St. Petersburg International Airport.
Professor Krugman and Albert were waiting for boarding to begin, and they looked very tired.
It had been a week since the International Congress of Mathematicians came to an end.
After the conference closing ceremony, the two did not immediately leave St. Petersburg.
After all, St. Petersburg was the famous “city of mathematics” in Eastern Europe. Some of the world’s top mathematics research institutes, such as the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, were all located in this city.
These two professors visited these mathematics institutes in hope of recruiting like-minded scholars. The two even tried a few more times to recruit Perelman to join their great project.
However, ever since that 60-minute report at the ICM, Perelman had become an even stranger person.
Before this, he would patiently answer the two’s questions, but now, he was reluctant to even let them into the apartment.
Their vacation time had been exhausted. They couldn’t stay here forever.
Therefore, after being unsuccessful at recruiting anyone in St. Petersburg, the two decided to go back to America and consider their next step.
If nothing else worked, they would lower the threshold of finding scholars to collaborate with. Or maybe they could work more on the research project and recruit people after making some progress.
“… It’s a shame Professor Lu left so early. I think he was actually a little bit interested in our plan,” Professor Krugman suddenly said. He looked at the airport terminal and said, “If only that accident didn’t happen, if we tried harder to convince him, maybe he would have agreed.”
“Yeah… I think so too.” Albert sighed. He raised his hand and looked at the time on his watch. He got up from his chair and said, “My flight is about to board… See you later then.”
“Take care, we’ll talk through email.”
“Yeah.”
Stanford University was on the west coast, where Albert worked as a visiting professor at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology. Princeton, where Krugman worked, was on the east coast, a few time zones away from California.
After his friend left, Krugman picked up a newspaper and began reading.
However, when he first glanced at the headline, he was stunned.
“… Frozen dormancy?”
He picked up another newspaper…
The headline was the same!
Krugman was intrigued.
He raised his finger and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He carefully read the headline article. He became more and more shocked and in disbelief. Finally, he could not help but whisper.
“This is… crazy.”
Frozen dormancy!
Traveling to the future for treatment!
This is the craziest thing I’ve heard this whole year!
Prior to this, he vaguely heard about Lu Zhou transferring Pulyuy to China, but he did not expect that this was the reason why.
But…
Compared to Miss Pulyuy’s health, he was more interested in the freezing dormant technology itself.
This reminded him of a thesis on the interstellar trade theory that he wrote a long time ago. In the paper, he casually mentioned that all capital activities would be related to the dimension of time.
If human beings could travel through time, the financial market would be hugely impacted. People would be more inclined to hold long-term and stable income assets, rather than investing in high-risk and high-return products. Because time was no longer a concern, the cost of waiting would decrease…
For example, if someone deposited 10,000 US dollars into a fund, with an annual rate of 4%, by doing some compound interest calculation, after 50 years, they would have 70,000 dollars in their account!
The money would have increased by seven times!
If the period was increased to 100 years…
“This is a financial nuclear bomb…” Krugman muttered to himself as he turned the page in his hand. He said, “I’m afraid tomorrow’s Nasdaq and the global debt market will become extremely volatile…”
Maybe it wasn’t just finance…
Its power could no longer be measured by a monetary value.
Equality existed between people based on the inevitability of birth, illness, and death. Whether someone was rich or poor, civilians or kings, there was no escape from the certainties of life.
However, frozen dormancy technology undoubtedly broke this equality.
It seemed like the balance of death was about to be broken…
If someone could live in a utopia in the future, why would they want to stay behind and build this utopia?
Some of the lucky ones would begin on their first step toward immortality. Human civilization would gradually shape into a world of inequality.
This seemingly innocent technology could actually have a greater impact on society as a whole than controllable fusion. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that it could even completely change the face of human civilization.
From a sociological point of view, this wasn’t the combustion engine, nor the steam engine, this was equivalent to the invention of printing!
Its birth would pave the way for a major event that would be more influential and powerful than the “Age of Enlightenment” or “French Revolution”. This revolution would continue to exist until restrictions were placed on this new technology.
And this process was ugly.
Of course, this idea might be too pessimistic. The more wealthy people were, the more cautious they would be in weighing the balance between risk and return.
Thinking about this logically, bearing the risk of not waking up was far worse than living their current, comfortable lives.
After all, if a 19th-century businessman was placed in the 21st century, he would be confused by the new financial products and global trade rules. He wouldn’t be able to survive.
After all, in his era, a profitable business was colonial plunder and industrial dumping. That had since changed.
Only those that couldn’t afford a ticket to the future would think about doing something as risky as going into dormancy.
On the other hand, survival was the highest priority of living things, even if no one used this technology now, someday, someone would open the Pandora box.
This was quite an interesting research project.
It was interesting enough that Krugman almost wanted to suspend his current research project.
Professor Krugman held his breath and rubbed his hands together.
There was only one thing he wanted to do.
Which was to immediately go back to his office, clean up his thoughts, and write them down in the form of a thesis…
Maybe something could come of this.
For example…
He could be named as the father of the New Enlightenment?
How exciting.
