It may be clearer to take a person's life as a metaphor: to educate the years is to live your own life, do what you want, and live a life that you think is worthwhile, no matter how long you can live.
Pay attention to the content of life; To give civilization time is to do nothing all day, just to live forever, even if you live in a mess, as long as you don't die. Pay attention to the length of life.
This sentence has sounded the alarm for human beings who have experienced ups and downs. If we fall into a chaotic and cruel social state out of fear because of the end of the future, it is equivalent to giving up the characteristics of the civilization we have established.
Extended data:
"Three-body" has a profound social consciousness, and the emerging "Cosmic Sociology" in the novel is entangled in the conflict between system construction and human morality, and actually puts the issue of "China experience" on the scale of the whole universe more directly. It can be said that the Three-body World conceived by Liu is not far away, although it has hundreds of millions of light-years of time and space.
It is on the basis of the real situation that the grand world of Three-body is conceived, which is obviously based on the moral inquiry of "if there is an alien civilization, is there a common moral code in the universe?"