Dead on Mars

“Tomcat, Mai Dong… If you were to list the ten scientists who created deep, everlasting influence in human history, who would you choose?” Tang Yue sat before a table, with a piece of paper in front of him, while he spun the pen in his hand.

Ever since they had begun recording human history, Kunlun Station went from a research center of natural science to a social science research center.

“Isaac Newton.” Tomcat was typing rapidly on the keyboard, muttering without looking up. “… Galois was no doubt a young genius. He deserves to be called one of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, he died young… This warns us not to challenge others in fields you aren’t skilled in. If Galois had engaged in a duel that didn’t involve shooting but in solving equations, we could imagine that Galois would not only win the woman’s hand but also live to a ripe old age…”

“Albert Einstein!” Mai Dong answered.

“Galileo Galilei,” Tomcat added.

“Nicolas Cage, ah no—Copernicus!” Mai Dong added again.

“Charles Darwin.”

“Doesn’t Tesla count?” Tang Yue asked. “Nikola Tesla.”

“When you mentioned Tesla, I thought you were referring to the founder of Tesla, Inc., Elon Musk.” Tomcat stroked its whiskers. “Nikola Tesla might be a rare genius, but he doesn’t deserve to be one of the top ten scientists in human history. You can place Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, and a bunch of others ahead of him.”

“Some people call him a god.”

“There are no gods in academia, just nut cases,” Tomcat said.

“There’s also Max Planck!” Mai Dong recalled another famous person.

“Miss Mai Dong, such a ranking is actually meaningless. I don’t know why you humans like rankings. It’s as though you always have to come up with a top ten, top four, and top three. Humans like to demarcate matters, using a layman’s viewpoint to forcefully separate matters. You have to know that separation is the beginning of discrimination.”

Tomcat shook its head.

“Max Planck is obviously great, but there are equals such as Niels Bohr, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, as well as Louis de Broglie. Just randomly point at a picture of the Fifth Solvay International Conference in 1927, and he would be one of the greatest physicists in the twenty century or even human history.

Tang Yue scratched his head. Enjoying rankings was something that was part of his mindset. It wasn’t only him; most Chinese, including Mai Dong, had such a mindset.

“We began ranking from a young age,” Tang Yue said. “Tomcat, you haven’t experienced the National College Entrance Examination. We were the students that survived from the hundreds of thousands of students in the entire province. Not only are students ranked, but even schools are also ranked. Peking University and Tsinghua University are the top tier, followed by the five universities in East China ¹ as well as the C9 League ² . There was a 985 and 211 in the past before they came up with the Double First-Class University Plan. The various fields have their own circles both big and small like the Eight Architecture Universities ³ , the Two Electronic and One Post ⁴ and the Five Institutes and Four Departments.”

“What about you?” Tomcat glanced at him.

“The university I received my Bachelors from is very ordinary. It was once a 211, but later became part of the Double First-Class University Plan,” Tang Yue replied. “My Masters was received at the same place, and you can think of it as scraping by.”

“Education is really the most severe involution in China.” Tomcat sighed. “The college entrance examinations must have been highly competitive, right? Thousands cross a single bridge as they engage in a life-and-death struggle, each strike seeing blood.”

“But that also has Chinese characteristics.” Mai Dong giggled.

Tomcat stopped talking as it continued working hard at recording mathematical history.

It had just finished writing about Évariste Galois’s life and was preparing to write about Niels Abel, who was also a pioneer in Group theory.

After Abel was a list of illustrious names.

Henri Poincaré. Without him, there wouldn’t be the theory of relativity.

Georg Cantor. Yes, the Cantor from Cantor Sets.

Bernhard Riemann. Riemann’s hypothesis had yet been solved even when the Earth vanished.

David Hilbert, an uncrowned king in the field of mathematics.

Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s teacher.

Tomcat wrote down these people in chronological order. It would write about whoever it recalled; thus, many famous mathematicians such as Archimedes, Gauss, Euler, Lagrange, Gödel, Neumann, and Hardy had already been filed away on Kunlun Station’s hard disk, joining the ranks of the other most illustrious humans in human history.

Tang Yue switched on the computer and connected it to the survey telescope on the space station.

He continued observing the comet.

Both Kunlun Station and the space station were tracking Comet Tomcat-Tang-Mai I and had collected enough data for the computer to calculate its trajectory. The calculation was the simplest part of the mission, with the hardest being collection of data. In the past, when observational means weren’t advanced enough, humans had to spend decades or even centuries of observation to predict a comet’s orbit period.

The Dawn module on the United Space Station had been destroyed, causing Tomcat and Tang Yue to lose most of its remote observation means. This dragged out the time needed.

The survey telescope took a picture every half an hour. It was difficult to tell any difference in the comet’s brightness in a short period of time, but when Tang Yue lined them up together, he found that the comet was moving. It had already taken shape, and he could identify its head and tail from the telescope photos. According to the computer’s calculations, the comet was passing by Jupiter’s orbit and speeding towards Mars at an extremely fast rate.

With the comet constantly approaching the sun, the gravity exerted on it grew greater, accelerating it even more.

Tang Yue stared at the photo on the monitor, imagining the celestial body hurtling through space, spewing out evaporating steam and carbon dioxide in its tail. But instead of a tail, it resembled the flames spewed out by a rocket engine. Its tail was big enough to comprise all of Jupiter. The Great Red Spot was slowly spinning on Jupiter’s surface as the turbid atmosphere stirred up intense bolts of lightning and storms like a colossal eye.

“Tang Yue, where’s Grothendieck… Tang Yue?”

Tang Yue was taken aback as he snapped out of his fantasies.

“What?”

“Alexander Grothendieck’s information,” Tomcat said. “Where did you put it?”

“It’s still on this hard disk.” Tang Yue took out a hard disk from the drawer and pushed it over to Tomcat.

“Stop dazing around. What are you looking at? That comet?” Tomcat glanced at him before glancing at the monitor.

Tang Yue nodded. “You said that it wouldn’t collide with Mars, right?”

“Of course.” Tomcat wore an odd look. “The probability of it striking Mars is basically zero…”

“Ding!”

A pop-up window suddenly appeared on the monitor. It indicated that the calculation was done.

Tang Yue and Tomcat looked over.

The workstation indicated that it had completed the trajectory calculations of Comet Tomcat-Tang-Mai I, and it displayed the results.

Did it finish that quickly? Tomcat was slightly surprised, believing it would take another two more days.

The man and cat looked at the blue curve over the pitch-black background. It was the comet’s predicted trajectory.

At its origin was a white point that clearly represented the comet.

And at its destination was a red circle, with the label: Mars.

There was also a tiny rectangle.

Inside the rectangle were English words written in bold. “WARNING: IMPACT!”

Tomcat was taken aback. Its expression slowly warped as though in slow-motion, looking like a Peking opera marshal with flags sticking out. It grimaced at the flags it had risen.