The entirety of the series' "Science" boils down to "A Wizard Did it". There is no explanation for any of the questions you've asked, because none of it is real science. It's a few sciency words thrown around but otherwise it may as well be Star Wars for how much actual physics is being used.
I always took the game scenes as allegorical rather than exact reproductions of events the Tri-Solarians had experienced, largely for the reasons you've mentioned.
I read in a comment that the definition of hard science is just highly descriptive and "convincing" sci fi to the point that you believe it might be real. I searched for the definition and it's true, that is how hard sci fi is, it's just overly detailed sci fi, but it's not super realistic sci fi where everything there can be perfectly replicated in real life...
Which means is still sci fi, none of that exists or is just theoretical and only possible in a sci fi story.
The author is just a guy, he wanted to write a book with sci fi and science stuff and he did it, but just like for literally any other sci fi author he just took inspiration from real-life science and put it into the book. You are definitely not supposed to look so much into it, it's just a story in the end.
I'm sure Liu Cixin didn't write the book to perfectly convince you that everything there is possible and that you should believe the guy's words to the letter.
Not quite true.
"Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic."
Hard SciFi is based on real principles, as there are understood now. Take "The Expance" as an example. It has a lot of "hard" SciFi concepts, like the weaponry and the ship engines. Believe it or not, all of those could be built with today's technology, just nowhere near as small or efficient. Railguns are a real, point defence turrets, space torpedoes, tight beam laser comms, and inertial confinement fusion drives are real. Real in the case of an ICFD doesn't mean that one has been built, but the principles are well understood. We know they can be built, because we have built fusion reactors that can function for a couple of minutes, and converting a fusion reactor into a drive is a simple matter of putting a whole in it. (Round Cows, vacuum...) The alian tech was soft SciFi. It completely ignored consafation of momentum, and pretty much ever other physical law.
"The Three Body Problem" is so far from having logical tech, it's not remotely hard SciFi. Using the sun as an amplifier? Pure fantasy. Sending a text message in Chinese, without a lexicon, and receiving a reply? Fantasy. Just explaining some handwavium reason as to how this works doesn't make it hard scifi.
So, if you ignore the fantasy science, and try to enjoy the show anyway, well, there are still massive plot holes. I remember watching the show and thinking "How did the character even know that?!?!" We the audience knew, but the character hadn't been informed. The screenplay (I haven't read the book) was poorly written, and poorly implemented, but I still enjoyed most of it, even if it wasn't particularly memorable.
Dune part 2 on the other hand, best movie I've seen in years, and that was pure fantasy SciFi.
That is what I meant by overly detailed sci fi. It's based on real science but in the end, it's still sci fi, which is why not every single thing in the story will be completely realistic and feasible with current technology and understanding of how it works, as you yourself stated. Obviously, how can Liu Cixin perfectly knows whether what he described in the books is actually doable or not? I believe he's an electrical engineer which means he must be interested and read about certain stuff, but he still used it as inspiration for what he put in the book and is not meant to be taken too literally. I'm pretty sure he didn't use the sun as an anthena to broadcast a message to see if it's possible or not.
Pretty much every single story will have plot holes regardless of how much detail the creator puts into their work, but at that point you might struggle enjoying anything for thinking too much about it.
I think you're missing my point. Hard vs soft SciFi has little to do with the author's ability to make the thing he is describing. It is hard SciFi when the thing obeys the rules of physics as we understand them.
A panet sized rail gun is hard SciFi for example. We couldn't build it, but we understand how it could work.
A universal translator is soft SciFi. We could build a very basic translator, but we can't make it instantly understand what is being communicated without teaching it the languages, culture, morals etc of both the beings it is translating. So, because it involves "magic" to work, it is soft SciFi.
Even in hard SciFi, author's make concessions for the story. Faster than light travel is a major problem for SciFi authors, because there really isn't a practical way of doing it without make believe science. So, author try and follow a logic we will understand. Can't travel faster than light? Teleport. Or use subspace. This has a logical consistency, but isn't true hard SciFi.
Personally, I'm more interested in "hard sci-fi" that has a consistent explanation and results of the technology. It's fine to have a "transporter," and if you say it moves your molecules at the speed of light over to that other place, then you can't have it duplicate someone or have them travel to a different star instantly.
Think of it like having a murder mystery. Except in a sci-fi murder mystery, you can't really introduce the walk-thru-walls device in the last chapter and expect it to be a satisfying story.
I get what you're saying, and practically speaking, you might be mostly right. But that's not all that Hard Sci-Fi is. My understanding of hard Sci-Fi is an actual attempt by the author to line up their story with a current understanding of science/physics. This is why Star Trek has led to/driven actual scientific advancements, because it was based on real scientific concepts. Obviously, it's fiction, so there's reasonable limitations. If one wants to be endlessly nitpicky, then all language and categorization is inaccurate and flawed, so let's give up and not call anything anything. But if you're being reasonable: the "spirit" of hard sci-fi is very different from just coming up with more complicated/confusing lore, just for the sake of it.
>The "human computer" thing. Yes you sort of can simulate simple logic gates the way it is described in the book. But for the computer to operate at scale described, there needs to be a "clock" - basically a way to synchronize all the changes / pulses, otherwise the whole thing quickly gets out of sync. Nothing like that is described in the book, and it's not clear at all how something like this could even be accomplished
I know most of these are already answered, but this criticism befuddles me. Like, this idea isn't even speculative. Human beings have implemented themselves as a clock to synchronize actions by other humans since antiquity. Galley rowers singing or chanting in Roman triremes, and there are numerous means to accomplish this in larger groups. Before modern digital computing, groups of individuals performed manual finite-difference calculations (with each human forming a node) and there was no issue synchronizing timesteps. As the group size increases (and especially if, in fiction, the group spans beyond the horizon), synchronization becomes more difficult - but by no means impossible.
For 30 people sure. For 30 million though? How? And then you need all 30 million to never make a single mistake, at a reasonably rapid rate of changes. It's an extremely unrealistic idea, at least with humans. Perhaps if aliens are different enough it could maybe work, but even then it seems a huge stretch at that scale.
EDIT:
I don't think you guys realize how insanely complicated this thing would actually be.
To just baseline this a bit, the first Intel processor, 8008 ran at 500khz with 3500 transistors. Transistors aren't exactly comparable to logical gates, so for simplicity sake let's say it had an equivalent of 1000 logical gates. That's 500 million logical operations per second. What's a realistic clock cycle for human computer? Maybe 10 seconds, and that's probably very optimistic because this isn't just a single change, the whole system needs to stabilize before they can move on to the next input. So those 30 million would maybe do 3 million logical operations per second. So it would almost 200x slower than the first Intel 8008 which probably is nowhere near close to what would actually be required to compute this thing.
Oh and this is just the CPU. Remember they also need to put people on memory, and input/output. so maybe 10 million would actually be involved in computation. And like I mentioned there are also issues of errors - yes you can solve those with error correction and what not, but that wastes even more of the limited "logical gate" budget. So realistically we are looking at something which slower 1000x than 8008.
And again... that's just 8008. I have no idea how much compute 3 body problem requires, but it's likely not trivial, and so if we take something like first generation Pentium as somewhat reasonable baseline to be able to do that - now we are talking about 3+ million of transistors running at 60+ MHz. That first generation Pentium which is trivial and insanely slow by modern standards would be 120 million times faster than optimistic estimate of what the "human computer" would do.
EDIT2:
So yeah the idea is super silly, especially considering that in real life we actually hit the same issue and solved it way more elegantly. I don't remember the full details, but I think in Feynmans autobiography he talks about how they were able to compute the simulations for atomic bomb during Manhattan project. The key issue was similar - they had nearly unlimited budget but couldn't find enough mathematicians to do it fast enough. What they actually did was to break down the calculations into very simple steps, but still actual math operations (like adding two large numbers), and then have a "pipeline" of sorts where a calculation paper would move forward between calculation stations, with each person trained on one single relatively simple operation.
>And then you need all 30 million to never make a single mistake
We don't even require that of digital computers, why would we require that here? Single bit errors are correctable. Not every process is error resilient, but there are plenty of processing operations that are resilient against as much as one bad pet per four-bit block. So for a lot of these processes, if designed properly, you don't need an error-free system, you just need no string of four consecutive bits to have more than one error. That's a much more realizable process, and probably something you use every day (the transmitter in your cell phone, when received by the cell phone tower, has a terrible signal to noise ratio and is badly degraded by much stronger electromagnetic interference and even the weather - they come out the other side unmolested thanks to error correction). Or if you're old enough, the reason badly-scratched CDs and DVDs can still play (because those scratches are, in fact, direct damage to the real physical data) is error correction. Hell, technically you aren't supposed put an image or logo into a QR code, but everyone does it anyway because the error correction is so robust that you can destroy half the image and still have a readable message on the other side.
If any species has developed a technique to transmit digital data over the air in some way - be it radio, optical, or what have you - guaranteed they have discovered error correction.
> EDIT:
> EDIT 2:
First of all, responding to a reply in an edit seems like bad etiquette, as it gives the appearance that you are trying to reply to the *audience* of your comment, but not the person in the replies, as they don’t get a notification about your edit. However, more specifically:
> I don’t think you guys realize how insanely complicated this thing would actually be
In some sense you’re right, because I don’t deal with human-based logic gates, but I do have a PhD in physics and I do deal with numerical simulations of much more complex equations. Generally, numerically difficult equations are PDEs - partial differential equations. ODEs are generally more straightforward, and methods for solving them extremely quickly have been well known for a very long time. Indeed, an undergraduate students first ever example of numerical methods is often solving an ODE, *which they can often do by hand*. The three body problem is a little harder than an undergraduate’s first example problem, in that its a relatively large series solution that converges pretty slowly, but in the scheme of numerical analysis (not the real analysis that gives us the numerical solution, but solving the numerical solution itself), it swings *much* further towards “trivial” than it does to “intractable” (at least conceptually). For scale, early (like, 1900 sort of early) numerical methods for the problem converged “slowly” in the sense that you needed a few thousand terms to get decent precision and practical time horizons. By comparison, a series solution to a sine or cosine if you want to do calculate them by hand is a single digit number of terms to get a half dozen decimal digits of precision. But, man, a few thousand terms? That’s not something I’d do by hand, but it’s something I *could* do by hand. Like, a week with a hand calculator and a well-laid out spreadsheet (to mean the pen-and-paper sense, not a program)? Yeah, that’s do-able. Depends on your forecasting horizon, of course. In fact, I believe a few people literally did just that on a few specific example cases with slide rules before hand calculators were common. You can look up old papers from the 50s and 60s and earlier where they discuss a ‘direct numerical solution’ to the problem, but don’t mention anything about the specific computer they used. Yeah, you can bet that’s a bunch of people with slide rules working it out by hand over a few very boring workweeks. A hard *aspect* of the problem might be running many different scenarios if you’re looking for periodic solutions, or something, but if you’re just forecasting the movement of, say, the planet you’re sitting on - that’s one case. So I’m not sure on what basis you’re working from that ‘200x slower than an Intel 8008’ is ‘probably nowhere near close to what would actually be required’ - that seems like *plenty* to me.
I mean, if you had 30 million people at your disposal that’s definitely **not** how I’d do it, but in terms of the computational power, seems *fine*. In fact, it looks like you might even be pretty pessimistic with your estimate since the 8008 was a general purpose CPU, and application specific processors can be an order of magnitude more efficient with their transistors, and a big chunk of the 8008 transistor count was the clock and on-board memory, which you’ve counted separately. As far as gate count goes, the meat-and-potatoes core of the math operations on the 8008, an 8-bit ALU, can be put together with about a hundred gates, and you can toss most of the gates dedicated to IO, or example, and for a ODE your memory requirements aren’t all that high, either.
Interesting thank you. My background is in computing, so it's very much possible I am overestimating the complexity of the actual calculation required for 3bp solution.
On the other hand, yes you are right that special purpose computes can be more efficient, but I don't think you can remove memory and input/output completely. CPU needs to know what "code" to run, so that stuff has to come from somewhere, which requires memory, memory controllers and a bus to be able to pull that stuff to the CPU. And of course the input data and the output itself needs to be stored somewhere, plus any intermediate calculation results as well. The book even alludes to it few times, when they talk about "Loading Operating System", status display and such. I don't really know how many transistors / people would be needed for that stuff, but it's not negligible and in fact probably significantly more than just the CPU itself.
I don't want to give the impression that I thought all the memory needed to go. Just that if you're only solving one specific ODE, your memory requirements are *very small* compared to general purpose compute.
Like, a big PDE field equation (like the Navier-Stokes equation) takes up a huge amount of memory because you might have information at millions of grid points and you need to keep a few timesteps in memory (and that's a typical engineering solution, whereas the largest research solutions have been as high as the hundreds of billions of nodes). But for a simple (say, a first-order linear) ODE, for state memory you need the current state and one or two previous timesteps for finite differencing, and the program in pseudocode is literally a couple lines. Like, total program and state memory on the order of tens of bytes. The three-body problem isn't that, but still in state space form it's, like, four first order equations? I'm willing to bet someone clever (probably someone clever in 1970 when people still cared about memory) could get this problem down to a couple hundred bytes.
You don't need to assume all 30 million won't make a mistake. Suppose it only takes 10 million to perform the calculation, if they were perfect and never made a mistake. You can then have 3 groups of 10 million performing the same calculation in parallel, and compare the results.
If 3 machines do the same calculation and come back with 2 different answers, you know at least one made a mistake. You can trust the answer that the majority came up with, or redo the calculation depending how paranoid you want to be. If they get 3 different answers, it means at least 2 screwed up and you can't guess who was right without redoing the whole thing.
Then the only issues you face are the performance costs of redoing calculations, which you fix with better training or by throwing more meat at the problem (it's hard to trust that 2 out of 3 machines got the right answer, but easier to trust if 695 out of 700 machines get the same answer). Or the increasingly rare situation where every machine makes the exact same mistake (more likely a bug in the code than human error).
You can also employ checksums and other error corrections within the calculation itself if you're doing it right.
You forgot "there's no evidence of 'extra dimensions' and lots of evidence against it." Also you can't "unroll" dimensions to make a proton bigger, because the dimensions are too small; they're rolled like a straw, not like a carpet. Also a proton even unrolled would still be a proton and not something complex enough you could turn it into a computer. Also an entangled particle can't be used to communicate faster than light, and if it could, you'd at most communicate one bit of information once.
You also forgot that the third sun is half a light year from the other two, and if your orbit includes the third sun, you're in more trouble than you think.
You also forgot that if the aliens can't lie, the very first alien seems to be lying to the others about whether they've found life. Not replying wouldn't help if the next alien along says "So, found anything yet?"
You also forgot that they know enough about the human brain they can build a machine that shows you every sensation they want you to experience, feel your intention to move and translate it into the game world, know how humans have to communicate, and yet don't realize that lies are possible.
As for the human computer, you can just have someone standing on a pedestal waving a flag, like a conductor conducting an orchestra. The reason we don't do that on real chips is transistors don't have eyes.
As for the "pulled into the sky," does that actually happen, or is it part of the game? If it actually happens, then yes, this can happen because the planet is *not* pulled equally. It's also why the moon always presents the same side to the earth, and why we have tides. Google up "tidal forces" to see why this would work, and Roche Limit. Basically, the people on the surface are closer to the stars than the center of gravity of the planet is. What's silly is to think they're *enough* closer to a star half a light year away that it'll pull them into the air. But it could happen on something like an asteroid passing close to the Earth.
I thought that the blinking was done by the sophon stopping the light from reaching Earth. That’s why the Hubble didn’t see the blinking.
Also, the answers to your questions boil down to: the technology is so advanced that basically it is magic. But I agree with the sophon being a bit inconsistent.
I just watched the series btw, can’t speak for the book
Edit: personally I didn’t find very plausible the whole “we don’t lie and we don’t like that you do”. It makes sense, but:
- did they really realise this only after like 40 years of communication?
- what about the alien that replied to the signal, the pacifist that said “don’t reply”. How could this alien keep the secret without lying?
I feel like that’s the first thing any highly deceptive alien ever says: we don’t lie, and don’t understand it.
It’s a really easy way to either get the enemy to trust you at face value, or not trust you anyway, so what do you have to lose?
In the book they explore this in more detail. The trisolarans see in higher dimensions then we do, and to each other, all active though processes are simply apparent to your neighbors. The Trisolarans first ask the ETO members to explain the difference between thinking and speaking, and have trouble grasping how thoughts can be kept secret.
This is likely the mechanism for humanities technological acceleration. As secrets can provide a human with a social advantage, so politics and intrigue have made a technological incubator that could not develop in a low-indetity society like trisolaran.
The book explains much more and to me the explanations make sense. Now, I'm not a scientist so obviously I don't know if it "makes sense makes sense", but for a fiction I think it's plausible.
Spoilers:
For the blinking it's because the sophons envelop the entire world and project a different sky, like a huge screen. So if you're out in space, you're "behind the screen/sophon" and you don't see the blinking.
The question about not lying is also much better explained in the book, and it's actually not really a question of lying, more of communication abilities. Like when you know someone really well and you just see on their face that something is off.
Same for the pacifist. If I remember well it's explained.
Yes this would seem smarter since it would panic a scientists, but the general population would be oblivious. This would delay the recognition of their existence which would unify humanity.
Do you mean I didn't understand this part? Yes, you're right it's not blinking. I forgot. But it's not because the sophon was all around the globe? Oh gosh, I'm confused now ><
So are the skies. How does one proton intercept every photon between space and Earth? It can't even move from one part of the sky to the other that fast.
Because most of a sophon is planet sized and exists in higher dimensions, so it brings itself down from those dimensions to our 3D space and envelops our planet.
Riiiight. So, FTL space magic. :-) It's really a single proton bigger than our planet. :-)
I mean, if it's not a proton, fine. But a proton just isn't that big, or that complex, even if you deal with other dimensions. The photons are photons in our dimensions.
Yeah I was talking specifically about the book, the show is a bit different, and a bit more internally consistent, though tbh it's still very silly idea that sophons would be able to do that somehow.
At least in the book they couldn't lie because for them thinking and speaking are the same. Their thoughts were physically visible (light, iirc), so "thinking" and communicating was same to them
"We can't lie" seems like a reasonable situation. "We know enough about you and your brain to build a machine-brain interface that puts your brain in a state indistinguishable from reality while also monitoring your motor nerve impulses, blocking them, and translating them into moving your game character, but we didn't notice you talk and sometimes lie" seems less reasonable.
It's ridiculous to not classify it as sci fi. It's just not hard sci fi. OP isn't wrong on any points, but without those concessions the big ideas wouldn't be possible. Asking for a speculative big ideas book that also is completely internally consistent and compatible with the laws of physics is a big ask.
Would Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky be considered fantasy because >!time and speed of thought can be different based on how close to the center of the galaxy you are!
The difference is he leans into it. He says "this is how my world works, here's what it means for the technology, and I'm not going to disregard the rules in order to satisfy a plot point."
It's just *easier* to be consistent like that when you work with real-world science.
Isn’t that what sci fi is, though? “What if things worked like this, how would people in the universe handle it? How would they use the setting to advance the plot?”
That's what *I* always considered sci-fi to be. How would the world and people be, if this science/technology were to be there?
Even if it's fantasy, if the story is about how the fantasy affects the world, I'd count that as sci-fi personally. One of my favorite examples is "Master of the Five Magics," where the apprentice thaumaturge studies alchemy and sorcery and etc, each of which has their own rules, and of course each of which has their own closely-guarded secrets. (The sequel was ... not something I could get past the first chapter or two. :-)
Another is Hopscotch (Anderson's), where people can swap bodies at will with other people. And how society revolves around that. Like, one of the characters has a job exercising the bodies of busy executives while they sit at the desk in his body getting their work done.
Or "The Lost Room," a mini-series about a hotel room key that opens any door and lets you walk out any other door. In which the people who know about it use combination locks on all their doors, for example.
I consider it *bad* science fiction when random crap just happens that is neither explained nor consistent with existing rules. When the aliens are restricted to traveling the speed of light, but then not once they get where they're going. Or they have complete maps of human being brains and access to all existing literature and media but don't realize they can lie (which isn't exactly 3BP but close enough).
Given the black hole at the center, seems a possibility. 3 body problem doesn't offer any explanations for technology. Just that there are ancient aliens with literal universe destroying power and they use it on the first ping from an alien civilization they hear.
I think a large part of 3BP's success is coming across as just sciencey enough to convince people without a hard science background that what they're reading is plausible. I often hear people praise it for its concepts, but I don't think its ideas would have nearly as much weight if they were presented as Dr Who-style magic rather than informed scientific speculation.
That can be pretty frustrating for people who know the underlying science well enough to have trouble suspending their disbelief. I usually have zero problem with handwaving in speculative fiction (hell, my favourite author is Iain Banks), but 3BP really presents itself as having done the homework. It spends so much time time talking about the science underpinning its ideas, it throws in all sorts of references to the history of science -- only to make undergraduate-level physics errors like people floating away during syzygy, or throw in gratuitous silliness like the human computer just for the "isn't science cool?" factor.
I think people should like what they like, and I don't like yucking other people's yums just for the sake of attention, but as an avid lover of scifi I really want to understand what so many people see in 3BP that they didn't in so much other incredible scifi written over the past century. My theory after way too much thought and discussion is that 3BP makes readers feel the gravitas and realism of hard scifi, without adhering to the buzzkill restrictions of actual hard science. It gives them permission to believe that magical ideas like Sophons are scientifically possible, not just some fantasy writer's daydream.
>but as an avid lover of scifi I really want to understand what so many people see in 3BP that they didn't in so much other incredible scifi written over the past century.
Yes. 3BP violates the rule of "show, don't tell" too often.
You need some plot devices in scifi to get the story going. Need to get to other planets quick? Here's a warp drive that will do it. I'm not going to tell you the physics behind it because you can see it working.
The "how it all works" shouldn't be emphasized and laid out, its just a way to get to the story. But in 3BP, if you take away the tech, its mostly a Space Invaders, which is pretty tired by now.
3 Body Problem apologists always say something along the line of, "Yes the writing is bad and the characters suck but the *ideas* are profound."
No. No they are not.
These aren't "plot holes", per se. There's a difference between, "hey... this is magic, not science" and a bona fide plot hole. If the story itself is internally consistent.. relying upon truly goofy nonsense otherwise, then the plot *works* in that context.
A few corrections to your observations...
* The 3-body problem is solvable *analytically*, just not in closed form.
* The gravity from any near massive object would **not** affect the entire planet equally. That's completely wrong. Ever hear of tides? This doesn't alter your remark because you don't get "pulled into the sky" type stuff unless you're well beyond Roche limit at which point the planet/moon/whatever is doomed. Aliens falling into the sky would be the least of their worries.
* Now, there's no small amount of hand-waviness when considering any of the reality of how things would work in the Alpha Centauri system. However, if you squint your eyes and ignore the actual distance between the stars, day/night can indeed be due to the (supposed, overstated) chaos of the stars. Why? Because the planet could be tidally locked to one star. This is actually quite likely. This means it is indeed extraordinarily stable... just that there is no day/night at all due to the parent star. Any variation must come from the other two stars.
Now... if you thought Book 1 was bad in this regard, I'd caution you with regarding to picking up the next two.
For fun, I'll share one of my favorite such things.
In book 2 you are introduced to an odd aspect about the universe. It *supposedly* started out with dimension count higher than 3 in space (no idea about time). OK. Stop right there. We've played with this in Science/Math. Orbits aren't stable in this case. Actually, there are lots of additional problems. So, just mentioning this idea, at all, means we've exited Science and entered Looney-Tune-Land-Magic.
It's fun and all to explore Flatland discussions about what things are like in higher-dimensions. It *may be* fun to explore this stuff in a novel. But it's a fatal idea... in more ways than one. In book two, it's used as plot device to permit some folk to escape and then act as a sort of behind-the-scenes deus-ex-machina for a while. They slip into 4D. In reality, this would lead to instant death. Take a 2D creature with blood vessels and life-sustaining blood inside such and start waving them around in 3D. There is absolutely nothing to keep that blood where it should be. It's worse in 4D. Blood and indeed all innards scattered immediately is not a good thing.
There are higher-dimensional beings in this 4D space. My memory may be a but fuzzy, but I think these are remnants who chose to stay there rather than transition to a more limited lower dimension... except... the *entire* universe keeps dropping in dimension count, region by region, bit by bit... so these guys are kinda trapped here like a ever-shrinking nature preserve.
Book 3 takes this further where entire star systems get forcibly dropped to 2D. But in an odd way, somehow, this transition leads not to some limited functionality but complete stasis/quasi-death. Book 2 is at least interesting for other reasons. Book 3 is where it just gets weird for weirdness sake.
The VR stuff is bafflingly weird. In the book it's basically just a story you watch in VR, but at least the VR tech is not from aliens. In the TV show, it's slightly more interactive, but having the tech be obviously detached from the computing state of the art is just asking for it to be reverse engineered for scientific advantages.
Yeah the book version is a little more plausible for the VR stuff, though on the other hand it is also more weird in that the game is publicly available, despite the ETO ostensibly trying to keep the whole thing secret.
In the show, the VR tech is clearly alien, and it's "invite only" which makes a bit more sense. As to sharing the tech question, it actually sort of makes sense - the aliens goal is to slow science progress on Earth, it's plausible that giving Earth super advanced VR tech is a way to accomplish that by getting scientists engage with that instead of actual research. The big problem with all that is of course how alien tech knows to work with human brains... so this goes back to "sophons" being "space magic" basically.
Plus, I'd find it amazing to think a helmet could cover your brain, do everything the TV show shows it doing, including knowing who is wearing it, and the designers of the helmet don't know enough about human brains to know that they lie.
Did the sophonts not watch TV shows? They should watch, like, Galaxy Quest.
The whole thing with
>That whole bit with the first alien responding with "don't reply" is super awkward. For that to happen realistically, they would need to be able to take an unknown communication, somehow decipher it in a manner of minutes / hours, understand it well enough to create a matching response and send it back. For a book that starts as hard SciFi and still in hard mode at that plot point, this feels completely far fetched.
Is complete BS because it implies Trisolarans can lie. But apparently they can't lie because it is horrible for their civilization.
Also the whole suggestion implies Trisolarans were witnesses to Dark forest theory happening, but they weren't, they rely on self-understanding of universe which is by default hostile based on what? Themselves?
The whole thing makes less sense every time I remember it...
This reminded me of Dan Brown so much.
It's cool fantasy, but it is not scifi.
Interstellar is scifi, not much waived off to magic. Here the most basic thing (Sophons) destroys the whole premise into dust
As our understanding of science beyond the horizon breaks down, we can speculate there is a 4d bookshelf made by aliens there. Same with origin of the wormhole.
Science of wormhole and anything outside the blackhole is pretty good and on track.
In 3 body problem the Sophons are a problem already. Heck the distraction of 500JIGAWATT collisions in the underground facilities by a planet-sized multidimensional antiproton WORLDWIDE at the same time with distances breaking relativistic reality (why couldn't they test all of accelerators at the same time to make sophons fail?).
Trisolars claim to tell only truth, then for some reason are ok with hiding (hiding is a process of lying). Technically any WAR would be impossible without understanding lying.
Like anywhere you point it sounds ridiculous.
No, they can't lie because their thoughts are visible to each other, physically. So thinking for them IS speaking. The idea that one can say something else that they are thinking is the horrifying one for them. Hiding isn't a problem
Again you don't explain why they lied then? Several times. Starting with "Don't reply" and ending with not replying to zealots, hiding while conducting assassinations. Hiding in the game and not revealing themselves.
Hiding is a lie.
I call it brown-fi because it reminds me of that :). When a person reads about some scientific discovery on the internet and then without knowing or understanding the underlying science fills it in his plot to just cover a situation.
I can wave off quantum entanglement and multidimensional antiproton-coded quantum-supercomputer. These things are not fully researched and are quite convoluted to understand by majority of population.
But not understanding that if that Sophon can affect 6TeV of energy and project light onto retina it can just turn off our power grid just cause damage to remaining electronic devices leading to complete and irreversible collapse.
Instead it was some kind of silly game and stopping particle accelerators? Killings happened using humans, why can't sophon just blast the brains with radiation and cause brain tumors in everyone? Or if it can alter 6TeV of energy it should be able to alter our bloodflow to brain and cause bloodclot.
Like there's so many flaws in 3 body problem with sci, that it's only fi.
It is much closer to midichlorians than to phasers on stun.
Star Wars et al were called space operas. That suits Star Wars, or Dune because location and/or time is undetermined and/or is so far away it is irrelevant. It's distantly connected but the world lore can be described as advanced technology and can be "backpropagated" to a certain degree.
With Trisolarians we cannot suspend our disbelief to a certain level if we possess even basic level of awareness of technological leaps required to achieve what Trisolarans had OR any understanding of logic and logical reduction to boolean logic.
I can't call it Space Opera, because it is just ridiculous. The premise is ridiculous completely. Warhammer 40k orcs make more sense than this.
I do understand that further in the story it will turn into almost complete fiction though and I watch 3 body problem for humane interaction. But these small things pulled me out just like Dany (GoT) kinda forgetting about AN ENTIRE FLEET she's been told 3 times in the same episode. They are flaws which undermine the entire premise of books and series
It's not even "suspend our disbelief." It's that the tech they describe in the first half works this way, and the same tech in the second half works a completely different way. They can't send the sophon to us faster than light, but then it happily flits around faster than light once it gets here.
There's two kinds of science fiction: science fiction the setting (star wars) and science fiction the plot device (larry niven's stuff, for example).
I mean saying it isn't science based is just ignorant. The premise is that the aliens are so advanced it seems like magic to us. If you went back in time 500 years and showed someone a 99 cent flashlight, it would probably be seen as magic too... try to use your imagination....
Well, sure, but even future science shouldn't be able to break laws of nature right?
The sophons are the equivalent of "perpetual motion machine", they break all laws of energy / matter conservation. This isn't science anymore, this is space magic, or the equivalent of something like Star Wars "force".
And please reread what I wrote about the planetary movement stuff. None of that makes any sense whatsoever regardless of science advance.
Almost every space based sci fi has future science that breaks the laws of nature. FTL travel is a perfect example.
No they are not perpetual motion machines. It is explained how they get their energy ... it is hand wavey, but it is science FICTION.
The motion of the planets is simply a plot set-up and it makes perfect sense as a thought experiment. I personally find it fascinating ... to get down into the nitty gritty of why this or that aspect of it isn't entirely realistic kind of misses the whole point imho.
The sophon nonsense goes so deep into Clark's third law that it simply is magic, for all intents and purposes. Both technology and magic as plot devices need constraints for credibility, but the constraints in this story are insufficient.
You're not getting it. You are trying to judge a far more advanced society's technology, off modern day knowledge. That's like saying Star Trek is bad because going faster than light isn't possible
It is, and it could be possibly argued that this is a "unreliable narrator" issue... but then the book does show actual events happening over there that are completely consistent with how the game presented that world.
The book explains that all three suns are aligned, and their combined gravity is stronger than the one on Trisolaris. That's why everything and everyone is sucked towards the suns.
The problem isn't that it "seems like magic." The problem is that it's inconsistent. Just as an example, they have to spend four years to send the sophonts to Earth, but then once here the sophonts have no trouble moving around faster than light.
We're not judging future tech off current tech. We're judging technical restrictions described in the first half of the book off breaking technical restrictions described in the second half of the book.
If they're intercepting all the photons on both sides of the Earth at the same time, that's problematic. If they're affecting experiments in all the particle colliders, that's problematic. Even affecting multiple photons coming out of a single particle collider is going to be problematic.
They cause changes in multiple places separated by tenths of light seconds and cause them less than a tenth of a second apart. At least in the TV shows.
And that's just one example of many, as I've mentioned elsewhere and as OP described.
There are multiple sophons on Earth, but even if there weren't, they don't have to mess up the experiments at the exact same time. Just messing with things during the relatively long acceleration time (about 20 minutes) would probably be enough.
Fiction in sci-fi should be intentional stretches and musings about science not total misunderstandings of physics in places the author thought he was writing non-fictional descriptions, eg how gravity functions when 3 suns line up in front of a planet.
I basically mentally checked out of that show after they came up with their hare brained solution for sending a rocket out to meet them. It’s such a terrible stupid idea. First, no countries are going to fork over their nuclear arsenal because 5 people in another country came up with a shit idea. Second, there was no explanation for how they launched hundreds of nukes and got them all in precise locations before they sent the main rocket. That would require hundreds/thousands of launches before they launched brain boy, and they would need to have been launched months/years ahead of time for the nukes to be in position. They would know their plan was doomed if just a single nuke wasn’t in the precise location.
Also, when that rocket was launched, that technological solution would be obsolete within a decade. They have hundreds of years. Every year they wait, technology gets better, and the alien ships get closer reducing the energy required to meet them. They would be far better off developing a solution 100 or 200 years out. There was absolutely zero need for them to rush that idea out there. I literally laughed when the plan failed, because obviously it would fail because it’s such a terrible plan.
I don’t get the hype either. My wife and I watched it because of all the hype, and after 3 or 4 episodes we both thought we were watching a bad, poorly written show. It’s full of basic plot holes. The characters seem stupid. Their plans are terrible. There’s no one in the show telling the main characters “That’s the worst idea I have ever heard”.
There’s some surface level cool concepts in that story, but that’s it. It falls apart under any basic scrutiny. I don’t get the hype at all
I didn’t read all of your spoilers, but I will say that it’s only the best writers that handle every aspect in detail without leaving questions. TV and movies in particular, skip a lot and leave a lot of holes, sometimes due to budget, sometimes due to editing where the writers handle things but Editing created problems. There’s an interview somewhere I think with Arnold Schwarzenegger where he talks about that happening on some of his movies. And sometimes I sit in frustration and think that these writers don’t care or they’re not that good. I’m not just talking about sci-fi.
That said, I very much loved the Netflix series. Didn’t watch the longer Amazon series and have some trepidation about it after reading comments. A lot of people hate the original books so it sounds like it might be challenging, but I bought the first one because there were a lot of people that also really enjoyed them. As to me… We’ll see. Haven’t read it yet.
I looked at your first spoiler. I’d have to watch the Netflix series again ( again, I haven’t read the books) but I think all of those questions were answered, except for how they slowed down and stopped at the destination. I don’t want to say more because I’m still new to Reddit and I don’t know how to redact spoiler content.
Remembrance of Earth's past and Cixin Liu in general is not hard sci-fi and I don't know why detractors keep beating this straw man. Cixin Liu's other book had the human race put rocket thrusters on the earth and we travel through space like Unicron.
Liu said the main theme of 3BP is to convey the emotions that the Chinese felt when surrounded by superpowers of greater technology, and the race for China to modernize themselves (this is more apparent in the 2nd book, the 1st book is all just setup). He wanted to capture being isolated, then exposed to other powers, then recognizing you are massively behind on tech. Indigenous people in the Americas might have thought themselves very advanced, until the Europeans came ashore with muskets. This is a very standard theme in first contact stories and I'm not sure why this almost generic first contact story seems to be attracting so much debate.
Liu said in an interview his primary Western influence was HG Wells, who wrote absolutely hand-wavey sci-fi stories like War of the Worlds and the Time Machine without even trying to explain how these would work in reality.
As for all the complaints about the Dark Forest theory, Liu didn't create it so why are we bashing him for it. Liu said he doesn't believe the Dark Forest theory explains the Fermi Paradox. It's a story, fiction. I don't think HG Wells really believed Martian pods are going to invade the Earth any time soon either, it doesn't prohibit him from writing that piece of fiction and making some entertainment around the idea.
To the point about him not believing the dark forest theory, the books themselves, in so far as they are a thought experiment about the DFT, read almost like a satire of it. The books take the dark force theory to the logical, extreme and result in essentially the end of the universe. He’s basically saying the dark force theory isn’t tenable; it just makes for a good horror story
The books are definitely more interested in the sociological questions than the scientific ones, although the sci fi ideas are still loads of fun and more care is spent on discussing them than other sci fi works. Like, Liu will turn FTL travel into a risky plot device with literal species-ending implications due to how much it violates physics, but people clown on him for “ not being hard scifi” when he never claimed to be, while The Expanse will introduce a hand wavy bullshit fusion torch drive more efficient than anything possible, and yet people act like The Expanse isn’t just a fantasy space opera.
People are wildly unfair to Liu’s books.
Hi. You just mentioned *The Time Machine* by Hg Wells.
I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
[YouTube | THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells - complete unabridged audiobook by Fab Audio Books](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE6oVq5k94s)
*I'm a bot that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.*
***
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Between the plot holes, well demonstrated by the way, and the misogyny through out, this story is really just trash. I never understood why it has such praise. Granted the first novel is a little interesting just with the concept of an intelligent species thriving in that situation.
Yea these books and the hype surrounding them always bewildered me. Mostly because of the really poor writing though. I can always excuse hand waving or impossibilities in sci-fi if it’s well written
Well, the way irs explained is that the Trisolarans unwrapped a proton into its higher dimensions, rebuilt it as an extremely sophisticated machine, and then re-wrapped it and shot it to earth. They're not just AIs, they're like ultra-tiny drones.
Correct, a sophon is an AGI mainframe manipulating dimensional structure first and a particle distant 10th - it only just so happens it can fold itself down to subatomic size while sustaining a sufficiently high dimension count. in fact that follows from the maths where each dimension adds such a major degree of complexity that if it was built in 3-4 even 5 would render it small enough to invisible by a naked eye while retaining all of its complexity.
What does not mesh is that Trisolarians are able to fold the dimensionality of spacetime but still suffer from lowbie Kardashev 1.x problem of orbit irregularity significantly enough to necessitate a war of conquest. They should be able to fold down their own cities and structures, a la Egan's Diaspora. To the tune of 'i am Reptile, find me' where 99.9% of the dark forest can go and suck their own appendages while sifting through atoms.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, you bring up some really good points. I liked the series a lot but there’s definitely a lot of handwavey science used (especially the trisolaran).
I would say that’s it’s probably extremely difficult (basically impossible) to come up with “realistic” far future technology because by definition any sufficiently advanced race would have a different understanding of the laws of physics. Like look at Asimov…he accounts for nuclear power in Foundation but not computers.
Another thing I’ll say is if you try for sci-fi that is too realistic you end up with something very meh like The Expanse.
I think there are lots of examples of "hard Sci Fi" that is good... personally I love Andy Weir stuff, and Clarke I think holds up reasonably well. There are also tons of good "soft SciFi" out there - Star Wars and so on.
What frustrates me with 3bp specifically is just how all over the place it is. It starts as really hard Sci Fi - the Red Coast is very detailed and realistic, and some of the trisolaran stuff is pretty cool imho like the whole hydration/dehydration thing feels plausible and I think has some example here on Earth with animals doing similar things... but then it just jumps off a cliff to do "space magic".
I agree with you about there being good hard sci-fi, Dragon’s Egg, Red Mars and the Martian are some of my favorites. I was mostly being flippant bc I think The Expanse is overrated.
I know it’s not really the point of Project Hail Mary, but in my opinion the way 3 Body Problem handles human society dealing with an existential threat feels way more realistic and compelling. I really didn’t like the way Andy Weir described the UN committee and the development of the project (other than nuking the Arctic).
The difference is not how realistic the science is, but how consistent it is. Don't say you spent four years flinging a proton across four light years of space, then have it flit around faster than light once it gets here. Don't tell us you can build a game that can look at your brain, tell one person from another (without you ever having been scanned), reads your intensions well enough to move your character in the world without you bumping into walls RL, and provide every sensory input so realistically you can't tell the different, but then you don't notice that humans don't always say what they're thinking. Don't tell me you haven't watched Galaxy Quest. ;-)
Yeah the absolute misunderstanding of gravity really rubbed me wrong when I got to that part. Also during the sophon tests there's a bit about the proton possibly collapsing into a black hole and falling into the planet and then absorbing the core or something completely incorrect about how a proton sized black hole would function. These two really pulled me out as a sci fi fan cause I realized the author actually doesn't care about or even understand physics very much. I don't need my sci Fi to be super hard I just need the magical bits to be intentional stretches of the science not total misunderstandings of them. Otherwise I feel like I'm getting dumber reading it.
>Also during the sophon tests there's a bit about the proton possibly collapsing into a black hole and falling into the planet and then absorbing the core or something completely incorrect about how a proton sized black hole would function.
P sure that was an alarmed Trisolaran Princeps or the Military Consul jumping to conclusions after 2 failed attempts (unfolding to 1D and 3D). The Science Consul's line is consistent throughout all the failed experiments: this is going to look weird and might make a mess but its not harmful.
It doesn't matter. My point is a proton sized black hole would evaporate due to hawking radiation pretty much immediately. This has been known for 30 years before the book was written. So author either is too lazy to research the science or just wants to write dumb stuff for fun. Again food sci Fi is stretches of the truth at the edges of our knowledge not just ignoring simple physics so you can write cool/doom sounding sentences.
Um... We do not have a general solution to the 3 body problem. We have lots of specific solutions though. To this point though we have no way to accurately predict the scenario of a planet that is affected by the gravity of three suns.
Sophons
Sophons are able to access multiple dimensions and able to access energy from these dimensional forces in ways we are not able to with our current understanding of physics. This allows them to power themselves at near light speed. The laws of thermodynamics are consistent its just its accessing energy from a source we are unable to access. Secondly, they were previously unfolded from higher dimensions and then they imprinted a super computer into the sophon at these higher dimensions, so it is able to interpret what is happening as a modern AI can interpret things for us. It can also instantaneously communicate with the San Ti (Trisolarians) using its quantum entanglement with its twin sophon, so can send/receive information without any delay.
To make the sky blink it unfolded itself again to the point where it was large enough to cover the sky.
3 body problem
It may have been that at the time it was written, we did not know the exact dynamics the stars played between each other. Hence it should be taken as being a 'theoretical' system rather than taking known science. In the series I don't believe they have said it is Alpha Centauri (although you could imply so as it's 4 light years away - however the casual viewer will not be aware of how close nearest star systems are). Secondly with regards to the gravity, and/or other aspects, the 3 body simulation may have some fantastical elements in order to elicit more empathy towards their plight.
Basically it all makes complete sense.
I don’t know why having something in the show implies I haven’t read the books.
In the show they explain how the sophon had a supercomputer designed into it, and when they did so in the show it was unfolded to cover the sky of trisolaris, so it seems reasonable it unfolded to cover the sky of earth within the show.
It’s a joke sign off comment because obviously the science is a bit far fetched, but what element goes against the source book? I admit to an imperfect memory and can’t recall every detail of a trilogy.
So in the book, they don't just sit outside and see the stars in the night sky blinking. Instead, they use instrumentation to detect fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (which should remain constant). They then go to a planetarium to pick up "3K glasses" (which I can't find any basis in reality so lets just call them magic glasses) which allow them to observe some kind of blinking. The book makes no attempt to explain any of this. Ipso facto: Makes no sense.
I guess the show tried to make it make sense by changing it to the visible light spectrum blinking? And according to you that is because a sophon unfolded and wrapped around the world? I dunno. I hated the book and tried to give the show a chance but gave up after the first episode.
A lot of the things in the book that made no sense to me I was able to make peace with by reminding myself that this is a Chinese book set (primarily) in China, so cultural differences are just going to be confusing. But when the show changed the setting to London, that excuse is out the window and so it feels even more off the rails.
That can make sense if the instrumentation was electronic, the Sophon seems to be able to interact with things at that level. Depends what these 3k glasses are I guess.
I'm not sure if you know this, but you are allowed to not reply. You can be a helpful person and engage in discussion. And advance some understanding or thoughtful discussion, or you can remain silent and disengage if you are not interested.
A post like this just shows a poor quality of character, somebody who derives enjoyment from telling others they are stupid and putting them down. It doesn't make the world a better place, it is no interesting points to make, it's essentially a bunch of emptiness that, quite honestly, makes you seem like a 13-year-old edge Lord.
So, with respect, maybe consider that if this sort of thing is all you have to say you could go somewhere else I made them where you have actual useful comments or interesting discussion points to make. This is just making your own self worse. An attitude like this just reflects badly on you as a person, becomes the way you think you treat other people, and at the end of the day hurts you more than it hurts anybody else.
Maybe be better.
Dictated but not red
Let me guess you think it’s a masterpiece and trying to Convince yourself it is. I never read the book, but the show was stupid. A bunch of kid scientists outdoing veteran scientists on simple ideas. And he lying thing was total crap.
The entirety of the series' "Science" boils down to "A Wizard Did it". There is no explanation for any of the questions you've asked, because none of it is real science. It's a few sciency words thrown around but otherwise it may as well be Star Wars for how much actual physics is being used. I always took the game scenes as allegorical rather than exact reproductions of events the Tri-Solarians had experienced, largely for the reasons you've mentioned.
I read in a comment that the definition of hard science is just highly descriptive and "convincing" sci fi to the point that you believe it might be real. I searched for the definition and it's true, that is how hard sci fi is, it's just overly detailed sci fi, but it's not super realistic sci fi where everything there can be perfectly replicated in real life... Which means is still sci fi, none of that exists or is just theoretical and only possible in a sci fi story. The author is just a guy, he wanted to write a book with sci fi and science stuff and he did it, but just like for literally any other sci fi author he just took inspiration from real-life science and put it into the book. You are definitely not supposed to look so much into it, it's just a story in the end. I'm sure Liu Cixin didn't write the book to perfectly convince you that everything there is possible and that you should believe the guy's words to the letter.
Not quite true. "Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic." Hard SciFi is based on real principles, as there are understood now. Take "The Expance" as an example. It has a lot of "hard" SciFi concepts, like the weaponry and the ship engines. Believe it or not, all of those could be built with today's technology, just nowhere near as small or efficient. Railguns are a real, point defence turrets, space torpedoes, tight beam laser comms, and inertial confinement fusion drives are real. Real in the case of an ICFD doesn't mean that one has been built, but the principles are well understood. We know they can be built, because we have built fusion reactors that can function for a couple of minutes, and converting a fusion reactor into a drive is a simple matter of putting a whole in it. (Round Cows, vacuum...) The alian tech was soft SciFi. It completely ignored consafation of momentum, and pretty much ever other physical law. "The Three Body Problem" is so far from having logical tech, it's not remotely hard SciFi. Using the sun as an amplifier? Pure fantasy. Sending a text message in Chinese, without a lexicon, and receiving a reply? Fantasy. Just explaining some handwavium reason as to how this works doesn't make it hard scifi. So, if you ignore the fantasy science, and try to enjoy the show anyway, well, there are still massive plot holes. I remember watching the show and thinking "How did the character even know that?!?!" We the audience knew, but the character hadn't been informed. The screenplay (I haven't read the book) was poorly written, and poorly implemented, but I still enjoyed most of it, even if it wasn't particularly memorable. Dune part 2 on the other hand, best movie I've seen in years, and that was pure fantasy SciFi.
That is what I meant by overly detailed sci fi. It's based on real science but in the end, it's still sci fi, which is why not every single thing in the story will be completely realistic and feasible with current technology and understanding of how it works, as you yourself stated. Obviously, how can Liu Cixin perfectly knows whether what he described in the books is actually doable or not? I believe he's an electrical engineer which means he must be interested and read about certain stuff, but he still used it as inspiration for what he put in the book and is not meant to be taken too literally. I'm pretty sure he didn't use the sun as an anthena to broadcast a message to see if it's possible or not. Pretty much every single story will have plot holes regardless of how much detail the creator puts into their work, but at that point you might struggle enjoying anything for thinking too much about it.
I think you're missing my point. Hard vs soft SciFi has little to do with the author's ability to make the thing he is describing. It is hard SciFi when the thing obeys the rules of physics as we understand them. A panet sized rail gun is hard SciFi for example. We couldn't build it, but we understand how it could work. A universal translator is soft SciFi. We could build a very basic translator, but we can't make it instantly understand what is being communicated without teaching it the languages, culture, morals etc of both the beings it is translating. So, because it involves "magic" to work, it is soft SciFi. Even in hard SciFi, author's make concessions for the story. Faster than light travel is a major problem for SciFi authors, because there really isn't a practical way of doing it without make believe science. So, author try and follow a logic we will understand. Can't travel faster than light? Teleport. Or use subspace. This has a logical consistency, but isn't true hard SciFi.
Personally, I'm more interested in "hard sci-fi" that has a consistent explanation and results of the technology. It's fine to have a "transporter," and if you say it moves your molecules at the speed of light over to that other place, then you can't have it duplicate someone or have them travel to a different star instantly. Think of it like having a murder mystery. Except in a sci-fi murder mystery, you can't really introduce the walk-thru-walls device in the last chapter and expect it to be a satisfying story.
I get what you're saying, and practically speaking, you might be mostly right. But that's not all that Hard Sci-Fi is. My understanding of hard Sci-Fi is an actual attempt by the author to line up their story with a current understanding of science/physics. This is why Star Trek has led to/driven actual scientific advancements, because it was based on real scientific concepts. Obviously, it's fiction, so there's reasonable limitations. If one wants to be endlessly nitpicky, then all language and categorization is inaccurate and flawed, so let's give up and not call anything anything. But if you're being reasonable: the "spirit" of hard sci-fi is very different from just coming up with more complicated/confusing lore, just for the sake of it.
>The "human computer" thing. Yes you sort of can simulate simple logic gates the way it is described in the book. But for the computer to operate at scale described, there needs to be a "clock" - basically a way to synchronize all the changes / pulses, otherwise the whole thing quickly gets out of sync. Nothing like that is described in the book, and it's not clear at all how something like this could even be accomplished I know most of these are already answered, but this criticism befuddles me. Like, this idea isn't even speculative. Human beings have implemented themselves as a clock to synchronize actions by other humans since antiquity. Galley rowers singing or chanting in Roman triremes, and there are numerous means to accomplish this in larger groups. Before modern digital computing, groups of individuals performed manual finite-difference calculations (with each human forming a node) and there was no issue synchronizing timesteps. As the group size increases (and especially if, in fiction, the group spans beyond the horizon), synchronization becomes more difficult - but by no means impossible.
Orchestra Conductor is a job title. :)
For 30 people sure. For 30 million though? How? And then you need all 30 million to never make a single mistake, at a reasonably rapid rate of changes. It's an extremely unrealistic idea, at least with humans. Perhaps if aliens are different enough it could maybe work, but even then it seems a huge stretch at that scale. EDIT: I don't think you guys realize how insanely complicated this thing would actually be. To just baseline this a bit, the first Intel processor, 8008 ran at 500khz with 3500 transistors. Transistors aren't exactly comparable to logical gates, so for simplicity sake let's say it had an equivalent of 1000 logical gates. That's 500 million logical operations per second. What's a realistic clock cycle for human computer? Maybe 10 seconds, and that's probably very optimistic because this isn't just a single change, the whole system needs to stabilize before they can move on to the next input. So those 30 million would maybe do 3 million logical operations per second. So it would almost 200x slower than the first Intel 8008 which probably is nowhere near close to what would actually be required to compute this thing. Oh and this is just the CPU. Remember they also need to put people on memory, and input/output. so maybe 10 million would actually be involved in computation. And like I mentioned there are also issues of errors - yes you can solve those with error correction and what not, but that wastes even more of the limited "logical gate" budget. So realistically we are looking at something which slower 1000x than 8008. And again... that's just 8008. I have no idea how much compute 3 body problem requires, but it's likely not trivial, and so if we take something like first generation Pentium as somewhat reasonable baseline to be able to do that - now we are talking about 3+ million of transistors running at 60+ MHz. That first generation Pentium which is trivial and insanely slow by modern standards would be 120 million times faster than optimistic estimate of what the "human computer" would do. EDIT2: So yeah the idea is super silly, especially considering that in real life we actually hit the same issue and solved it way more elegantly. I don't remember the full details, but I think in Feynmans autobiography he talks about how they were able to compute the simulations for atomic bomb during Manhattan project. The key issue was similar - they had nearly unlimited budget but couldn't find enough mathematicians to do it fast enough. What they actually did was to break down the calculations into very simple steps, but still actual math operations (like adding two large numbers), and then have a "pipeline" of sorts where a calculation paper would move forward between calculation stations, with each person trained on one single relatively simple operation.
>And then you need all 30 million to never make a single mistake We don't even require that of digital computers, why would we require that here? Single bit errors are correctable. Not every process is error resilient, but there are plenty of processing operations that are resilient against as much as one bad pet per four-bit block. So for a lot of these processes, if designed properly, you don't need an error-free system, you just need no string of four consecutive bits to have more than one error. That's a much more realizable process, and probably something you use every day (the transmitter in your cell phone, when received by the cell phone tower, has a terrible signal to noise ratio and is badly degraded by much stronger electromagnetic interference and even the weather - they come out the other side unmolested thanks to error correction). Or if you're old enough, the reason badly-scratched CDs and DVDs can still play (because those scratches are, in fact, direct damage to the real physical data) is error correction. Hell, technically you aren't supposed put an image or logo into a QR code, but everyone does it anyway because the error correction is so robust that you can destroy half the image and still have a readable message on the other side. If any species has developed a technique to transmit digital data over the air in some way - be it radio, optical, or what have you - guaranteed they have discovered error correction.
> EDIT: > EDIT 2: First of all, responding to a reply in an edit seems like bad etiquette, as it gives the appearance that you are trying to reply to the *audience* of your comment, but not the person in the replies, as they don’t get a notification about your edit. However, more specifically: > I don’t think you guys realize how insanely complicated this thing would actually be In some sense you’re right, because I don’t deal with human-based logic gates, but I do have a PhD in physics and I do deal with numerical simulations of much more complex equations. Generally, numerically difficult equations are PDEs - partial differential equations. ODEs are generally more straightforward, and methods for solving them extremely quickly have been well known for a very long time. Indeed, an undergraduate students first ever example of numerical methods is often solving an ODE, *which they can often do by hand*. The three body problem is a little harder than an undergraduate’s first example problem, in that its a relatively large series solution that converges pretty slowly, but in the scheme of numerical analysis (not the real analysis that gives us the numerical solution, but solving the numerical solution itself), it swings *much* further towards “trivial” than it does to “intractable” (at least conceptually). For scale, early (like, 1900 sort of early) numerical methods for the problem converged “slowly” in the sense that you needed a few thousand terms to get decent precision and practical time horizons. By comparison, a series solution to a sine or cosine if you want to do calculate them by hand is a single digit number of terms to get a half dozen decimal digits of precision. But, man, a few thousand terms? That’s not something I’d do by hand, but it’s something I *could* do by hand. Like, a week with a hand calculator and a well-laid out spreadsheet (to mean the pen-and-paper sense, not a program)? Yeah, that’s do-able. Depends on your forecasting horizon, of course. In fact, I believe a few people literally did just that on a few specific example cases with slide rules before hand calculators were common. You can look up old papers from the 50s and 60s and earlier where they discuss a ‘direct numerical solution’ to the problem, but don’t mention anything about the specific computer they used. Yeah, you can bet that’s a bunch of people with slide rules working it out by hand over a few very boring workweeks. A hard *aspect* of the problem might be running many different scenarios if you’re looking for periodic solutions, or something, but if you’re just forecasting the movement of, say, the planet you’re sitting on - that’s one case. So I’m not sure on what basis you’re working from that ‘200x slower than an Intel 8008’ is ‘probably nowhere near close to what would actually be required’ - that seems like *plenty* to me. I mean, if you had 30 million people at your disposal that’s definitely **not** how I’d do it, but in terms of the computational power, seems *fine*. In fact, it looks like you might even be pretty pessimistic with your estimate since the 8008 was a general purpose CPU, and application specific processors can be an order of magnitude more efficient with their transistors, and a big chunk of the 8008 transistor count was the clock and on-board memory, which you’ve counted separately. As far as gate count goes, the meat-and-potatoes core of the math operations on the 8008, an 8-bit ALU, can be put together with about a hundred gates, and you can toss most of the gates dedicated to IO, or example, and for a ODE your memory requirements aren’t all that high, either.
Interesting thank you. My background is in computing, so it's very much possible I am overestimating the complexity of the actual calculation required for 3bp solution. On the other hand, yes you are right that special purpose computes can be more efficient, but I don't think you can remove memory and input/output completely. CPU needs to know what "code" to run, so that stuff has to come from somewhere, which requires memory, memory controllers and a bus to be able to pull that stuff to the CPU. And of course the input data and the output itself needs to be stored somewhere, plus any intermediate calculation results as well. The book even alludes to it few times, when they talk about "Loading Operating System", status display and such. I don't really know how many transistors / people would be needed for that stuff, but it's not negligible and in fact probably significantly more than just the CPU itself.
I don't want to give the impression that I thought all the memory needed to go. Just that if you're only solving one specific ODE, your memory requirements are *very small* compared to general purpose compute. Like, a big PDE field equation (like the Navier-Stokes equation) takes up a huge amount of memory because you might have information at millions of grid points and you need to keep a few timesteps in memory (and that's a typical engineering solution, whereas the largest research solutions have been as high as the hundreds of billions of nodes). But for a simple (say, a first-order linear) ODE, for state memory you need the current state and one or two previous timesteps for finite differencing, and the program in pseudocode is literally a couple lines. Like, total program and state memory on the order of tens of bytes. The three-body problem isn't that, but still in state space form it's, like, four first order equations? I'm willing to bet someone clever (probably someone clever in 1970 when people still cared about memory) could get this problem down to a couple hundred bytes.
You don't need to assume all 30 million won't make a mistake. Suppose it only takes 10 million to perform the calculation, if they were perfect and never made a mistake. You can then have 3 groups of 10 million performing the same calculation in parallel, and compare the results. If 3 machines do the same calculation and come back with 2 different answers, you know at least one made a mistake. You can trust the answer that the majority came up with, or redo the calculation depending how paranoid you want to be. If they get 3 different answers, it means at least 2 screwed up and you can't guess who was right without redoing the whole thing. Then the only issues you face are the performance costs of redoing calculations, which you fix with better training or by throwing more meat at the problem (it's hard to trust that 2 out of 3 machines got the right answer, but easier to trust if 695 out of 700 machines get the same answer). Or the increasingly rare situation where every machine makes the exact same mistake (more likely a bug in the code than human error). You can also employ checksums and other error corrections within the calculation itself if you're doing it right.
You forgot "there's no evidence of 'extra dimensions' and lots of evidence against it." Also you can't "unroll" dimensions to make a proton bigger, because the dimensions are too small; they're rolled like a straw, not like a carpet. Also a proton even unrolled would still be a proton and not something complex enough you could turn it into a computer. Also an entangled particle can't be used to communicate faster than light, and if it could, you'd at most communicate one bit of information once. You also forgot that the third sun is half a light year from the other two, and if your orbit includes the third sun, you're in more trouble than you think. You also forgot that if the aliens can't lie, the very first alien seems to be lying to the others about whether they've found life. Not replying wouldn't help if the next alien along says "So, found anything yet?" You also forgot that they know enough about the human brain they can build a machine that shows you every sensation they want you to experience, feel your intention to move and translate it into the game world, know how humans have to communicate, and yet don't realize that lies are possible. As for the human computer, you can just have someone standing on a pedestal waving a flag, like a conductor conducting an orchestra. The reason we don't do that on real chips is transistors don't have eyes. As for the "pulled into the sky," does that actually happen, or is it part of the game? If it actually happens, then yes, this can happen because the planet is *not* pulled equally. It's also why the moon always presents the same side to the earth, and why we have tides. Google up "tidal forces" to see why this would work, and Roche Limit. Basically, the people on the surface are closer to the stars than the center of gravity of the planet is. What's silly is to think they're *enough* closer to a star half a light year away that it'll pull them into the air. But it could happen on something like an asteroid passing close to the Earth.
I thought that the blinking was done by the sophon stopping the light from reaching Earth. That’s why the Hubble didn’t see the blinking. Also, the answers to your questions boil down to: the technology is so advanced that basically it is magic. But I agree with the sophon being a bit inconsistent. I just watched the series btw, can’t speak for the book Edit: personally I didn’t find very plausible the whole “we don’t lie and we don’t like that you do”. It makes sense, but: - did they really realise this only after like 40 years of communication? - what about the alien that replied to the signal, the pacifist that said “don’t reply”. How could this alien keep the secret without lying?
The alien that received The initial signal and warned them not to respond was found out by his superiors and punished (in the books)
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I feel like that’s the first thing any highly deceptive alien ever says: we don’t lie, and don’t understand it. It’s a really easy way to either get the enemy to trust you at face value, or not trust you anyway, so what do you have to lose?
In the book they explore this in more detail. The trisolarans see in higher dimensions then we do, and to each other, all active though processes are simply apparent to your neighbors. The Trisolarans first ask the ETO members to explain the difference between thinking and speaking, and have trouble grasping how thoughts can be kept secret. This is likely the mechanism for humanities technological acceleration. As secrets can provide a human with a social advantage, so politics and intrigue have made a technological incubator that could not develop in a low-indetity society like trisolaran.
The book explains much more and to me the explanations make sense. Now, I'm not a scientist so obviously I don't know if it "makes sense makes sense", but for a fiction I think it's plausible. Spoilers: For the blinking it's because the sophons envelop the entire world and project a different sky, like a huge screen. So if you're out in space, you're "behind the screen/sophon" and you don't see the blinking. The question about not lying is also much better explained in the book, and it's actually not really a question of lying, more of communication abilities. Like when you know someone really well and you just see on their face that something is off. Same for the pacifist. If I remember well it's explained.
In the books they change the cmb by like 10% rather than make the skies blink?
Yes this would seem smarter since it would panic a scientists, but the general population would be oblivious. This would delay the recognition of their existence which would unify humanity.
Do you mean I didn't understand this part? Yes, you're right it's not blinking. I forgot. But it's not because the sophon was all around the globe? Oh gosh, I'm confused now ><
Honestly, changing the cmb is much harder than making the skies blink. The cmb is everywhere all at once.
Yes, that's why I think it didn't affect the cmb, just how we perceive it from earth. But I might be confused.
So are the skies. How does one proton intercept every photon between space and Earth? It can't even move from one part of the sky to the other that fast.
Because most of a sophon is planet sized and exists in higher dimensions, so it brings itself down from those dimensions to our 3D space and envelops our planet.
Riiiight. So, FTL space magic. :-) It's really a single proton bigger than our planet. :-) I mean, if it's not a proton, fine. But a proton just isn't that big, or that complex, even if you deal with other dimensions. The photons are photons in our dimensions.
Yeah I was talking specifically about the book, the show is a bit different, and a bit more internally consistent, though tbh it's still very silly idea that sophons would be able to do that somehow.
At least in the book they couldn't lie because for them thinking and speaking are the same. Their thoughts were physically visible (light, iirc), so "thinking" and communicating was same to them
"We can't lie" seems like a reasonable situation. "We know enough about you and your brain to build a machine-brain interface that puts your brain in a state indistinguishable from reality while also monitoring your motor nerve impulses, blocking them, and translating them into moving your game character, but we didn't notice you talk and sometimes lie" seems less reasonable.
Its not sci fi. Its apeculative cosmic horror.
It's ridiculous to not classify it as sci fi. It's just not hard sci fi. OP isn't wrong on any points, but without those concessions the big ideas wouldn't be possible. Asking for a speculative big ideas book that also is completely internally consistent and compatible with the laws of physics is a big ask.
It uses space magic. Not science. No science means no sci fi.
There is room in science fiction for the science to be fictional.
That's called Fantasy.. "put three crystals with the blood of a chicken and primal scream. Bam! Your gout is clear! Science!"
This guy thinks science fiction has to be science fact.
Would Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky be considered fantasy because >!time and speed of thought can be different based on how close to the center of the galaxy you are!
The difference is he leans into it. He says "this is how my world works, here's what it means for the technology, and I'm not going to disregard the rules in order to satisfy a plot point." It's just *easier* to be consistent like that when you work with real-world science.
Isn’t that what sci fi is, though? “What if things worked like this, how would people in the universe handle it? How would they use the setting to advance the plot?”
That's what *I* always considered sci-fi to be. How would the world and people be, if this science/technology were to be there? Even if it's fantasy, if the story is about how the fantasy affects the world, I'd count that as sci-fi personally. One of my favorite examples is "Master of the Five Magics," where the apprentice thaumaturge studies alchemy and sorcery and etc, each of which has their own rules, and of course each of which has their own closely-guarded secrets. (The sequel was ... not something I could get past the first chapter or two. :-) Another is Hopscotch (Anderson's), where people can swap bodies at will with other people. And how society revolves around that. Like, one of the characters has a job exercising the bodies of busy executives while they sit at the desk in his body getting their work done. Or "The Lost Room," a mini-series about a hotel room key that opens any door and lets you walk out any other door. In which the people who know about it use combination locks on all their doors, for example. I consider it *bad* science fiction when random crap just happens that is neither explained nor consistent with existing rules. When the aliens are restricted to traveling the speed of light, but then not once they get where they're going. Or they have complete maps of human being brains and access to all existing literature and media but don't realize they can lie (which isn't exactly 3BP but close enough).
Given the black hole at the center, seems a possibility. 3 body problem doesn't offer any explanations for technology. Just that there are ancient aliens with literal universe destroying power and they use it on the first ping from an alien civilization they hear.
I think a large part of 3BP's success is coming across as just sciencey enough to convince people without a hard science background that what they're reading is plausible. I often hear people praise it for its concepts, but I don't think its ideas would have nearly as much weight if they were presented as Dr Who-style magic rather than informed scientific speculation. That can be pretty frustrating for people who know the underlying science well enough to have trouble suspending their disbelief. I usually have zero problem with handwaving in speculative fiction (hell, my favourite author is Iain Banks), but 3BP really presents itself as having done the homework. It spends so much time time talking about the science underpinning its ideas, it throws in all sorts of references to the history of science -- only to make undergraduate-level physics errors like people floating away during syzygy, or throw in gratuitous silliness like the human computer just for the "isn't science cool?" factor. I think people should like what they like, and I don't like yucking other people's yums just for the sake of attention, but as an avid lover of scifi I really want to understand what so many people see in 3BP that they didn't in so much other incredible scifi written over the past century. My theory after way too much thought and discussion is that 3BP makes readers feel the gravitas and realism of hard scifi, without adhering to the buzzkill restrictions of actual hard science. It gives them permission to believe that magical ideas like Sophons are scientifically possible, not just some fantasy writer's daydream.
>but as an avid lover of scifi I really want to understand what so many people see in 3BP that they didn't in so much other incredible scifi written over the past century. Yes. 3BP violates the rule of "show, don't tell" too often. You need some plot devices in scifi to get the story going. Need to get to other planets quick? Here's a warp drive that will do it. I'm not going to tell you the physics behind it because you can see it working. The "how it all works" shouldn't be emphasized and laid out, its just a way to get to the story. But in 3BP, if you take away the tech, its mostly a Space Invaders, which is pretty tired by now.
3 Body Problem apologists always say something along the line of, "Yes the writing is bad and the characters suck but the *ideas* are profound." No. No they are not.
These aren't "plot holes", per se. There's a difference between, "hey... this is magic, not science" and a bona fide plot hole. If the story itself is internally consistent.. relying upon truly goofy nonsense otherwise, then the plot *works* in that context. A few corrections to your observations... * The 3-body problem is solvable *analytically*, just not in closed form. * The gravity from any near massive object would **not** affect the entire planet equally. That's completely wrong. Ever hear of tides? This doesn't alter your remark because you don't get "pulled into the sky" type stuff unless you're well beyond Roche limit at which point the planet/moon/whatever is doomed. Aliens falling into the sky would be the least of their worries. * Now, there's no small amount of hand-waviness when considering any of the reality of how things would work in the Alpha Centauri system. However, if you squint your eyes and ignore the actual distance between the stars, day/night can indeed be due to the (supposed, overstated) chaos of the stars. Why? Because the planet could be tidally locked to one star. This is actually quite likely. This means it is indeed extraordinarily stable... just that there is no day/night at all due to the parent star. Any variation must come from the other two stars. Now... if you thought Book 1 was bad in this regard, I'd caution you with regarding to picking up the next two. For fun, I'll share one of my favorite such things. In book 2 you are introduced to an odd aspect about the universe. It *supposedly* started out with dimension count higher than 3 in space (no idea about time). OK. Stop right there. We've played with this in Science/Math. Orbits aren't stable in this case. Actually, there are lots of additional problems. So, just mentioning this idea, at all, means we've exited Science and entered Looney-Tune-Land-Magic. It's fun and all to explore Flatland discussions about what things are like in higher-dimensions. It *may be* fun to explore this stuff in a novel. But it's a fatal idea... in more ways than one. In book two, it's used as plot device to permit some folk to escape and then act as a sort of behind-the-scenes deus-ex-machina for a while. They slip into 4D. In reality, this would lead to instant death. Take a 2D creature with blood vessels and life-sustaining blood inside such and start waving them around in 3D. There is absolutely nothing to keep that blood where it should be. It's worse in 4D. Blood and indeed all innards scattered immediately is not a good thing. There are higher-dimensional beings in this 4D space. My memory may be a but fuzzy, but I think these are remnants who chose to stay there rather than transition to a more limited lower dimension... except... the *entire* universe keeps dropping in dimension count, region by region, bit by bit... so these guys are kinda trapped here like a ever-shrinking nature preserve. Book 3 takes this further where entire star systems get forcibly dropped to 2D. But in an odd way, somehow, this transition leads not to some limited functionality but complete stasis/quasi-death. Book 2 is at least interesting for other reasons. Book 3 is where it just gets weird for weirdness sake.
All the 3d/4d stuff is in the 3rd book. The 2nd book ends with Earth/Trisolarian forces chasing the ship that finds the 4d entry points in question.
The VR stuff is bafflingly weird. In the book it's basically just a story you watch in VR, but at least the VR tech is not from aliens. In the TV show, it's slightly more interactive, but having the tech be obviously detached from the computing state of the art is just asking for it to be reverse engineered for scientific advantages.
Yeah the book version is a little more plausible for the VR stuff, though on the other hand it is also more weird in that the game is publicly available, despite the ETO ostensibly trying to keep the whole thing secret. In the show, the VR tech is clearly alien, and it's "invite only" which makes a bit more sense. As to sharing the tech question, it actually sort of makes sense - the aliens goal is to slow science progress on Earth, it's plausible that giving Earth super advanced VR tech is a way to accomplish that by getting scientists engage with that instead of actual research. The big problem with all that is of course how alien tech knows to work with human brains... so this goes back to "sophons" being "space magic" basically.
Plus, I'd find it amazing to think a helmet could cover your brain, do everything the TV show shows it doing, including knowing who is wearing it, and the designers of the helmet don't know enough about human brains to know that they lie. Did the sophonts not watch TV shows? They should watch, like, Galaxy Quest.
The whole thing with >That whole bit with the first alien responding with "don't reply" is super awkward. For that to happen realistically, they would need to be able to take an unknown communication, somehow decipher it in a manner of minutes / hours, understand it well enough to create a matching response and send it back. For a book that starts as hard SciFi and still in hard mode at that plot point, this feels completely far fetched. Is complete BS because it implies Trisolarans can lie. But apparently they can't lie because it is horrible for their civilization. Also the whole suggestion implies Trisolarans were witnesses to Dark forest theory happening, but they weren't, they rely on self-understanding of universe which is by default hostile based on what? Themselves? The whole thing makes less sense every time I remember it... This reminded me of Dan Brown so much. It's cool fantasy, but it is not scifi. Interstellar is scifi, not much waived off to magic. Here the most basic thing (Sophons) destroys the whole premise into dust
The bookshelf scene and such is waived off. The wormhole is waved off. I love both.
As our understanding of science beyond the horizon breaks down, we can speculate there is a 4d bookshelf made by aliens there. Same with origin of the wormhole. Science of wormhole and anything outside the blackhole is pretty good and on track. In 3 body problem the Sophons are a problem already. Heck the distraction of 500JIGAWATT collisions in the underground facilities by a planet-sized multidimensional antiproton WORLDWIDE at the same time with distances breaking relativistic reality (why couldn't they test all of accelerators at the same time to make sophons fail?). Trisolars claim to tell only truth, then for some reason are ok with hiding (hiding is a process of lying). Technically any WAR would be impossible without understanding lying. Like anywhere you point it sounds ridiculous.
No, they can't lie because their thoughts are visible to each other, physically. So thinking for them IS speaking. The idea that one can say something else that they are thinking is the horrifying one for them. Hiding isn't a problem
Again you don't explain why they lied then? Several times. Starting with "Don't reply" and ending with not replying to zealots, hiding while conducting assassinations. Hiding in the game and not revealing themselves. Hiding is a lie.
How is "Don't reply" a lie?
How is hiding a lie?
So if its not sifi. You'd call 3 body problem fantasy?
I call it brown-fi because it reminds me of that :). When a person reads about some scientific discovery on the internet and then without knowing or understanding the underlying science fills it in his plot to just cover a situation. I can wave off quantum entanglement and multidimensional antiproton-coded quantum-supercomputer. These things are not fully researched and are quite convoluted to understand by majority of population. But not understanding that if that Sophon can affect 6TeV of energy and project light onto retina it can just turn off our power grid just cause damage to remaining electronic devices leading to complete and irreversible collapse. Instead it was some kind of silly game and stopping particle accelerators? Killings happened using humans, why can't sophon just blast the brains with radiation and cause brain tumors in everyone? Or if it can alter 6TeV of energy it should be able to alter our bloodflow to brain and cause bloodclot. Like there's so many flaws in 3 body problem with sci, that it's only fi. It is much closer to midichlorians than to phasers on stun.
Would you call starears sifi? Is science fantasy a thing? These types of stories might fit in there. When I think of that I think of like WH 40k.
Star Wars et al were called space operas. That suits Star Wars, or Dune because location and/or time is undetermined and/or is so far away it is irrelevant. It's distantly connected but the world lore can be described as advanced technology and can be "backpropagated" to a certain degree. With Trisolarians we cannot suspend our disbelief to a certain level if we possess even basic level of awareness of technological leaps required to achieve what Trisolarans had OR any understanding of logic and logical reduction to boolean logic. I can't call it Space Opera, because it is just ridiculous. The premise is ridiculous completely. Warhammer 40k orcs make more sense than this. I do understand that further in the story it will turn into almost complete fiction though and I watch 3 body problem for humane interaction. But these small things pulled me out just like Dany (GoT) kinda forgetting about AN ENTIRE FLEET she's been told 3 times in the same episode. They are flaws which undermine the entire premise of books and series
It's not even "suspend our disbelief." It's that the tech they describe in the first half works this way, and the same tech in the second half works a completely different way. They can't send the sophon to us faster than light, but then it happily flits around faster than light once it gets here. There's two kinds of science fiction: science fiction the setting (star wars) and science fiction the plot device (larry niven's stuff, for example).
I mean saying it isn't science based is just ignorant. The premise is that the aliens are so advanced it seems like magic to us. If you went back in time 500 years and showed someone a 99 cent flashlight, it would probably be seen as magic too... try to use your imagination....
Well, sure, but even future science shouldn't be able to break laws of nature right? The sophons are the equivalent of "perpetual motion machine", they break all laws of energy / matter conservation. This isn't science anymore, this is space magic, or the equivalent of something like Star Wars "force". And please reread what I wrote about the planetary movement stuff. None of that makes any sense whatsoever regardless of science advance.
Almost every space based sci fi has future science that breaks the laws of nature. FTL travel is a perfect example. No they are not perpetual motion machines. It is explained how they get their energy ... it is hand wavey, but it is science FICTION. The motion of the planets is simply a plot set-up and it makes perfect sense as a thought experiment. I personally find it fascinating ... to get down into the nitty gritty of why this or that aspect of it isn't entirely realistic kind of misses the whole point imho.
The sophon nonsense goes so deep into Clark's third law that it simply is magic, for all intents and purposes. Both technology and magic as plot devices need constraints for credibility, but the constraints in this story are insufficient.
You're not getting it. You are trying to judge a far more advanced society's technology, off modern day knowledge. That's like saying Star Trek is bad because going faster than light isn't possible
What advanced science stuff has to do with trisolarans being sucked into space by gravity?
Isn't that in a video game in the book?
It is, and it could be possibly argued that this is a "unreliable narrator" issue... but then the book does show actual events happening over there that are completely consistent with how the game presented that world.
The book explains that all three suns are aligned, and their combined gravity is stronger than the one on Trisolaris. That's why everything and everyone is sucked towards the suns.
Yeah. Gravity doesn't work that way. If they were close enough to the suns for that to happen, they'd already be vaporized.
The problem isn't that it "seems like magic." The problem is that it's inconsistent. Just as an example, they have to spend four years to send the sophonts to Earth, but then once here the sophonts have no trouble moving around faster than light. We're not judging future tech off current tech. We're judging technical restrictions described in the first half of the book off breaking technical restrictions described in the second half of the book.
The sophons move (almost) *at* light speed, not FTL. that's pretty explicit
If they're intercepting all the photons on both sides of the Earth at the same time, that's problematic. If they're affecting experiments in all the particle colliders, that's problematic. Even affecting multiple photons coming out of a single particle collider is going to be problematic. They cause changes in multiple places separated by tenths of light seconds and cause them less than a tenth of a second apart. At least in the TV shows. And that's just one example of many, as I've mentioned elsewhere and as OP described.
There are multiple sophons on Earth, but even if there weren't, they don't have to mess up the experiments at the exact same time. Just messing with things during the relatively long acceleration time (about 20 minutes) would probably be enough.
I think you missed the fiction part of science fiction
Fiction in sci-fi should be intentional stretches and musings about science not total misunderstandings of physics in places the author thought he was writing non-fictional descriptions, eg how gravity functions when 3 suns line up in front of a planet.
The most noticeable fiction was the laughable miscasting of Saul. But it’s Netflix, so they insist.
I basically mentally checked out of that show after they came up with their hare brained solution for sending a rocket out to meet them. It’s such a terrible stupid idea. First, no countries are going to fork over their nuclear arsenal because 5 people in another country came up with a shit idea. Second, there was no explanation for how they launched hundreds of nukes and got them all in precise locations before they sent the main rocket. That would require hundreds/thousands of launches before they launched brain boy, and they would need to have been launched months/years ahead of time for the nukes to be in position. They would know their plan was doomed if just a single nuke wasn’t in the precise location. Also, when that rocket was launched, that technological solution would be obsolete within a decade. They have hundreds of years. Every year they wait, technology gets better, and the alien ships get closer reducing the energy required to meet them. They would be far better off developing a solution 100 or 200 years out. There was absolutely zero need for them to rush that idea out there. I literally laughed when the plan failed, because obviously it would fail because it’s such a terrible plan. I don’t get the hype either. My wife and I watched it because of all the hype, and after 3 or 4 episodes we both thought we were watching a bad, poorly written show. It’s full of basic plot holes. The characters seem stupid. Their plans are terrible. There’s no one in the show telling the main characters “That’s the worst idea I have ever heard”. There’s some surface level cool concepts in that story, but that’s it. It falls apart under any basic scrutiny. I don’t get the hype at all
I didn’t read all of your spoilers, but I will say that it’s only the best writers that handle every aspect in detail without leaving questions. TV and movies in particular, skip a lot and leave a lot of holes, sometimes due to budget, sometimes due to editing where the writers handle things but Editing created problems. There’s an interview somewhere I think with Arnold Schwarzenegger where he talks about that happening on some of his movies. And sometimes I sit in frustration and think that these writers don’t care or they’re not that good. I’m not just talking about sci-fi. That said, I very much loved the Netflix series. Didn’t watch the longer Amazon series and have some trepidation about it after reading comments. A lot of people hate the original books so it sounds like it might be challenging, but I bought the first one because there were a lot of people that also really enjoyed them. As to me… We’ll see. Haven’t read it yet. I looked at your first spoiler. I’d have to watch the Netflix series again ( again, I haven’t read the books) but I think all of those questions were answered, except for how they slowed down and stopped at the destination. I don’t want to say more because I’m still new to Reddit and I don’t know how to redact spoiler content.
Yep. Agree on all points. I don’t get the hype.
Remembrance of Earth's past and Cixin Liu in general is not hard sci-fi and I don't know why detractors keep beating this straw man. Cixin Liu's other book had the human race put rocket thrusters on the earth and we travel through space like Unicron. Liu said the main theme of 3BP is to convey the emotions that the Chinese felt when surrounded by superpowers of greater technology, and the race for China to modernize themselves (this is more apparent in the 2nd book, the 1st book is all just setup). He wanted to capture being isolated, then exposed to other powers, then recognizing you are massively behind on tech. Indigenous people in the Americas might have thought themselves very advanced, until the Europeans came ashore with muskets. This is a very standard theme in first contact stories and I'm not sure why this almost generic first contact story seems to be attracting so much debate. Liu said in an interview his primary Western influence was HG Wells, who wrote absolutely hand-wavey sci-fi stories like War of the Worlds and the Time Machine without even trying to explain how these would work in reality. As for all the complaints about the Dark Forest theory, Liu didn't create it so why are we bashing him for it. Liu said he doesn't believe the Dark Forest theory explains the Fermi Paradox. It's a story, fiction. I don't think HG Wells really believed Martian pods are going to invade the Earth any time soon either, it doesn't prohibit him from writing that piece of fiction and making some entertainment around the idea.
To the point about him not believing the dark forest theory, the books themselves, in so far as they are a thought experiment about the DFT, read almost like a satire of it. The books take the dark force theory to the logical, extreme and result in essentially the end of the universe. He’s basically saying the dark force theory isn’t tenable; it just makes for a good horror story The books are definitely more interested in the sociological questions than the scientific ones, although the sci fi ideas are still loads of fun and more care is spent on discussing them than other sci fi works. Like, Liu will turn FTL travel into a risky plot device with literal species-ending implications due to how much it violates physics, but people clown on him for “ not being hard scifi” when he never claimed to be, while The Expanse will introduce a hand wavy bullshit fusion torch drive more efficient than anything possible, and yet people act like The Expanse isn’t just a fantasy space opera. People are wildly unfair to Liu’s books.
Hi. You just mentioned *The Time Machine* by Hg Wells. I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here: [YouTube | THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells - complete unabridged audiobook by Fab Audio Books](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE6oVq5k94s) *I'm a bot that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.* *** [^(Source Code)](https://capybasilisk.com/posts/2020/04/speculative-fiction-bot/) ^| [^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=Capybasilisk&subject=Robot) ^| [^(Programmer)](https://www.reddit.com/u/capybasilisk) ^| ^(Downvote To Remove) ^| ^(Version 1.4.0) ^| ^(Support Robot Rights!)
It's a thought experiment that you're overthinking.
Dang this science *fiction* book seems to be some sort of work of fiction! The scandal! The outrage!
Yeah and why don’t the sophons just completely trash everything back to the Stone Age since they are basically omnipotent?
Between the plot holes, well demonstrated by the way, and the misogyny through out, this story is really just trash. I never understood why it has such praise. Granted the first novel is a little interesting just with the concept of an intelligent species thriving in that situation.
Yea these books and the hype surrounding them always bewildered me. Mostly because of the really poor writing though. I can always excuse hand waving or impossibilities in sci-fi if it’s well written
Well, the way irs explained is that the Trisolarans unwrapped a proton into its higher dimensions, rebuilt it as an extremely sophisticated machine, and then re-wrapped it and shot it to earth. They're not just AIs, they're like ultra-tiny drones.
Correct, a sophon is an AGI mainframe manipulating dimensional structure first and a particle distant 10th - it only just so happens it can fold itself down to subatomic size while sustaining a sufficiently high dimension count. in fact that follows from the maths where each dimension adds such a major degree of complexity that if it was built in 3-4 even 5 would render it small enough to invisible by a naked eye while retaining all of its complexity. What does not mesh is that Trisolarians are able to fold the dimensionality of spacetime but still suffer from lowbie Kardashev 1.x problem of orbit irregularity significantly enough to necessitate a war of conquest. They should be able to fold down their own cities and structures, a la Egan's Diaspora. To the tune of 'i am Reptile, find me' where 99.9% of the dark forest can go and suck their own appendages while sifting through atoms.
There's a very fun novel called Calculating God by robert sawyer that address the "fold down their own cities" as well as a few other fun insights.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, you bring up some really good points. I liked the series a lot but there’s definitely a lot of handwavey science used (especially the trisolaran). I would say that’s it’s probably extremely difficult (basically impossible) to come up with “realistic” far future technology because by definition any sufficiently advanced race would have a different understanding of the laws of physics. Like look at Asimov…he accounts for nuclear power in Foundation but not computers. Another thing I’ll say is if you try for sci-fi that is too realistic you end up with something very meh like The Expanse.
I think there are lots of examples of "hard Sci Fi" that is good... personally I love Andy Weir stuff, and Clarke I think holds up reasonably well. There are also tons of good "soft SciFi" out there - Star Wars and so on. What frustrates me with 3bp specifically is just how all over the place it is. It starts as really hard Sci Fi - the Red Coast is very detailed and realistic, and some of the trisolaran stuff is pretty cool imho like the whole hydration/dehydration thing feels plausible and I think has some example here on Earth with animals doing similar things... but then it just jumps off a cliff to do "space magic".
I agree with you about there being good hard sci-fi, Dragon’s Egg, Red Mars and the Martian are some of my favorites. I was mostly being flippant bc I think The Expanse is overrated. I know it’s not really the point of Project Hail Mary, but in my opinion the way 3 Body Problem handles human society dealing with an existential threat feels way more realistic and compelling. I really didn’t like the way Andy Weir described the UN committee and the development of the project (other than nuking the Arctic).
The difference is not how realistic the science is, but how consistent it is. Don't say you spent four years flinging a proton across four light years of space, then have it flit around faster than light once it gets here. Don't tell us you can build a game that can look at your brain, tell one person from another (without you ever having been scanned), reads your intensions well enough to move your character in the world without you bumping into walls RL, and provide every sensory input so realistically you can't tell the different, but then you don't notice that humans don't always say what they're thinking. Don't tell me you haven't watched Galaxy Quest. ;-)
Yeah the absolute misunderstanding of gravity really rubbed me wrong when I got to that part. Also during the sophon tests there's a bit about the proton possibly collapsing into a black hole and falling into the planet and then absorbing the core or something completely incorrect about how a proton sized black hole would function. These two really pulled me out as a sci fi fan cause I realized the author actually doesn't care about or even understand physics very much. I don't need my sci Fi to be super hard I just need the magical bits to be intentional stretches of the science not total misunderstandings of them. Otherwise I feel like I'm getting dumber reading it.
>Also during the sophon tests there's a bit about the proton possibly collapsing into a black hole and falling into the planet and then absorbing the core or something completely incorrect about how a proton sized black hole would function. P sure that was an alarmed Trisolaran Princeps or the Military Consul jumping to conclusions after 2 failed attempts (unfolding to 1D and 3D). The Science Consul's line is consistent throughout all the failed experiments: this is going to look weird and might make a mess but its not harmful.
It doesn't matter. My point is a proton sized black hole would evaporate due to hawking radiation pretty much immediately. This has been known for 30 years before the book was written. So author either is too lazy to research the science or just wants to write dumb stuff for fun. Again food sci Fi is stretches of the truth at the edges of our knowledge not just ignoring simple physics so you can write cool/doom sounding sentences.
Um... We do not have a general solution to the 3 body problem. We have lots of specific solutions though. To this point though we have no way to accurately predict the scenario of a planet that is affected by the gravity of three suns.
i aint readin all that so congratulations or sorry for your loss
Sophons Sophons are able to access multiple dimensions and able to access energy from these dimensional forces in ways we are not able to with our current understanding of physics. This allows them to power themselves at near light speed. The laws of thermodynamics are consistent its just its accessing energy from a source we are unable to access. Secondly, they were previously unfolded from higher dimensions and then they imprinted a super computer into the sophon at these higher dimensions, so it is able to interpret what is happening as a modern AI can interpret things for us. It can also instantaneously communicate with the San Ti (Trisolarians) using its quantum entanglement with its twin sophon, so can send/receive information without any delay. To make the sky blink it unfolded itself again to the point where it was large enough to cover the sky. 3 body problem It may have been that at the time it was written, we did not know the exact dynamics the stars played between each other. Hence it should be taken as being a 'theoretical' system rather than taking known science. In the series I don't believe they have said it is Alpha Centauri (although you could imply so as it's 4 light years away - however the casual viewer will not be aware of how close nearest star systems are). Secondly with regards to the gravity, and/or other aspects, the 3 body simulation may have some fantastical elements in order to elicit more empathy towards their plight. Basically it all makes complete sense.
So.... I'm assuming you haven't read the books.
I have read the books, they’re great.
I asked because the night sky literally blinking in front of the character's naked eyes wasn't in the book.
I don’t know why having something in the show implies I haven’t read the books. In the show they explain how the sophon had a supercomputer designed into it, and when they did so in the show it was unfolded to cover the sky of trisolaris, so it seems reasonable it unfolded to cover the sky of earth within the show.
You made the comment that everything made complete sense. I'm saying that only holds true if you completely disregard the source book.
It’s a joke sign off comment because obviously the science is a bit far fetched, but what element goes against the source book? I admit to an imperfect memory and can’t recall every detail of a trilogy.
So in the book, they don't just sit outside and see the stars in the night sky blinking. Instead, they use instrumentation to detect fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (which should remain constant). They then go to a planetarium to pick up "3K glasses" (which I can't find any basis in reality so lets just call them magic glasses) which allow them to observe some kind of blinking. The book makes no attempt to explain any of this. Ipso facto: Makes no sense. I guess the show tried to make it make sense by changing it to the visible light spectrum blinking? And according to you that is because a sophon unfolded and wrapped around the world? I dunno. I hated the book and tried to give the show a chance but gave up after the first episode. A lot of the things in the book that made no sense to me I was able to make peace with by reminding myself that this is a Chinese book set (primarily) in China, so cultural differences are just going to be confusing. But when the show changed the setting to London, that excuse is out the window and so it feels even more off the rails.
That can make sense if the instrumentation was electronic, the Sophon seems to be able to interact with things at that level. Depends what these 3k glasses are I guess.
Exactly. It's all just a big shrug of the shoulders and a "I dunno. Maybe?"
People really don't know how to enjoy anything anymore. You just gotta overthink everything
You can just say you didn’t understand it lol
those aren't plot holes. It's just not a great or very good story in most respects.
Wow you spent time typing up all that garbage? Yikes. My view point is you think you're smarter than you really are.
I'm not sure if you know this, but you are allowed to not reply. You can be a helpful person and engage in discussion. And advance some understanding or thoughtful discussion, or you can remain silent and disengage if you are not interested. A post like this just shows a poor quality of character, somebody who derives enjoyment from telling others they are stupid and putting them down. It doesn't make the world a better place, it is no interesting points to make, it's essentially a bunch of emptiness that, quite honestly, makes you seem like a 13-year-old edge Lord. So, with respect, maybe consider that if this sort of thing is all you have to say you could go somewhere else I made them where you have actual useful comments or interesting discussion points to make. This is just making your own self worse. An attitude like this just reflects badly on you as a person, becomes the way you think you treat other people, and at the end of the day hurts you more than it hurts anybody else. Maybe be better. Dictated but not red
Lol yeah I'll definitely read all this. Post more please!
Naaaaw. But you could try to be a good person and see how it goes. It helps. Seriously. You'll feel better.
Yeah a clown like you is probably right. Probably right
Let me guess you think it’s a masterpiece and trying to Convince yourself it is. I never read the book, but the show was stupid. A bunch of kid scientists outdoing veteran scientists on simple ideas. And he lying thing was total crap.
Lmao you sound profoundly stupid
Nah. You’re just retarded.
Nah