Eight hours of outdoor activity, a long and time-consuming extravehicular mission rarely seen since the establishment of Cassini Station, Liang Jing and Jiang Zi stopped as they drove by Napoleon's pit in their walking car, and they planned to pass through here and come down to have a look, because it was in this pit that the black ball was found.

The Napoleonic crater is not really a large crater visible to the naked eye, it was discovered by remote sensing satellites in low orbit, multispectral satellites found this crater during stratigraphic scanning, buried four or five meters deep underground, it was born from a violent impact 400 million years ago, when no culprit was found, and now Liang Jing is inclined to believe that the crater was hit by a black ball - at least the black ball was part of the impactor.

Liang Jing once suspected that the black ball was some kind of mechanical part, which was scattered in the impact and left on the surface, while the real big guy was deeper.

"That's where the black ball was found." Liang Jing squatted on the edge of the excavation pit and pointed to the bottom of the pit, the excavation pit has a depth of six or seven meters, like a big bowl.

Jiang Zi jumped into the pit, the sloping pit wall was nearly forty-five degrees, and he slid down as if he were skating, stopping at the bottom of the pit.

Jiangzi looked around, the walls of the pit were frozen soil and ice, the soil on Titan was completely different from the earth's minerals, the earth's soil contained most of the macroelements and organic matter, which was the result of the combined action of the environment and biology, but the lack of ecology on the Titan, and the lack of oxygen and silicon elements common on the earth, so the soil here was dry, compacted, and without the slightest vitality.

Jiang Zi raised his head and looked up at Liang Jing, who was squatting on the edge of the pit, whose light was very conspicuous in the thick fog, with slowly rising pit walls on all sides, and the ice and soil pressed together in layers like a mille-feuille, with different colors in different ages.

"The Napoleon Pit is a very good, very standard sample." Liang Jing said, "You see under your feet, each layer of permafrost represents a geological age, just like a dictionary, this is the history book of Titan, nature has always been the most honest and objective recorder, we can open this history book to find what happened to this satellite in the past hundreds of millions of years." ”

"Is this what geologists do?"

"Not only."

"Where are the black balls?" Jiang Zi asked.

"Four hundred million years ago." Liang Jing replied, "I have done simulations with Dabai before, and if I want to hit such a large crater, the more reasonable mass and volume of the impacted object should be the size of a ten-axle truck." ”

"But the mass of that ball was less than three kilograms." Jiang Zi said, "You mean there are other things in the pit?" ”

"Yes, I was so skeptical." Liang Jing also jumped down from the edge of the excavation pit, slid down the pit wall, and finally stopped steadily beside Jiang Zi, "The black ball may be part of something, its main body has not been dug up yet, this thing has a lot of mass, so the kinetic energy is very large, it hit very deeply, and it is still buried somewhere under our feet." ”

Jiang Zi thought for a moment.

"Alien spaceship? Got into a car accident 400 million years ago and fell here? So what is the black ball? Bearing balls? ”

"God knows." Liang Jing said, "Think about the heartbeat we found yesterday. ”

"I see!" Jiang Zi slammed his fist into the palm of his hand, "That heartbeat must be the creature that collided with it 400 million years ago, and it is most likely a certain type of life wandering around in space, pounced on it when it found a planet, and then multiplied here." ”

"And what is this black ball?" Liang Jing asked.

"The monster's eyeballs." Jiang Zi was babbling nonsense, and he casually dug the broken soil under his feet, "When I hit it, I was blind in one eye, and the eyeball fell out, so it's a one-eyed dragon now!" ”

Liang Jing was amused, and the two began to walk back from the bottom of the pit, bending over and using all fours together.

"Hey, Liang Gong, do you know what my biggest feeling is right now?"

"What?" Liang Jing walked in front and turned his head.

"I'm so ignorant, I should say that we're all too ignorant, we don't understand what we see, and we can't understand what we want." Jiang Zi walked behind, "When I was in the orbit of Mars, I thought that human beings were the masters of the solar system, so many space stations, space elevators, and solar arrays around Mercury orbit, if you want to say that it is not awesome, it is false, but as soon as we get out of the orbit of Mars, and then look back, it turns out that no matter how awesome we are, we are only awesome in a place as big as sesame mung beans." ”

"We're all a little inflated." Jiang Zi continued, "I think I can do everything, but in fact I am just the king in the shell. ”

"I didn't swell, I used to be one hundred and forty pounds, and now I am still one hundred and forty pounds." Liang Jing said, "If you want to say that the expansion is also the stationmaster, you have swelled, I heard that you were 150 pounds last year, but this year you are 160 pounds, and you have swelled by 7 percent." ”

"Hey, who's telling you I'm one hundred and sixty pounds now? I'm only one hundred and fifty-nine pounds! ”

"Cognition is a circle, so the more you know, the more you don't know." Liang Jing climbed onto the edge of the pit, turned around and pulled Jiang Zi, "Stationmaster, are you an agnostic?" ”

"What kind of person are you referring to as agnostic?" Jiang Zi took his hand and climbed up hard.

"There will always be something in this world that we cannot discover, and there will never be an end to the search for knowledge and truth." Liang Jing replied, "No matter how long human beings can survive, they will never be able to become God." ”

"That's the ultimate proposition." Jiang Zi thought for a moment, "What's the difference between your question and 'where are we going?'" But I just suddenly thought of a very interesting question, Liang Gong, didn't you say that cognition is a circle or a ball? The larger the volume of this ball, the larger the surface area, and the more unknowns it encounters, so will there be a needle in the vast and boundless unknown world? ”

Liang Jing was stunned.

"A needle?"

"Yes, a needle, that is, something that is completely out of the reach of humans." Jiang Zi explained, "Once our ball of cognition swells to the point where it touches it, it will be pierced by this needle, and human cognition and worldview will be completely destroyed at this moment. ”

"This kind of thing is not uncommon in history." Liang Jing said, "In the past few thousand years, our worldview has been gradually perfected through destruction and reconstruction again and again, and the black ball we find or the heartbeat may be the beginning of the next destruction and reconstruction...... In the face-to-face battle with the Old Gods, a single person may go crazy, but the human community does not, as a materialist, I firmly believe that the search for knowledge and truth is endless, but there can be no problem, and human beings cannot solve it with infinite energy and time. ”

"Old Gods?" Jiang Zi was curious about the word.

Liang Jing opened the door of the walking car, turned around and pointed to the top of his head, "Universe." ”