"I really can't remember, but can't you?" Tang Yue said. "With you here, you can help."
Old Cat had one eye open and the other closed.
"You want me to help?"
Tang Yue nodded.
"Call me Dad." Old Cat hooked its paw.
Tang Yue frowned. "Call me what?"
"Dad."
"Aye."
·
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"What you're going to do is a massive project that has never been done before and will never be done in the future. Even the ancient historians only wrote about the previous dynasty, and it took them decades. But you're going to record the entire human civilization."
Old Cat yawned and its two ears twitched. "Civilization is a concept that is too complicated. It covers history, culture, technology, art, everything you have created and everything that created you. If the development of the entire human civilization was written in a book, I think that book would be thick enough to circle 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 didn't have much of an understanding of history to begin with. Tang Yue's knowledge of history mainly came from his high school history textbooks. In history textbooks, there were only a few pages that spanned centuries. The number of times a monarch like Qin Shi Huang appeared could be counted on one hand.
"The researchers of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences spend their whole lives studying a dynasty. They might not even understand it. What makes you think you can write a book for the entire human race?" Old Cat sneered. "Can you tell the difference between Roosevelt and Roosevelt?"
"Make it simpler. We can make it simpler."
Tang Yue made a concession. Due to his own conditions, he really didn't have the ability to record the entire human civilization. If he accidentally got the birth and death years of Emperor Wu of Han wrong, he didn't know if Mr. Liu Che would chase him to Mars, a hundred million kilometers away, to protest.
"We can first come up with a framework in chronological order, just like a chronicle. Then, we can slowly fill in the content and leave it as it is," Tang Yue continued. "Starting with Peking Man and Yuanmou Man … Should we start with the Neanderthals?"
"Why don't you start with the Cambrian?" The Old Cat snorted. "Start with the Grotesque Worms."
"Good idea!" Tang Yue clapped. "Earth has disappeared, so we should also write a history of Earth."
"Screw you … Don't you know what it means to act within your means?"
Old Cat opened its eyes and waved its paw, feeling a little helpless. "You want to record from the Cambrian to the Ordovician to the Silurian to the Devonian to the Carboniferous to the Permian to the Triassic to the Jurassic to the Cretaceous to the Paleogene to the Neogene all the way to the Quaternary?
Is your lifespan longer than Peng Zu? "
"We can simplify it a little, just a little."
Tang Yue said bitterly, "For example, we can record this: The Jurassic was the most prosperous period of reptiles in the Mesozoic. On the vast continent lived … lived …"
Tang Yue realized that he didn't know much about paleontology, and he couldn't even remember the names of a few dinosaurs.
"Lived Elasmosaurus!"
Tang Yue finally remembered a name.
Old Cat silently held its forehead.
"Elasmosaurus is a species from the Triassic."
"During the Jurassic, the supercontinent began to split, and the development of gymnosperms reached its peak, and there were many types of reptiles. Among them, the ornithischian and saurischian dinosaurs developed and grew stronger. The ornithischian dinosaurs included Stegosaurus, and the saurischian dinosaurs included Allosaurus, Domosaurus, and Brontosaurus." Mai Dong's voice sounded in the channel, and the girl laughed crisply. "Is that okay?"
"Bingo!" Tang Yue snapped his fingers. "That's perfect girl!
That's it!
It's settled, we'll start from the Cambrian! "
Old Cat silently covered its face.
It didn't dare to say, "Why don't you start from the Big Bang?"
Because this idiot who didn't know the immensity of heaven and earth might really start with Big Bang.
Obviously, Tang Yue and Mai Dong alone couldn't complete this idea, so in the end, the one who would have to trouble was Old Cat. Old Cat didn't want to make things difficult for himself.
"Okay, okay, you can start from wherever you want." Old Cat sighed. "But what are you going to use to record?
Paper?
Hard disk?
Or carve the words on stone? "
There was a large stack of draft paper in Kunlun Station, which was brought by Old Mai to solve Goldbach's conjecture. But later, Old Mai became addicted to the ancient scrolls, and this 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, or that many pens, and we don't have that many people."
It was unimaginable to use draft paper to record Earth's history. The efficiency of manual recording was too low. In the era before printing, the transmission of books and culture was done by professional scribes. Those people would stay up all night to transcribe the words, working continuously for months. In the end, the pitiful output still made books exclusive to the nobles.
It might be possible to use a hard disk. Kunlun Station didn't lack hard disks. There were dozens of hundreds of terabytes of hard disks. A Chinese character only took up two bytes of space, and a letter only took up one byte of space. If they were all used to store text information, the hard disk space was enough to store all the books in human history.
With only Tang Yue and Mai Dong, there was no need to worry about the hard disk space.
"How long can the information on the hard disk be stored?" Mai Dong asked.
"It's hard to say. The harsh environment on Mars will greatly reduce the lifespan of the hard disk. The solid state hard disk used to store particles is more prone to damage. The lifespan of a mechanical hard disk is slightly longer, but it won't last more than a hundred years."
Old Cat shook his head. "Even if you record the information on the hard disk, where can the hard disk be stored?"
"This is the place with the best environmental conditions on Mars."
Old Cat pointed at his feet. "Kunlun Station's lifespan is longer than yours, but after you die, it won't last long without maintenance. At most, in fifty years, Kunlun Station will be completely abandoned, and in a hundred years, the information you engraved on the hard disk will be damaged and lost."
Tang Yue and Mai Dong fell into deep thought.
In a sense, they were writing an epitaph for human civilization. The epitaph was engraved on the tombstone for future generations to see. It had to be preserved for a long time. Even if the coffin and bones in the tomb had rotted and turned into soil, their names and deeds would still be known by people.
Therefore, Tang Yue hoped that the things he recorded could be preserved for as long as possible.
Paper and hard disk were not feasible.
As for engraving the words on the stone, this was indeed a romantic idea.
If possible, Tang Yue also wanted to use the entire surface of Mars as a piece of paper. He would lead a mighty army of excavators and forklifts to engrave the words on Mars so that the entire solar system could see it.
However, Tang Yue only had a shovel in his hand that looked like a soup spoon.
The most he could do was to engrave his name on the stone.
However, Mr. Lu Xun said that if the name was engraved on the stone, the name would rot faster than the corpse.
Mr. Lu Xun: … I didn't say that. Zang Kejia said it.