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What happened next was the longest half hour of her life. During this time, Ye adjusted the transmission frequency to the optimal frequency for amplification by the solar energy mirror, and increased the transmission power to maximum. Then, putting her eyes to the eyepiece of the optical positioning system, she watched the sun rise above the horizon, activated the positioning system for the antenna, and slowly aligned it with the sun. As the gigantic antenna turned, the rumbling noise shook the main control room. One of the men on duty looked at Ye again, but said nothing. The sun was now completely above the horizon. The crosshair of the Red Coast positioning system was aimed at its upper edge to account for the time it would take for the radio wave to travel to the sun. The transmission system was ready. The Transmit button was a long rectangle—very similar to the Space key on a computer keyboard, except that it was red. Ye’s hand hovered two centimeters above it. The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers. Without hesitation, Ye pressed the button.
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
Then the being kneeling before the formation made a sound, a series of sounds that far exceeded the ant’s capacity to comprehend: “It’s a wonder to be alive. If you don’t understand that, how can you search for anything deeper?”
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
A fourth factor was the two-way link between the rise in human population density and the rise in food production. In all parts of the world where adequate evidence is available, archaeologists find evidence of rising densities associated with the appearance of food production. Which was the cause and which the result? This is a long-debated chicken-or-egg problem: did a rise in human population density force people to turn to food production, or did food production permit a rise in human population density? In principle, one expects the chain of causation to operate in both directions. As I’ve already discussed, food production tends to lead to increased population densities because it yields more edible calories per acre than does hunting-gathering. On the other hand, human population densities were gradually rising throughout the late Pleistocene anyway, thanks to improvements in human technology for collecting and processing wild foods. As population densities rose, food production became increasingly favored because it provided the increased food outputs needed to feed all those people. That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started. A gradual rise in population densities impelled people to obtain more food, by rewarding those who unconsciously took steps toward producing it. Once people began to produce food and become sedentary, they could shorten the birth spacing and produce still more people, requiring still more food. This bidirectional link between food production and population density explains the paradox that food production, while increasing the quantity of edible calories per acre, left the food producers less well nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded. That paradox developed because human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food. Taken together, these four factors help us understand why the transition to…
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
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