'At first, no one cared about the disaster. It was merely a forest fire, a drought, the extinction of a species, the disappearance of a city—until the disaster became connected to everyone.'
Su Mo stood there blankly, and the opening line from a classic film flashed through his mind.
On the vast and boundless Earth, disasters that truly affected the entire world were exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, that many people went their entire lives without experiencing one firsthand, glimpsing them only through books, footage, or other people's accounts.
Yet the truth was that disasters had never been far away. They were like ghosts, omnipresent, merely occurring in different forms and quietly unfolding in different corners.
Imagine quantifying every leap forward in human development as an action. Each action would raise this small ball by ten centimeters.
As time passed, the ball's height from its starting point would gradually accumulate, growing higher and higher.
That height represented the tangible level of humanity's development in every field, bearing witness to the efforts humanity had made along the way.
At the same time, however, as the ball continued to rise, the pressure it bore continued to increase.
That pressure came from fear of the unknown, resource shortages, environmental deterioration, the side effects of various technologies, and, above all, humanity's own expectations and unease about the future.
Those pressures were like invisible shackles, binding the ball and making every leap seem unbearably heavy.
Once the balance between rising and falling was broken, the terrifying disaster that greeted humanity would naturally come crashing down.
Perhaps an all-out war would send everything straight to the bottom, smashing it to pieces.
Or perhaps it would fall several times while people struggled to support it, eventually returning to the starting point when it could no longer