"In the 17,000 years before the cataclysm, humanity tried its best to escape, the easiest of which was interstellar migration, but none of the Ark ships, including yours, found a star with habitable planets. Even if it is found, with the astronautical technology of mankind a century before the cataclysm, even one thousandth of humanity will not be able to immigrate. Another idea is to move deep into the stratum and escape the flickering of the sun's energy before coming out. This is just a process of prolonging death, and after the catastrophe, the earth's ecosystem will be completely destroyed and will not be able to feed human beings.

"There was a time when people were almost desperate. But a spark flashed through the mind of a genetic engineer: What if humanity were reduced by a billion times? In this way, the scale of human society has also been reduced by a billion times, and as long as there is a very small ecosystem, it can survive with very small resources. Soon all mankind realized that this was the only feasible way to save human civilization. The idea is based on two technologies, one of which is genetic engineering, in which human genes would shrink to about 10 microns, the size of a cell, but the structure of their bodies would remain completely unchanged. It is entirely possible to do this, and there is not much difference between the genes of humans and bacteria; The other is nanotechnology, a technology that was developed in the twentieth century, when it was possible to build bacteria-sized generators, and then people could build everything from rockets to microwave ovens at the nanoscale, but those nanoengineers never dreamed of the end use of their products.

"Raising the first micro-humans is akin to cloning: taking all the genetic information from a human cell and then creating micro-humans that are exactly the same as the subject, but only two-billionths the size of the subject. From now on, they will have offspring just like the macro people (as the micro people call you, and they also call your era the macro era).

"The appearance of the first micro-humans is very dramatic, one day, about 12,500 years after your spaceship set sail, there is a classroom on TV all over the world, there are thirty children in the classroom, the picture is extremely ordinary, the children are ordinary children, the classroom is an ordinary classroom, there is nothing special to see. But the camera pulled away, and it was discovered that the classroom was photographed under a microscope......"

"I would like to ask," interrupted the Supreme Archon, "can the intelligence of a macroman be attained with a tiny brain like a microman?" ”

"So you think I'm a fool? Whales aren't smarter than you either! Intelligence is not determined by the size of the brain, and the information processing power of the microhuman brain is as more than sufficient in terms of the number of origins and the number of their quantum states...... Well, can you please take us to the big ship? ”

"Of course, it's a pleasure, but ...... How to get there? ”

"Please wait for us a moment!"

So the Supreme Archon jumped into mid-air a strange flying machine, which resembled a large feather with a propeller. Then, everyone else in the square also scrambled to jump up the "feather". There seemed to be no hierarchy at all in this society, and those who jumped up randomly from the sea of people were certainly ordinary commoners, old and young, but all of them were childish and noisy with excitement like the supreme consul's girl. This "feather" was soon crowded with people, and new "feathers" kept appearing in the air, and as soon as each piece appeared, it was immediately crowded with people who jumped up. Finally, hundreds of "feathers" full of micro-humans floated in the sky of the city, and they flew in one direction under the leadership of the feathers of the Supreme Archon.

The Precursor crouched over the transparent hemisphere again, carefully observing the micro-city within. This time, he could make out the skyscrapers, which looked like a dense patch of upright matchsticks. The forerunners exhausted their eyesight, and finally discerned the feather-like vehicles, which were like tiny white particles floating in a glass of clear water, and they could not be distinguished if it were not a group of hundreds. It is impossible to see people with the naked eye.

In the left lens of the Forerunner video glasses, the footage taken by a micro-human videographer with an unimaginably small camera is still very clear, and now the cameraman is also on a "feather". The forerunners found that in the traffic of micro-cities, collisions are a thing that happens all the time. From time to time, the fast-flying "feathers" bumped into each other, crashed into huge dust particles floating in the air, and even crashed head-on into towering skyscrapers from time to time! But the craft and its occupants were unharmed, and no one seemed to pay attention to the collision. In fact, this is a physical phenomenon that junior high school students can understand: the smaller the response of an object, the higher the overall strength, and the consequences of a collision between two bicycles are completely different from a collision between two 10,000-ton ships, and if two particles of dust collide, they will be unharmed. The people of the micro-world seem to have the body of Vajra, and they don't worry about getting hurt. When the flock of "feathers" flew by, someone from the skyscraper next to him jumped out of the window from time to time, trying to jump on one of them, which was not always successful, so the person began to make the forerunners dizzy from a few hundred meters away, and those who were falling were still calmly greeting acquaintances in the windows of the buildings they passed!

"Ah, your eyes are like the black sea, so deep and deep, with a deep melancholy! Your melancholy has overshadowed our city, you have turned it into a museum! The Supreme Archon wept sadly again, and the others wept with her, letting their "feathers" crash between the skyscrapers.......

The forerunner also saw his huge eyes in the sky of the city from the left lens, and the melancholy magnified by hundreds of millions of times deeply shocked him. "Why a museum?" The forerunner asked.

"Because only in museums there is melancholy, the micro-era is the era of carefreeness!" The Earth leader shouted for joy, and though tears still hung on her delicate face, there was no trace of her grief at all.

"We are carefree times!" Everyone else cheered unpassionately.

The forerunners found that the mood changes of humans in the micro-era is hundreds of times faster than that of the macro-era, and this change is mainly manifested in negative emotions such as sadness and melancholy, and they can jump out of this emotion in an instant. There was another discovery that surprised him even more: this kind of negative emotion is so rare in this day and age that microscopic people treat it as a rarity and can't wait to experience it at the first opportunity.

"Don't be as melancholy as a child, you'll soon find out that there's nothing to worry about in the micro-era!"

This made the forerunner extremely surprised, he had already seen that the mental state of the micro-people was very similar to that of the children of the macro era, but the mental state of the children had to be exaggerated many times before they really looked like them. "You're saying that in this day and age, people get older and ...... The more naïve? ”

"The older we get, the happier we get!" The leader girl said.

"Yes, the micro-epoch is the longer the happier epoch!" The crowd shouted in response.

"But melancholy is also very beautiful, like a lake in the moonlight, it represents the pastoral love of the macro era, woo woo woo ......" the leader of the earth let out a sad cry again.

"Yes, what a beautiful time it was!" The other micro-figures also chimed in with tears in their eyes.

The forerunner laughed, "You don't know what melancholy is, little man, real melancholy can't cry." ”

"You'll let us experience it!" The Supreme Consul returned to a state of elation.

"I hope not." The forerunner said with a soft sigh.

"Look, this is the monument of the Macro Era!" When the flock of "feathers" flew over another city square, the Supreme Archon introduced. The forerunner saw that the monument was a thick black pillar, as thick as the giant television towers of the past, with a smooth surface and towering into the sky, and he looked at it for a long time before he realized that it was a macroman's hair.