Behind the design: Cosmic memories

In the 1960s, while calibrating an antenna at Bell Labs, engineers Penzias and Wilson encountered a persistent, perplexing "hum." This troublesome noise would ultimately reveal itself as an echo from the universe's very creation—the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). With this discovery, humanity finally felt the residual warmth of the Big Bang: photons, journeying across billions of years, carrying memories from the instant the cosmos cooled from a hot, dense soup into transparent spacetime. Their temperature, a mere 2.725 degrees above absolute zero, shines more brilliantly in the eyes of scientists than any dazzling star—for this is the universe's first "baby picture," recording the earliest wrinkles and birthmarks of spacetime itself.

In the science fiction masterpiece The Three-Body Problem, on the afternoon the Sophons blockaded Earth's fundamental physics, what Wang Miao witnessed through his CMB-viewing goggles was not the uniform glow of the microwave background, but an elaborate, universe-scale deception. The entire sky flickered madly, like the static snow on an old television screen—a terrifying message etched by the Trisolaran civilization. In our reality, scientists are searching the polarization signals within the CMB for even more hidden traces: primordial gravitational waves. These earliest ripples in spacetime are the fingerprints left behind from the era of cosmic inflation. If confirmed, humanity might witness how quantum fluctuations at the very moment of creation gave birth to the stars and, eventually, to life. Here, the line between science fiction and reality blurs: are we merely interpreting data, or are we listening to the universe's intimate whispers, meant for civilizations to hear?

Carl Sagan famously mused, "We are made of star-stuff." He also spoke of us as "a way for the cosmos to know itself." The existence of the CMB is a profound testament to this: every atom composing our bodies was forged in the stellar furnaces ignited after the Big Bang. And today, these very atoms have rearranged themselves into thinking brains, here on a tiny planet, attempting to decipher the murmurs of the universe's infancy. Perhaps, one distant day, when human civilization has vanished into the relentless tide of entropy, our probes will continue to drift through deep space. They might become another kind of "cosmic background radiation" in their own right—silently recounting, in the cold vastness, the story of a species that answered the dawn of creation's afterglow with its own faint light of wisdom.

Memory never sleeps; it merely awaits a receiver tuned to the right frequency.

Additionally, we have updated the OOBE (Out-Of-Box Experience) welcome sound, sourced from Coldplay's "A Sky Full Of Stars." We've taken the four notes: G♭, C♯, G, G♭.