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Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality. Children who made it through the perilous first years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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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