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Indeed, there was an easy way to ascertain the distance of the transmission source. Just respond to the message, and if the other party replies quickly to the response, the Trisolarans could determine the distance based on the round-trip time and the speed of light. Or maybe they would take a really long time to reply and cause the Trisolarans to be unable to determine how long the message was en route. But the question was: Would the other party reply? Since this source had actively sent out a call into the universe, it was very likely that they would reply after getting a response from Trisolaris. And the listener was sure that the Trisolaran government had already given the order to send a message to that distant world to lure them to respond. Maybe the message had already been sent, but maybe not. If the latter was true, then the listener had a singular chance to make his own humble life glow. The listener dashed in front of the operations screen and composed a short, simple message on the computer. He directed the computer to translate the message into the same language as the message received from the Earth. Then, he pointed the listening post’s antenna in the direction the message from Earth had come from. The Transmit button was a red rectangle. The listener’s fingers hovered above it. The fate of Trisolaran civilization was now tied to these slender fingers. Without hesitation, the listener pressed the button. A high-powered radio wave carried that short message, a message that could save another civilization, into the darkness of space. Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
On 15 September 1830, the first commercial railway line was opened, connecting Liverpool with Manchester. The trains moved under the same steam power that had previously pumped water and moved textile looms. A mere twenty years later, Britain had tens of thousands of miles of railway tracks.1 Henceforth, people became obsessed with the idea that machines and engines could be used to convert one type of energy into another. Any type of energy, anywhere in the world, might be harnessed to whatever need we had, if we could just invent the right machine. For example, when physicists realised that an immense amount of energy is stored within atoms, they immediately started thinking about how this energy could be released and used to make electricity, power submarines and annihilate cities. Six hundred years passed between the moment Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder and the moment Turkish cannon pulverised the walls of Constantinople. Only forty years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy – that’s what E = mc2 means – and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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