After reading this task, Ding Yun didn't know if she was lucky or unlucky. How could she be lucky to encounter a mission to save humanity? How could she be unlucky that the random mission happened to have some subtle connection with her golden finger.
The spring water from the Daughter's Spring was indeed related to reproduction.
However, Ding Yun did not dwell on this matter for long. She quickly began to merge with the original body's physical form.
And used the consciousness chip to sort through the original body's memories.
And then…
The specific cause and effect became known to her.
This world, starting from five hundred years ago, due to technological development, had seen many obvious forms of pollution, whether it was the air, soil, or water sources.
All had suffered various degrees of pollution.
For example, atmospheric dust pollution, industrial exhaust harmful substance pollution, surface water pesticide and hormone enrichment pollution, groundwater wastewater and compound pollution, solid waste pollution, compound pollution, soil fertilizer and pesticide white pollution, heavy metal and radioactive pollution, electromagnetic radiation pollution…
In short, all the conveniences and progress brought about by human technological development would bring pollution to the environment.
The difference was merely a matter of degree.
And the extent of their far-reaching impact!
Although this aspect had garnered some attention from various countries.
Yet, it had not been fully prioritized.
Or rather, the attention levels varied among countries and regions.
But most regions maintained a core standard: the environment must make way for development.
They believed that future generations could worry about pollution.
They needed to develop now.
These situations and ideas directly led to the environmental pollution problem not being solved, at most being slightly alleviated in certain aspects, or the speed of pollution slowing down, and that was all.
Over time, some pollutants became more deeply entrenched, even infiltrating everyone's daily lives and beginning to affect human health, human bodily mutations, and human reproduction and inheritance.
For instance, various strange mutations increased, cancer incidence rose, fertility rates declined.
The overall quality of newborns was not as good as in previous years.
Infertility increased.
Birth defects increased.
Non-voluntary miscarriage rates increased, and so on.
Merely due to technological advancement, the average human lifespan continued to slowly rise, masking these problems.
Or rather, making these problems
seem less acute!
By four hundred years ago, even without a large-scale war causing a massive death toll of men globally, the global male-to-female ratio had already crossed a dangerous threshold.
The sex ratio reached 0.8:1.
The sex ratio at birth dropped to 0.7:1.
The research results at that time indicated that the primary reason was that men were more affected by environmental influences, or rather, men had a lower ability to adapt to drastic environmental changes compared to women.
Even their genetic material had problems.
Whether this was true or not was hard to say, but historical records generally described it this way, and the original body had thus accepted it.
This situation, since it appeared,
had never been reversed.
The environmental degradation further exacerbated related phenomena, and the sex ratio, in an irreversible manner, showed a huge disparity that showed no signs of improvement in the following years.
In fact, the gap continued to widen.
But by then, it was too late to address environmental protection.
Because almost no region on Earth was free from pollution; the difference was merely that some places had a little less pollution, some had more, and some were no longer habitable for humans.
The further into the future, the more skewed the sex ratio became.
Men even became a precious commodity.
One man could be pursued by dozens or even a hundred women; it was simply a matter of scarcity making things valuable.
However, the issues of reproduction and population
remained serious problems.
Labor shortages could be compensated for by robots, but an insufficient population was not a problem that could be solved by building more robots. Thus, starting two hundred years ago, this world initiated the artificial human plan. It couldn't be said to be entirely accurate, more precisely, it should be called the new human plan, using genetic technology to create population.
After the plan was launched, all humans were divided into two categories: one category was humans formed through normal traditional methods to create embryos, and then gestated by artificial gestation machines; this category of humans was called natural humans.
The other category was where two genes were randomly selected from the gene bank to synthesize new embryos; humans formed from these embryos were called new humans.
Generally speaking, natural humans had parents.
New humans also had parents,
but some of their parents might have died many years ago, and some might have dozens of new human children synthesized through genetic synthesis technology. Therefore, it was impossible for those parents to bear the responsibility of raising children.
As a result, society generally believed that new humans had no parents and were not raised by parents, but were planned, managed, and raised by the government.
They were likely closer to nanny robots.
At the birth of new humans, natural humans hoped they would be more adaptable to the environment. Thus, some gene fragments that were more adaptable to the environment were artificially inserted into the gene chains of all new humans. Although this action balanced the number of males and females among new humans,
and made them stronger than natural humans,
the artificially inserted gene fragments greatly affected the self-reproduction of new humans, even making them almost unable to reproduce through the past natural reproduction methods. Children born from them together would basically not grow up healthy. They were likely to be infertile, and even if they became pregnant, they were likely to miscarry.
Even if they didn't miscarry, most of them would be born deformed.
The proportion of those who could give birth to normal children
was less than one in a hundred thousand.
The proportion of those who gave birth to healthy children
was even less than one in a million.
This situation directly led to new humans basically not reproducing or having children, but new humans synthesized through genes would still appear endlessly.
As a supplement to the deficient population.
This situation continued for many years.
It continued until natural humans became fewer and fewer, their status rose, and they became protected, becoming a new privileged class.
It continued until new humans participated more and more in various industries and controlled the lifelines of various industries, and until some new humans violated the law and began researching genetic technology.
The original body was one of the new humans, and also a new human who secretly violated the law and researched genetic technology.
Through her research, the original body discovered that the lifeline of new humans was entirely in the hands of natural humans. Once all natural humans died, the natural human genes in the current gene bank would lose their sustainability.
And once the genes lost their sustainability,
and no new genetic material was input,
and new humans were artificially created, the diversity of new humans would be greatly limited. The impact would not be significant in the short term, but if it continued for a hundred or eighty years, the newly created new human genes would definitely have genetic conflicts, leading to the terrifying phenomenon of genetic collapse.
At that time, it would mean the extinction of humanity.
This was because the genetic synthesis human plan had a flaw from the start: the genetic material in the gene bank was adjusted genetic material and did not contain original genetic material. It was said to be for ease of synthesis.
To avoid wasting time adjusting each time.
Whether original genes would cause problems when directly synthesized, the original body did not know, but adjusted genetic material was definitely not suitable for long-term human synthesis. Constant introduction of new original genetic material to regulate the process in the middle was certain.
Once natural humans went extinct,
the synthesis of new humans would inevitably lead to major problems.
After the original body discovered this crisis, and considering that the current number of natural humans had fallen to six figures.
She specifically took the risk.
And reported the relevant situation to the main superintelligence.
Then, of course, they did not adopt her suggestions and deemed her to have violated the law requiring new humans not to study genetic technology. They arrested and issued a warrant for her.
Then the original body began to flee.
The latest situation was that she was attacked, severely injured, fled into a contaminated area, and then died.
Shortly thereafter, Ding Yun arrived.