March

In fact, at the atomic level, there was no fundamental difference between matter and life.

It was only a matter of how the atoms were arranged and combined in space.

To Chen Shouyi, crops capable of feeding all of humanity were merely something he had thrown together while building the spaceship. The work involved amounted to less than one percent of the entire vessel.

Life held no more mysteries for Chen Shouyi.

Even he himself was transparent to his own eyes.

If he wished, he could completely optimize and remodel his body at any time.

The journey from the first single-celled organism, born hundreds of millions of years ago, to the complex and diverse life forms of today could only be described as chaotic, disorderly, and built up through random accumulation.

Constant trial and error, constant elimination, and constant development.

Far too much "junk" had accumulated along the way!

Take human beings, for example.

Only about three percent of the human genome consisted of genes capable of expressing proteins.

The rest consisted of regulatory regions, DNA fossils, ancient genes that could no longer be expressed, meaningless repeated sequences, parasitic DNA of unknown origin from unknown organisms, 98,000 kinds of viruses, evolutionary remnants from 150,000 species, and fragments of all sorts that even Chen Shouyi had no idea what they were.

There was even a selfish gene that had copied itself a million times, taking up ten percent of the human genome. As far as he knew, it seemed to have no function beyond making copies of itself.

Nature had never wielded any supernatural craftsmanship, and humanity was not the carefully designed creation of some higher being.

From a genetic perspective, human genes were like an ancient, complex, rust-covered, fragile machine that had come into being through sheer chance hundreds of