Chapter 2293 - 1481: Boundary

Chapter 2293: Chapter 1481: Boundary

"Professor Yang, you mentioned the seal is to protect the finiteness of meaning, but what if life itself is meaning? Extending life is extending meaning itself. Do you see this logical gap?"

Manstein asked.

Weber’s voice carried a unique excitement that researchers feel when faced with logical paradoxes: "He makes a good point. If life itself is the carrier of meaning, then extending life is extending the duration of meaning’s existence. Compared to a fifty-year-old, a hundred-year-old person has more time to create, to love, to think. Viewed from this angle, extending life in itself expands the total amount of meaning. The seal limits the maximization of meaning, hence, the seal is bad."

"What if extended to two hundred years? Five hundred years? Immortality?" Yang Ping asked.

"Every increment of time has meaning. Another day is another day, another year is another year. According to this logic, there is no upper limit."

"What about infinity then? Infinite time, infinite total meaning. Sounds wonderful. But what does infinite time imply? It implies everything you do today can be done again tomorrow, again the day after tomorrow, again after ten thousand years. Nothing is unique, nothing is irreplaceable. Every choice can be undone, every decision can be overturned. In infinite time, choice loses its fundamental attribute—irreversibility. Without irreversible choices, there are no true choices."

"This is a thought from an individual perspective. If we think from the perspective of humanity as a whole, with the entire group attaining immortality, can you imagine how terrifying that would be? It’s like a lake without circulation, with no exchange with the outside world."

After pondering for a moment, Weber asked: "Which side are we on?"

Yang Ping answered: "We stand in the middle, understanding the existence of the seal, understanding the meaning of finiteness, optimizing the repair program within the seal’s permissible range, allowing it to perform better within reasonable limits, finding a balance point."

"Where is the balance point?"

"Unknown, hence we must slow down. But we can seek it through experimentation. Conduct a batch of new experiments, not chasing ultimate repair speed, but pursuing stable, controllable, reversible repair effects. In each experiment, set observation windows to see if the structural and functional stability is maintained after the repair program is activated. If abnormalities occur at a certain activation intensity, that intensity is the boundary. We stop just before the boundary."

"Another concerning thing is that finding the balance point might just be our wishful thinking. Once this magic box is opened, someone will inevitably lose control, wanting to see what exactly is inside, releasing all its magic power."

"Of course, we might also be worrying unnecessarily, perhaps we won’t find the key to truly open the seal for hundreds or even thousands of years. But even if it’s unwarranted concern, we must be cautious, just in case, just in case the magic box is opened."

Weber remained silent for a moment, then said: "I agree with you. This is much more complex than previous experiments, we need to redesign the whole experimental plan."

"Then let’s redesign it."

Yang Ping stood by the window. Below the office building, the ginkgo trees had started shedding leaves again. Golden leaves danced and fell in the wind, blanketing the ground. He recalled a paper from years ago about the mechanism of tree leaf shedding. Plants actively sever the leaf stalk supply channels in autumn, letting the leaves fall. This is not passive decay, but an active programmed process. Before winter arrives, the tree actively abandons its leaves because the cost of retaining them exceeds the benefit. Abandoning is for survival. The seal is also a form of abandonment, abandoning the possibility of infinite repair in exchange for structural stability and predictable functionality.

He turned back towards the desk, opened the experiment log book, turned to the latest page, and wrote a line: "Continue researching the mechanism of the seal, but do not pursue breaking the seal. The target is to understand the regulation logic of the seal, optimizing repair efficiency within its permissible range."

After writing, he closed the book and returned it to the drawer.

But that night, he didn’t sleep well. Something kept turning in his mind. "What if life itself is meaning?" he turned over in bed, looking at the crack on the ceiling. The crack was barely visible in the darkness, yet he knew it was there. He knew where it is, how long it is, knew it stretched from the corner of the wall to the light socket. He recalled the sentence he wrote in the experiment log book during the day, "understanding the regulation logic of the seal," and suddenly realized a deeper question: What if the seal itself is also evolving?

If we consider the average human lifespan of eighty years as the default setting of the seal, this setting is not fixed. Evolution’s history is a history of continuous adjustment to the seal. Ancestors might have lived only twenty or thirty years, with the seal much tighter. Modern humans’ lifespan extends to seventy or eighty years, which is essentially the process of loosening the seal using various technological means. Medical advances fundamentally constitute a gradual loosening of the seal. Vaccines, antibiotics, surgical operations, targeted drugs, each advancement pushes the boundaries of life outward. From this perspective, Yang Ping finds the unifying theory and the receptor X is just one segment in this long "loosening the seal" process.