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in the past there were many more distinct peoples in the world, each of which had a smaller population and occupied less territory than today’s typical people. The land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, which today struggles to satisfy the ambitions of just two peoples, easily accommodated in biblical times dozens of nations, tribes, petty kingdoms and city states.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
What was once a system for raising money to grow a business is now an arbitrary high-tech system of fluctuating numbers. It is estimated by the World Bank that the global market capitalization (size of all publicly traded companies) is $69 trillion. The derivatives market, however, is an astounding $1.2 quadrillion.
WallStreetBets
Jaime Rogozinski
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
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