclosed workspace, and advanced age, what member of the opposite sex would be interested in him? In the last few years, the listener had asked himself millions of times: Is this all there is to my life? And millions of times he had answered himself: Yes, this is all there is. All that you have in this life is the endless loneliness in the tiny space of this listening post. He couldn’t lose that paradise, even if it was only in a dream.
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
The sector that employs the vast majority of the population of a poor country cannot be underestimated.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities. Shortly after factories imposed their time frames on human behaviour, schools too adopted precise timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores. Even in places devoid of assembly lines and machines, the timetable became king. If the shift at the factory ends at 5 p.m., the local pub had better be open for business by 5:02.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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