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“What did you bring us here for?” Wang asked. “To look at bugs.” Da Shi lit one of the cigars Colonel Stanton had given him and pointed at the wheat fields with it. Wang and Ding now noticed that the fields were covered by a layer of locusts. Every wheat stalk had a few crawling over it. On the ground, more locusts wriggled, like some thick liquid. “They’re plagued by locusts here?” Wang brushed away some locusts from a small area near the edge of the field and sat down. “Like the dust storms, they started ten years ago. But this year is the worst.” “So what? Nothing matters now, Da Shi.” Ding spoke, his voice still drunk. “I just want to ask the two of you one question: Is the technological gap between humans and Trisolarans greater than the one between locusts and humans?” The question hit the two scientists like a bucket of cold water. As they stared at the clumps of locusts before them, their expressions grew solemn. They got Shi Qiang’s point. * * * Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it … this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans. The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated. A small black cloud covered the sun and cast a moving shadow against the ground. This was not a common cloud, but a swarm of locusts that had just arrived. As the swarm landed in the fields nearby, the three men stood in the middle of a living shower, feeling the dignity of life on Earth. Ding Yi and Wang Miao poured the two bottles of wine they had with them on the ground beneath their feet, a toast for the bugs. “Da Shi, thank you.” Wang held out his hand. “I thank you as well.” Ding gripped Da Shi’s other hand. “Let’s get back,” Wang said. “There’s so much to do.”
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment. If you were an eighteen-year-old youth in a small village 5,000 years ago you’d probably think you were good-looking because there were only fifty other men in your village and most of them were either old, scarred and wrinkled, or still little kids. But if you are a teenager today you are a lot more likely to feel inadequate. Even if the other guys at school are an ugly lot, you don’t measure yourself against them but against the movie stars, athletes and supermodels you see all day on television, Facebook and giant billboards.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
Around 10,000 BC, before the transition to agriculture, earth was home to about 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), but their numbers were dwarfed by the world’s 250 million farmers.1...
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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