Chapter 78 - Sol Hundred, Starting from the Cambrian Period (2/2)

“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 .