Industrial Cthulhu doesn't believe in the end times.

Chapter 34: A Tombstone Left for Four Billion Years Later
After Su Xun raised this question, everyone present fell silent. Many people were aware of this, but when it was truly laid bare before them, many were still speechless at the cruelty involved.

Looking around the silent conference room, Su Xun straightened his posture:
"If the end times really come, comrades must understand one thing."

"Clearing the danger zone is an endless battle of urban warfare and CQB, and we have hundreds of millions of hostages in the hands of zombies."

CQB, or close-quarters combat, is a nightmare for all professional armies, much like urban warfare; it's practically synonymous with a meat grinder.

Seeing the low morale of the crowd, Su Xun sighed and comforted them, "Don't worry, the situation won't be as dire this time. We are now prepared and there won't be any more unpredictable situations."

"After you return to your respective units, you will be placed at various key points. Your task will be to quickly organize the survivors and assimilate as many of the newly emerged or non-systematic superhumans as possible."

"Fighting against the apocalypse is a long relay race, and you are holding the first leg of this relay race."

After answering a few more peripheral questions, Su Xun announced the end of the meeting. Someone took away the cameras set up indoors. This training session would be distributed to the survivor seeds who had not made it to the meeting and kept as archives.

A few moments after I returned to my office, Wang Wei came looking for me.

"Advisor Su, that's a wake-up call!"

“There have always been some people in various sectors whose thinking is difficult to change, and your speech should be able to influence many people.”

"It's not that easy. There will be more disputes later. What, did you call me here for something?"

Wang Wei nodded: "Some people from the Spark Project team will be coming over today. They've already produced some results, and they'll bring them over for you to see and ask for your opinion."

"Okay, when?"

"It's already on its way and will arrive tonight."

Time flies when you're working. After dinner, Su Xun met several elderly professors carrying suitcases.

As a project under the same Kuafu Project, the Fire Seed Project is second only to the Sun Chasing Project in terms of secrecy within the entire project. The two often cooperate, and Wang Wei is usually responsible for liaison.

No one can predict the future; even apocalyptic disasters can occur. Preserving as much of the knowledge of our entire civilization as possible has become an issue that we must consider.

As soon as Su Xun's identity was confirmed, the relevant plan was put forward. The organization always makes plans with maximum redundancy. After learning in detail about the power of the tenth-order natural disaster and various extraordinary beings, some people have a more pessimistic attitude towards the long-term development of all mankind.

The so-called apocalypse, the end of the world, the end of civilization. In Su Xun's previous life, human civilization was completely destroyed. Due to Su Xun's special ability to become the base, although he was not very powerful and was much less lethal than some experts in a certain path, he was the one who could survive the most and was the most difficult to kill.

Before being wiped out by the natural disaster, Su Xun had actually witnessed the fall of all the large bases, or at least heard about it.

Perhaps a few individuals still exist, hiding in some corner, but by then, the entire human civilization will have effectively perished.

It is precisely for this reason that the Spark Project came into being.

This project has two main tasks. The first is the Great Library Project, which aims to establish a sufficiently large book storage system to preserve as much knowledge and information as possible in the post-apocalyptic world.

In this regard, each base already has corresponding book storage facilities, but the capacity is not very large. For example, a significant part of the ongoing renovation of the Taimon base is to expand this capacity.

The main task of the Fire Seed Project is to transport books from libraries in various places after screening them, and to seal some of the remaining books on-site and move others to shelters in various cities.

The other task is to build a tombstone for civilization. If your world were to face extinction in a month, what would you leave for potential alien travelers?
ASEAN has decided to have the words engraved on stone.

Su Xun invited the elderly professors into his office. They opened the box in their hands, revealing three square black stone slabs.

The slate is sealed with a transparent material, and its surface appears very smooth.

It's called a stone, but it's not really; it just looks like one.

"Although it looks like there's nothing there, it's just an optical illusion," an elderly professor explained. "The patterns on it are hard to see with the naked eye; we've used a special etching technique to record a lot of information into it."

"Through the sealing treatment and external protection methods we have developed, these stone slabs will theoretically have a lifespan of at least one billion years."

"At most?"

"That might be four billion years, right?"

Four billion years from now, the Earth may not even exist anymore. Even if a cataclysmic event doesn't occur, it's uncertain whether humanity can survive until then.

Su Xun didn't continue speaking, and the other party began to introduce the contents stored in these stone slabs.

"The first stone tablet records our history, the events we have experienced, our understanding of human civilization, and our descriptions of various countries."

"The second stone tablet records our culture, including works of music, literature, and art, as well as the scripts, languages, customs, and dietary habits of various countries."

"The third stone tablet records our technology, including genetics, industry, social sciences, information technology, and so on."

The old professor sighed: "It's almost all-encompassing; most of the valuable information in the ASEAN database is here."

Su Xun carefully took a stone slab from the other person's hand. The old professor noticed his caution and shook his head with a smile.

“The outer coating is not that fragile.”

Even so, Su Xun still glanced at it and put it down.

Each stone slab is about two centimeters thick, about twenty centimeters long and wide, and weighs a little over two kilograms when you hold it.

Clearly, this is a technology that has been in the experimental stage for some time but has not yet been made public. It may be a cutting-edge exploration of information storage technology. It does not yet meet the conditions for commercialization and is not compatible with the reading devices commonly used in the current market.

The people of Project Fire used their existing technological reserves to create these three stone tablets that represent the most advanced technology of the entire civilization.

In primitive times, people needed to draw information in caves, using mountains as a medium. Even if they filled an entire mountain range, they still couldn't tell the story of the sunrise and sunset of the year.

In ancient times, sages had to inscribe information on bamboo slips, using plants as carriers. It took tens of thousands of bamboo slips to barely record the rise and fall of dynasties over two thousand five hundred years.

In ancient times, scholars needed to write information in books. Using paper as a medium, they filled thousands of volumes, recording 400 million words, which was enough to record most of the classics of an ancient Eastern country.

Currently, the total weight of all human civilization is only about six kilograms.

(End of this chapter)