Die on Mars

"I really can't remember it, but can't you remember it?" Tang Yue said, "As long as you are here, you can help."

The old cat has one eye open and one eye closed.

"Want me to help?"

Tang Yue nodded.

"Call daddy." The old cat raised its paws.

Tang Yue frowned, "What's your name?"

"dad."

"Why."

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"The work you want to do is a huge project that has never been done before or since. It would take decades for ancient historians to compile history just for the sake of previous dynasties, but you want to record the entire human civilization." Lao Mao said. Yawning, his ears twitched, "Civilization is an overly complex concept. It covers history, culture, technology, art, everything you create, and everything that creates you. If the entire development process of human civilization is written down, In the book, I think the book was so thick it could have circled Mars several times.”

Tang Yue was a little surprised. He knew that this project was huge, but he didn't expect it to be so huge.

He had no idea about history. Tang Yue's understanding of history mainly came from high school history textbooks. Hundreds of years in history textbooks are only a few pages. The name of Qin Shihuang, the emperor of the ages, appears only a handful of times. number.

"Researchers from the Academy of Social Sciences spend their whole lives studying a small period of history, but they may not be able to understand it. How can you write a book and biography for all mankind?" The old cat sneered, "Old Roosevelt and Little Roosevelt, you Can you tell the difference clearly?"

"Keep it simple, we can keep it simple." Tang Yue made a concession. Considering his own conditions, he really did not have the ability to record the entire human civilization. If he accidentally got the birth and death years of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty wrong, Liu Che would not know. If my husband has a soul in heaven, will he chase him to Mars, a hundred million kilometers away, to protest against him?

"We can first make a framework in chronological order, just like a chronicle, and then slowly fill in the content wherever it goes." Tang Yue continued, "People from Beijing who are from Yuanmou...should be from Nepal." Ender starts?”

"Why don't you start from the Cambrian period?" The old cat snorted, "Start from the grotesque bug."

"Good idea!" Tang Yue clapped his hands, "The earth has disappeared, we should also write down the history of the earth."

"As your uncle... do you know what it means to act within your ability?" The old cat opened his eyes and waved his paws, a little helpless, "You have to start from the Cambrian Ordovician Silurian Devonian Carboniferous Permian The Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene and Neogene are recorded all the way to the Quaternary? Do you live longer than Peng Zu?"

"We can be a little simpler, a little simpler." Tang Yue said bitterly, "For example, we can record it like this: The Jurassic Period was the most prosperous period of reptiles in the Mesozoic Era, and people lived... lived... on the vast continent..."

Tang Yue found that he had no research on paleontology. He couldn't even remember the names of several dinosaurs.

“There live Plateosaurus!”

Tang Yue finally remembered a name.

The old cat held his forehead silently.

"Elatesaurus is a Triassic species."

“In the Jurassic period, the supercontinent began to break up, the development of gymnosperms reached its peak, and there were many types of reptiles. Among them, ornithischian and saurischian dinosaurs developed and expanded. Ornithischian dinosaurs included Stegosaurus, and sauropod dinosaurs included Allosaurus. , Camarasaurus and Brontosaurus." Maidong's voice sounded on the channel, and the girl laughed hard, "Is that okay?"

"Bingo!" Tang Yue snapped his fingers, "You're so perfect, girl! That's all you need to say! That's it, let's start from the Cambrian Period!"

The old cat covered his face silently.

It no longer dares to say, “Why don’t you start with the Big Bang?”

Because this idiot who knows nothing about the world is really likely to start in Bigbang with just a slap on the forehead.

Obviously, it is impossible for Tang Yue and Maidong to realize this idea alone, so in the end it is Lao Mao who is really in trouble, and Lao Mao does not want to make himself uncomfortable.

"Okay, okay, you can start wherever you want." Old Cat sighed, "But what are you going to use to record? Use paper? Use a hard drive? Or carve the words on stone?"

There is a large pile of draft paper in Kunlun Station, which Lao Mai brought to conquer Goldbach's conjecture. But later, Lao Mai became addicted to the Elder Scrolls and couldn't help himself, and this lofty ambition was thrown out of the window.

"We can't use paper. The information density is too low and the capacity is too small." Tang Yue shook his head, "We don't have that much paper, that many pens, and we don't have that many manpower."

It is unimaginable to use manuscript paper to record the history of the earth. The efficiency of manual manual recording is too low. In the era before the advent of printing, the spread of books and culture was through the hands of professional scribes. Those people stayed up all night transcribing text. After working continuously for several months, the poor output in the end still made the books exclusive to the nobility.

It may be possible to use hard disks in terms of capacity. There is no shortage of hard disks in Kunlun Station. There are many hard disks with dozens or hundreds of TB. One Chinese character only takes up two bytes of space, and one letter only takes up one byte of space. If All used to store text information, these hard drives have enough space to hold all the books in human history.

With just Tang Yue and Maidong alone, there is no need to worry about insufficient hard drive space.

"How long can the information on the hard disk be saved?" Maidong asked.

"It's hard to say. The harsh environment on Mars will greatly shorten the life of the hard drive. Solid-state drives using storage particles are easier to damage. Mechanical hard drives have a slightly longer life, but they won't survive a hundred years." Old Cat shook his head. , "Even if you record the information on the hard drive, where can the hard drive be saved?"

"This is the place with the best environmental conditions on Mars." Old Mao pointed to his feet, "Kunlun Station has a longer lifespan than you, but after you die, it will not survive for too long without maintenance. At most In fifty years, Kunlun Station will be completely abandoned, and in a hundred years, the information and data you have engraved on the hard drive will be damaged and lost."

Tang Yue and Maidong were both deep in thought.

In a sense, they are writing an epitaph for human civilization. The epitaph is engraved on the tombstone for future generations to see. It must be preserved for a long time, even if the bones in the coffin in the tomb have rotted and turned into soil. , but his name and deeds are still known to people.

Therefore, Tang Yue hopes that what he describes can be preserved for as long as possible.

Neither paper nor hard drives will work.

As for carving words on stone, this is indeed a romantic idea.

If possible, Tang Yue would also like to use the entire surface of Mars as a paper surface, and bring a vast fleet of excavators and forklifts to carve words on Mars so that the entire solar system can see them.

But Tang Yue only had a spoon-like shovel in his hand.

The most he can do is carve his name in stone.

But Mr. Lu Xun once said - the names of those who carve their names into stone will rot earlier than the corpse.

Mr. Lu Xun: ...I never said this, Zang Ke’s family said it.