Dead on Mars

Chapter 78 - Sol Hundred, Starting from the Cambrian Period
“It’s true, I don’t remember, but you do.” Tang Yue said. “With you around, you can help.”

Tomcat kept one eye open while the other remained close.

“You wish to get my help?”

Tang Yue nodded.

“Call me daddy.” Tomcat hooked its paw.

Tang Yue frowned. “Call you what?”

“Daddy.”

“Good son.”

…

“What the two of you wish to do is an unprecedented endeavor that will never be matched even in the future. In ancient times, history offices needed decades just to chronicle the previous dynasty. And both of you wish to chronicle all of human civilization.” Tomcat yawned as its ears twitched. “Civilization is an ill-defined concept. It covers history, culture, technology, art, and everything you created as well as everything that created you. If you write down the entirety of human civilization’s development process into the book, I believe that book will be thick enough to circle Mars several times.”

Tang Yue was somewhat alarmed. He knew that it would be a massive endeavor, but he never expected it to be that scale.

He didn’t have much knowledge about history, to begin with. Most came from his history textbooks in high school, and in history textbooks, spanning centuries was covered in just a few pages. Even the first emperor of China, Qin Shihuang, appeared only a handful of times.

“The researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences spend their entire lives researching a tiny slice of history, and that’s without any guarantees of them figuring out anything. What makes you think you can chronicle all of human civilization?” Tomcat scoffed. “Do you know the difference between Roosevelt and Roosevelt Jr.?”

“Simplify it a little. We can simplify it a little.” Tang Yue compromised. He did lack the capabilities needed to chronicle all of human civilization. If he made a mistake with Emperor Wu of Han’s date of birth and death, he wondered if this particular Mr. Liu Che would travel hundreds of millions of kilometers to Mars to make a protest.

“We can start with a framework based on time, just like a chronicle. Then, we can slowly fill in the details, and develop as we go,” Tang Yue said. “Peking Man, Yuanmou Man… We should start with the Neanderthals?”

“Why don’t you just start from the Cambrian Period?” Tomcat scoffed. “Why not start from the hallucigenia?”

“Great idea!” Tang Yue clapped. “Earth is gone. We should biographize Earth’s history.”

“Biographize my ass… Do you know what it means to do things within your means?” Tomcat opened his eyes, waved his claws, and felt a little exasperated. “Are you going to start from the Cambrian period to the Ordovician period, to the Silurian period, to the Devonian period, to the Carboniferous period, to the Permian period, to the Triassic period, to the Jurassic period, to the Cretaceous period, to the Paleogene period, to the Neogene period, all the way to the Quaternary period? Do you have a lifespan longer than Peng Zu 1 ?”

“We can simplify it a little. Simplify it a little,” Tang Yue said with resent. “For example, we can describe the Jurassic period as a period when reptiles flourished. On the massive continent lived… lived…”

Tang Yue realized he had nearly zero knowledge about ancient creatures. He couldn’t even remember the names of any dinosaurs.

“… lived the Plateosaurus!”

Tang Yue finally recalled a name.

Tomcat silently held its forehead.

“The Plateosaurus is a creature from the Triassic period.”

“In the Jurassic period, the supercontinent began to break up. Gymnosperms reached their peak development, and there were plenty of reptiles. Among them, Ornithischia and Saurischia dinosaurs had the greatest development. Ornithischia dinosaurs included the Stegosaurus, while the Saurischia dinosaurs included the Allosaurus, Camarasaurus, and Brontosaurus.” Mai Dong’s voice sounded over the comms as she gave a lively laugh. “Would that be fine?”

“Bingo!” Tang Yue snapped his fingers. “Perfect, lady! That would do! That’s it, we shall begin from the Cambrian period!”

Tomcat silently facepalmed.

It didn’t dare make the sarcastic remark, “Why don’t you start from the Big Bang?”

It was very likely that this clueless idiot would just smack his head and really begin from the Big Bang.

Clearly, just Tang Yue and Mai Dong were insufficient to complete this endeavor. Therefore, the one who would truly end up with all the troubles was Tomcat. It didn’t wish to make things worse for itself.

“Alright, alright. You can start wherever you wish to start from.” Tomcat sighed. “But what are you going to use to record? Paper? Hard disks? Or carving it on a rock?”

Kunlun Station had lots of paper which Max had brought to solve Goldbach’s conjecture, but after Max got engrossed with The Elder Scrolls, this grand goal was thrown to the back of his mind.

“We can’t use paper. The density of information it can contain is too little. It has too low a capacity.” Tang Yue shook his head. “We don’t have that much paper or pens, much less that much manpower.”

Using paper to record Earth’s history was unimaginable. The efficiency of handwriting records was just too low. In the era before the printing press was created, books and cultural transmission was done by professional scribes. Those people worked late-nights for months to write. Finally, that pitiful amount produced became the exclusive collections of the aristocracy.

Using the capacity of hard disks was viable as Kunlun Station didn’t lack hard disks. There were hard disks with tens or hundreds of terabytes of storage. A Chinese character only took two bytes of space, and each letter in the alphabet took a byte of space. If it was all used to store text, the hard disk’s storage would be enough to store all the books in human history.

With just Tang Yue and Mai Dong alone, there was no need to worry about having a lack of hard disk space.

“How long can the information on hard disks be preserved?” Mai Dong asked.

“It’s hard to tell. The harsh environment on Mars will greatly degrade the lifespan of a hard disk. The particles in solid-state drives that are used to store data are prone to damage. Mechanical hard drives have slightly longer lifespans, but they won’t last past a century.” Tomcat shook its head. “Even if you were to record the information on a hard disk, where would you store them?”

“The best environment on Mars is here.” Tomcat pointed down. “Kunlun Station’s lifespan is longer than both of yours, but once you are dead, it won’t survive long due to the lack of maintenance. It will last for at most fifty years, and by then it will be in complete ruins. And a century later, the information left on the hard disks would have been damaged and lost.”

Tang Yue and Mai Dong fell into a thoughtful silence.

In a certain way, they were writing an epitaph for human civilization. An epitaph was engraved on tombstones for people from the future to see. It needed to be preserved, so even if the coffin and remains in the grave had rotted and reduced to soil, their names would still be known to others.

It was why Tang Yue wished to record something and store it for as long as possible.

Paper and hard disks weren’t viable options.

As for engraving it on stone, that was indeed a romantic idea.

If he had the conditions, Tang Yue wished to use the entire Martian surface like paper, using an excavator and tractor convoy to engrave words on Mars, so that the entire Solar System could see it.

But Tang Yue only had a soup-spoon-like shovel on hand.

At best, he could engrave his name on the rock.

However, Lu Xun 1 once said, “The one who engraves his own name in rock, will see their name rot faster than a corpse.”

Lu Xun: … I didn’t say 1 that. It’s by Zang Kejia 2 .