When twilight fades, you can see the stars. When dawn fades, all that’s left is…” “All that’s left is the harsh light of reality. - Liu Cixin

If the entire history of the Earth were condensed into a single day, one hour would equate to 200 million years, one minute to 3.3 million years and one second to 55,000 years. Life would appear as early as eight or nine o'clock in the morning, but human civilisation would not emerge
until the last tenth of the last second of the day. From the morning that philosophers held the first ever debate on the steps of a temple in Ancient Greece... from the day slaves laid the first foundation stone of the Great Pyramid…… from the minute that Confucius welcomed his first disciple into the candlelit gloom of his thatched hut... right up until the moment you turned the first page of this book, only one tenth of the tick of the clock would have elapsed.

If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer.

I really can’t keep it up anymore,” Huahua said.
“No one’s doing any better,” Specs said lightly.
“It’s not the same. This is impossible!”
“Think of yourself as a computer. You’re just cold hardware, and reality is just data. Accept your input and perform your calculations. That’s how you keep it up.