Chapter 4 Chapter 4 The World is in Chaos

In 2130, Rama invaded the solar system for the first time, which had a huge impact on the people on earth.While life has gone on since Newton led a team aboard Rama 1 and back to Earth, the evidence is clear that somewhere in the depths of the universe there is (or was) a Highly intelligent creatures.This fact forces people to re-understand the universe and re-understand the position of human beings in this universe.And obviously, in another world, at some point, another chemical, physical approach has been discovered and understood. Where did the Rama people come from?Why did they build these huge and complex spaceships and travel across the vastness of interstellar space to come to us?For many months, "Rama" was at the center of people's conversations.

For more than a year, people waited anxiously to see the Rama spaceship reappear.Telescopes of all wavelengths are pointing into space, trying to find the clues of those mysterious alien spacecraft.But there was nothing, the starry sky was silent and silent. As if Rama came suddenly, he left and disappeared, leaving only an unsolvable mystery. "Excalibur" started running, but it still didn't find anything new.Before long, people's attitudes towards the Rama incident suddenly began to change.Seemingly overnight, Rama's visit to the solar system became a thing of the past.Those newspapers that prominently published the words "Rama is back..." also changed their tone, asking whether we still have a chance to meet the creatures who built Rama.What was thought to be a possible threat quickly dissipated.

Rama's departure made people feel a little frustrated and disappointed.Not so long ago, people were galvanizing themselves for the major events that might accompany encounters with alien intelligent beings, but all this seemed unfounded. People's nerves are relaxed.Oddly enough, a hysterical bout of self-centered hedonism ensues. When you think about it, this wave of self-indulgence sweeping the globe is understandable.Contact with Rama caused subtle changes in people's hearts and spirits.In the past, human beings were independent of the universe, admiring themselves, thinking that they were the only highly developed intelligent creatures, and thinking that human beings controlled their own future destiny, and deduced from this concept, it constituted the core of the entire pragmatism philosophy of life. Base.

But all this was completely shattered by the arrival of Rama, who changed everything.Humans are no longer "the only" and probably not "special" intelligent species.With the discovery of other intelligent species, the formerly popular belief in "anthropocentrism" has been completely bankrupted. It is easy to understand why people's way of life has suddenly become self-centered hedonism.People can't help but think of the beautiful lines of Robert Herrick's exhortation to girls to cherish their youth five centuries ago: "In May, the spring is intoxicating,

The roses are about to bloom, the leaves are dripping green, Hurry up, take heed, Time flies like an arrow..." Greed and unrestrained consumption exploded around the world for two full years.The frenzied grabbing has added to the burden of fragile economies.When Rama invaded in 2130, the economy had already begun to decline, but at that time, under the joint intervention of the government and financial institutions, a kind of misty false prosperity was artificially created, and the long-term fragile situation faced by the economy , no one took it seriously. With the surge of buying frenzy in the first half of 2132, the world suddenly entered a new period of economic development.The production capacity expanded rapidly, the stock market skyrocketed, and the consumption index and employment index remained high for a long time.The short-term effect of unprecedented economic success has significantly improved people's living standards.

By the end of 2133, many experienced observers had seen that the "Rama boom" was leading human history to disaster.Millions of people became rich and fruitful in this prosperity.In fact, the persuasion of budget restraint and credit shrinkage has long since fallen on deaf ears; on the contrary, people have tried their best to encourage mass consumption, and all "prudent" and "thrifty" have been forgotten. Amidst the singing of happiness, the dark clouds of disaster are approaching the blue sky. In January 2134, world stock markets began to crash, but this was only a harbinger of greater disaster.

The people scattered across Earth and the various colonies of the solar system can't see it all.The over-expansion of the economy continued for more than nine years, and in the last two years the economy grew much faster than in the previous two centuries. "There is something wrong with the economy!" Some people began to worry.But world leaders insist that a panacea has been found to stop the recession from happening.People believed them until that terrible May of 2134. In the first three months of the year, world stock markets slumped relentlessly, slowly at first, then suddenly accelerated sharply.Many have been tempted to link the stock market's decline with the ominous return of Halley's Comet (a superstitious tradition dating back more than two thousand years).

In March, Halley's comet appeared in the sky, shining brightly and brightly, making many people full of doubts.For weeks, scientists raced to come up with various theories as to why it was much brighter than originally thought. In late March, it swooped towards the perihelion and disappeared into the sun's rays; in mid-April, it returned to the evening sky again, and at this time, the huge comet tail swept across the entire sky. Astonishingly coincidentally, the economic crisis was also beginning to sweep the world around this time. On May 1, 2134, three of the largest international banks declared bankruptcy due to bad debts.Within two days, panic swept the world.More than a billion home computer terminals connected to the world's financial markets are busy dumping stocks and bonds of all kinds. The communication lines of the "global network system" were severely overloaded, and the delay in data transmission increased from minutes to hours.The waves of panic grew more violent.

Within a week, the crisis had two dire consequences: one, half the world's stock value was wiped out; That's true for every last penny on the planet, rich or poor.All of a sudden, in one fifth of the world's households, there was a disastrous message from the database that demanded that the debt be settled. The reality is much worse, because information travels in all directions much slower than originally estimated, and computers are processing only a small fraction of the total business to be processed.In the words of computer experts, the global financial system has entered a state of "circulation imbalance".Billions of information transfers are waiting in "low priority" computer networks.

The data delay of the computer network caused the personal accounts of most electronic banks to be fully cleared for several hours or even days, and the money that should have been used to pay for the increasing stock losses remained in the original account.These individual users quickly understood what had happened, and took advantage of the opportunity to rush to spend again the cash surplus that now appeared to exist on the books. Finally, the government and financial institutions discovered the problem and hurriedly took measures to stop this crazy behavior.Unfortunately it was too late!Computer networks, already bewildered by conflicting data, crashed.

Getting the system back up and running is no easy task, requiring careful deletion and reinstallation of a series of programs scattered across computer network centers around the world. For more than three weeks, the electronic financial system that managed all the money was completely shut down.Nobody knows how much money they have, because banknotes have long since been abandoned, and only eccentrics and collectors keep banknotes.They can only use this money to buy daily necessities for a week.So, people began to carry out the ancient barter trade for the purchase of necessities; or for the sake of friends, they mortgaged and mortgaged and held it temporarily. But this is where the pain begins.The "International Supervisory Organization" responsible for overseeing the global financial system has repeatedly announced that it will resume operations, asking people to temporarily separate the terminal from the network during this "extraordinary period", but no one paid attention.As a result, the data flooded the system again, causing the crash again. It took only two weeks for scientists to agree on the cause of Halley's Comet's unusual brightness; but it took more than four months for the global network to be operational again.No one can estimate how much loss this unprecedented chaos has brought to society. After normal electronic economic activity resumed, the sharp recession lasted for 12 years before bottoming out.After another 50 years of slow recovery, the world's GDP returned to the level before 2134.