As Long As I Can Learn

The construction of the Earth Era consumes 2.07% of the entire human GDP every year. Over so many years, the total cost has already reached a staggering 159 trillion Federal Credits!

This is an astronomically huge number, and as time drags on, the average citizen is naturally becoming unwilling to foot the bill.

One must realize... many people on Earth are still struggling to even put food on the table!

Li Cheng sighed again: "The Deep Space Foundation still has to prepare at least a trillion-level budget to lay down an optical path for the Earth Era."

"Over the next 20 years, the Jupiter Industrial Base must harvest a massive amount of nuclear fuel, with its fusion energy used to launch long-range lasers..."

Zhang Yuan nodded, lost in thought.

The Earth Era utilizes a dual-propulsion mode consisting of light sails and nuclear fusion.

Light sails refer to light pressure propulsion. When photons strike a smooth surface, they can change their direction of motion just like a ping-pong ball bouncing off a wall, imparting a corresponding force to the object and thereby propelling the spacecraft.

However, the light pressure from the sun is far too weak to rapidly push a giant spacecraft weighing tens of millions of tons. Only large-scale artificial light sources from the moon and the Jupiter base can generate enough pressure to move it.

Just think about it: although the nuclear fuel on Jupiter is inexhaustible, it still requires human labor costs.

Add to that the fact that this optical path needs to be fired continuously for 20 years, requiring hundreds of thousands of laser-launching devices that must be constantly replaced, and you have another massive financial burden.

It is hard to imagine how, back in the day, the "Father of Nuclear Fusion," Professor Qi Yuanshan, managed to persuade those shrewd businessmen and calculating politicians.

Deep space colonization, this ultra-large-scale project, offers absolutely no profit.

It won't even generate any benefits for hundreds or thousands of years.

This point is very strange.

After chatting for a while, Li Cheng also felt that discussing these things with the younger generation was a bit dull: "Whether there is enough budget is a problem for the big shots at the top to consider; you don't need to worry about it. Just doing your own part is enough."

He shook his head, as if he had thought of something, and stopped eating abruptly. He stood up from the dining table, walked into his study, and went off to ponder some problem by himself.

Although Zhang Yuan was quite curious about the gossip in this regard, seeing this scene, he could only let it go.

After the meal, Zhang Yuan complained privately: "Your dad and my dad are so alike; they're just workaholics. They suddenly get some inspiration, then get lost in their own world, busy recording things. You absolutely cannot disturb them at times like this, or else you'll get an earful of anger or some inexplicable nonsense."

"Tell me about it!"

Li Zhendong agreed wholeheartedly: "I remember when I was a kid, I asked my dad why 1+1=2, and do you know what he said? He actually started talking to me about Peano axioms, and I was still in kindergarten back then. I seriously doubted if he had any common sense!"

"Has your younger sister ever been educated like that?"

"She has."

Li Zhendong said exaggeratedly: "One time, my sister asked him why the area of a rectangle is length times width, and he went straight into some incomprehensible stuff about Euclidean space and inner products. Luckily, my mom is a normal person, otherwise, she would have been driven brain-dead by him."

Zhang Yuan laughed out loud, following suit by recalling his own father's bizarre behavior.

Back then, he was playing with a Rubik's Cube on the sofa when his father suddenly had a whim and began lecturing an seven or eight-year-old child about group theory with great solemnity.

Yes, group theory—the paper that Galois spent a whole night writing.

"It's just math from five hundred years ago, very simple. If you learn this, people will look at you with new eyes, kid!"

Zhang Yuan was overjoyed: "I want to learn, I want to learn!"

"...The group formed by all operations is called the Rubik's Cube group. Clearly, the Rubik's Cube group is a non-Abelian group... If you can decompose it into the product of simpler subgroups and then construct the generators for each subgroup, you can prove its solvability. It has already been proven: all Rubik's Cubes can be solved within 20 moves."

During this process, Zhang Qiming was beaming with joy, fully enjoying the pleasure of being a teacher.

But in the end, he discovered that his son seemed to be staring at him blankly, unable to understand a word.

Couldn't understand?

Zhang Qiming let out a curse: "What a... complete idiot!"

He didn't know if he was talking about his son or himself.

Zhang Yuan sighed. Recalling these past events, he didn't feel the same resistance he had back then; instead, he felt quite nostalgic.

It has already been 3 years since his father passed away, right?

Time flies so fast. In the blink of an eye, 3 years have passed. The dead are gone, and all that remains is longing.

Seeing that Zhang Yuan was in a low mood, Li Zhendong turned on the TV and switched to the children's channel, which was playing a cartoon—Wolf Out: Bears Turn Into Sheep.

"Don't look at me, I'm just a bear..."

It was a very childish cartoon, but the little girl next to him was watching it happily.

Zhang Yuan asked again: "If you leave, won't your parents be heartbroken?"

"Not heartbroken, don't I still have a younger sister?" He pointed to the young girl in her early teens nearby and said heartlessly, "They can just have a few more later. Anyway, technology is advanced now; they can give birth whenever they want, and they can afford to raise them."

He continued: "Think about it, if I didn't get on the ship and stayed on the moon to work. I'd go home once a year for the Spring Festival, three days each time, spending two hours with them every day... Over 60 years, the total time spent together would only be 360 hours..."

"Now, I spend every day at home eating and drinking, spending seven or eight hours with them every day. That's over two hundred hours a month. I've spent most of my life's worth of companionship during this entire vacation, so what regrets could there be?"

Zhang Yuan scratched his head. What kind of bullshit logic was that?

However, it did sound somewhat reasonable...

Mother Li smiled and cut some fruit for them, seemingly already accustomed to Li Zhendong's eccentric remarks. "Zhang Yuan, don't go back today. Stay at our house; we have spare rooms anyway."

"Okay."

Zhang Yuan nodded, sighing inwardly.

Li Zhendong's situation was very similar to his own, but the difference was that his parents were alive and he had a happy family.

As for Zhang Yuan, he was the product of in vitro fertilization; the sperm was provided by his father, while the egg came from an anonymous donor in the human gene bank. To this day, he didn't know who his biological mother was, nor was there any need to know...

However, who wouldn't want a kind and loving mother?

Back in university, their grades were about the same. Yet, Li Zhendong was a genius who could mess around and still score over 90 on exams, while Zhang Yuan was merely a top student who had to put in much more effort to achieve good results.

This was, in fact, a gap in intelligence...

But that didn't matter!

Thinking this, Zhang Yuan took out his phone and began scrolling through the Super Brain app. When he saw those mathematical symbols, a strange sense of happiness welled up in his mind.

There was no need to envy others; learning made him happy, and learning helped him grow!

As long as he could learn, he possessed the whole world!