Time starts from the Big Bang and ends at an unknown end, and civilization is just a moment in it. The latter sentence also has the same feeling, which is to let time have life, so as to reflect the meaning of time and years. .

This sentence comes from the famous saying of Pascal, a French mathematician in the 17th century. The original sentence is: "Give time life, rather than life time." Liu Cixin changed it to: "Give time to civilization, not civilization to time." Not only maintains the connotation of the original sentence, but also makes this sentence have philosophical thoughts and implications at the social and humanistic level. Extended information

At the end of "Three-Body 1", humans confirmed that the Trisolarans will arrive in the solar system about 500 years later, and have obvious intentions of grabbing resources and genocide. As a result, humans have entered an era of crisis. The top and bottom share the same hatred and fight against foreign enemies. Therefore, all countries around the world have invested most of their social resources in the field of scientific research. In order to break through the Trisolaran's technological blockade on basic physics research on the earth, developing armaments has become the primary goal of mankind.

This sense of crisis not only puts the spirit of human society under high pressure for a long time, but also exhausts limited resources, and people's living standards drop to far lower than the average of modern society. This extremely unbalanced social form finally collapsed due to frequent outbreaks of turmoil and resistance. Humanity entered the terrible "Great Depression" period, and the progress of civilization went back a hundred years.

This sentence has an obvious color of historical materialism. It is trying to answer the relationship between civilization and time. Obviously the author prefers the latter: to give civilization to the years. From the beginning of time to the unknown end, civilization is ultimately just a small boat rushing across the long river. This small boat undoubtedly adds a lot of excitement to the river, but there are more in other sections of the river that humans cannot imagine. of wonder and wonder.