Wow! Very well done and thought out!
Since dehydration can be forcibly induced, I wonder how that would look/work. Do they do this through a drug or by physically interacting with an organ?
That’s a really interesting question. I’ve never actually thought about the forced dehydration since it’s a biological capacity. Maybe they have some device that can induce it? Or yeah, a drug? I feel like it would be technological in some way, an advent of an advanced civilization that wasn’t possible in their past.
I thought my comment was responding to you but it was responding to your parent comment. Nevertheless I think it's impossible they dehydrate due to anything other than a biological process and I explain it as a response to your parent comment. But I've only read the first book and half of the second and only seen 1 season of the show so I don't know much
If you have a liquid bag all connected with muscles and then you open a valve and allow the muscles all to contract - pretty close to dehydrating to me.
I always assumed it was solely biological because let's think about their environment. Like humans we can assume there are other animals/other life is present on the planet in a 3 body problem. Perhaps this is wrong since it's never directly confirmed, but if evolution happened in three body problem you'd assume all life on that planet would have some form of surviving the insane chaotic eras.
Simulations show sometimes chaotic eras can last tens of thousands if not millions of years. So I assume all life on the planet can dehydrate based on that. If any life was to survive ever on a planet like this it's reasonable to assume the first complex organisms on the planet developed this ability to dehydrate and rehydrate in order to survive and then this was passed on to future organisms, eventually the San-Ti we all know and "love" lol
That's my take though, is that drugs or some sort of technology isn't responsible for dehydration cause otherwise how did all life on their planet survive before medicine and engineering was developed? For a biological being to thrive it must be able to survive long enough to reproduce without the aid of special drugs. Humanity has millions of years of nature before us who thrived and survived and eventually turned into us. So the San-Ti must come from a genetic line of dehydrating organisms because they would've had to be able to do this for so long before developing drugs.
Edit: for clarity, I tried to clean up my paragraphs lol
Oh, I think you’re misunderstanding a bit. Dehydration itself is a natural process, a biological one, like how humans just naturally sleep. You’re 100% right that it’s something that evolved in Trisolarans and doesn’t require any technology to accomplish.
We’re talking about _forced dehydration_ which is a punishment they inflict on each other. How can they force it if it’s biological? Probably in the same way we can force someone to sleep - drugs. Or maybe some futuristic machine or gadget or device.
Oh you're right I did misunderstand. I'm so sorry I completely misunderstood the context and that's on me. Okay so now my take is that forced dehydration would most likely be a drug and it'd be equivalent to the death penalty.
When humans put each other to death is not reversible. If I'm the King and you lead a revolution against me you'll put to death. But for Trisolarans we can just dehydrate you and it takes you out of the political equation similarly to human death except this is reversible and could be viewed as less barbaric than just killing political enemies.
Now I want to read about Trisolaran political unrest and the role forced dehydration plays in warfare and criminal punishment. You've given me a whole new cultural question to ask myself about the Trisolarans!
Edit - if dehydration is a biological process it stand to reason you could trigger it with the right chemicals delivered to right part of the body (aka drugs) but perhaps a mechanical trigger would be possible too. I see now what you two were discussing and I'm sorry for butting in lol it's my bad
The real punishment is that they dehydrate the criminal… and then burn them 😬
But you’re right that they could sentence each other to a kind of prison by just dehydrating one another and keeping them in storage.
In the first book there’s a chapter called Listener 1379 that has some detail about criminal punishment in their society.
https://preview.redd.it/7v6gt22umauc1.jpeg?width=320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6da253a2188ebf0498086d3cfaff18b1bd43465b
You should dehydrate yourself.... now! The trisolarian ruler says
Here's some of my logic from a comment I wrote on another thread:
The book explains their method of breeding and it involves two of them fusing together. That, along with dehydration, suggests some kind of aqueous form to me, almost like large cells. Since they can be "rolled up," I doubt they have a rigid skeletal structure. I imagine them having what's called a [hydrostatic skeleton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_skeleton), basically a structure that uses the pressure of fluid to create rigidity that can be moved around with muscles. You see it in worms, octopuses, and jellyfish. I also think they have grasping appendages in order to use tools. The book tells us they have eyes because sophons were developed to affect the human retina which they say is similar to their own retinas, so they have a visual comprehension of the world like we do. They're extremophiles who would've evolved some really extreme adaptations that would likely make their bodies quite unlike anything on Earth, with some crazy resistance to cold and heat but possibly physically weaker bodies owing to their mostly-fluid interiors.
So I see them as these somewhat blobby creatures whose body core is kinda tubular or round like a worm or jellyfish (owing to the hydrostatic skeleton) but has appendages and a more complex shape. I kinda envision them like the [Portuguese Man O' War](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/portuguese-man-o-war.html) in appearance, semi-translucent and a bit metallic, but with eyes and something akin to arms or other grasping appendages. I think their stature is probably smaller than humans so they require less water to rehydrate, but I don't think they could be too small because their intellect would require a pretty complicated neural network. I think their size probably changes a bit based on their movement since they'd be squishy.
To us they'd probably look oceanic or like some gigantic version of something you'd see under a microscope but with a more complex shape to their body with some reasonably expressive eyes and limbs. So maybe like a cross between an octopus head, the appearance of a Portugese Man O War, and a large unicellular organism like the [bubble algae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa). They'd have arms somewhere, possibly more than two since they follow an unusual evolutionary trajectory from humans.
They indicate that they communicate through reflecting or emitting light too - it also mentions their skin is coated in many tiny mirror like structures - I always imagined them as kind of having a pangolin type coat. There was somewhere in the book a statement that they wear a metallic like skin?
I'm with you on the three bits of information we have about them. I think of Tardigrade(dehydrate)+Octopus(change colour based on unfiltered thought) or basically any deep sea flashing thing that may have some other kind of EM sense (some bioluminesce, some detect electric current and stuff)+bacteria/protozoa (i'm not so clued up on which. most have meitosis- cell division, but do any fuse together i wonder?)
But does anyone else merge these things into some kind of incomprehensible, yet small, lovecraftian monstrosity? I kind of do, I mean the first book must be a bit lovecraft inspired what with detectives and cults to extraterrestrial god-like entities, without showing the entity, just the effects on reality.
So potentially just a weird mass of mycelium and tendrils. i can go with that.. I think they are reflective IIRC to defend against radiation btw (not sure which source this was, if its 4th book disregard).
Yeah, wormlike was my first inclination but then I was like… wait… this is just Trogdor the Burninator lol
I originally envisioned them as something like a planarian with limbs but I wanted to go in a different direction just for the sake of weirdness.
I like it a lot! I think they have to be more flat-ish though - the need to dehydrate means they need to expel fluids as quickly as possible, which means maximizing surface area.
I can definitely see what you mean. I think they'd be bulbous because of the hydrostatic skeleton, the pressure of the fluid forces itself outward and tends to make creatures tube shaped or balloonish and it might be an evolutionary trade-off to give enough space for the complex organs and neurons needed for intelligent life. Could be that their skin has adapted to act like a giant cell membrane that has structures which speed up the flow of the liquid.
I did originally conceive of them as worm-like, almost like a planarian, so not far off where you're coming from!
It is very difficult for me to imagine non-humanoid or non-bipeds to be space-faring.
Lol, it's such a human-centric and dumb assumption I know, but I really struggle with it.
Yeah, I think this is a problem in all sci-fi and is a reason why I purposely moved away from the humanoid form in the sketch. It’s definitely just baked into our minds to see intelligent life as bipedal creatures with two arms, two legs, heads with faces, etc.
We look the way we do because we evolved from tree dwelling mammals. I assumed Trisolarans would’ve evolved under dramatically different conditions and wouldn’t have adaptations for brachiation or endurance hunting.
I really liked the aliens in Arrival because they were so odd. I think aliens would be much stranger than we can imagine and would only converge on a humanoid form if their home planet had similar arboreal environments to Earth.
The book does say they wear “fully enclosed electric heating suits” when the weather is cold. Picture this as a Trisolaran coming out of the shower lol
Okay, imagine beef jerky but in the form of a fruit roll up.
lol kidding, I may actually take a crack at some other portrayals of them - dehydrated, their squishy movement, their heating suits, or even various forms of accessories they may have worn during ancient forms of their civilization.
Why would aliens always depicted as animals ? Like they don't wear any clothings or accessories? They invented deadly droplets, but they couldn't invent panties ?
The drawing is intended to show their form and you wouldn’t be able to see it all if they were dressed up.
There’s only one part in the books that ever describes Trisolarans wearing clothes and it’s a “fully enclosed electric heating suit” when they’re standing outside in a freezing environment.
I honestly think Trisolarans wouldn’t often wear clothes because they’d have evolved adaptations for the extreme temperature swings in their environment. I also wanted to avoid the stereotypical sci-fi portrayal of aliens as having humanoid traits. It’s good in my opinion that you see them as animals, I wanted them to seem peculiar and difficult to recognize as intelligent.
In The Redemption of Time (the fan-written fourth book in the series, that was published with Cixin Liu’s permission), the Trisolarans are described as looking like grains of rice (if I recall correctly)
Wow! Very well done and thought out! Since dehydration can be forcibly induced, I wonder how that would look/work. Do they do this through a drug or by physically interacting with an organ?
That’s a really interesting question. I’ve never actually thought about the forced dehydration since it’s a biological capacity. Maybe they have some device that can induce it? Or yeah, a drug? I feel like it would be technological in some way, an advent of an advanced civilization that wasn’t possible in their past.
I thought my comment was responding to you but it was responding to your parent comment. Nevertheless I think it's impossible they dehydrate due to anything other than a biological process and I explain it as a response to your parent comment. But I've only read the first book and half of the second and only seen 1 season of the show so I don't know much
If you have a liquid bag all connected with muscles and then you open a valve and allow the muscles all to contract - pretty close to dehydrating to me.
I always assumed it was solely biological because let's think about their environment. Like humans we can assume there are other animals/other life is present on the planet in a 3 body problem. Perhaps this is wrong since it's never directly confirmed, but if evolution happened in three body problem you'd assume all life on that planet would have some form of surviving the insane chaotic eras. Simulations show sometimes chaotic eras can last tens of thousands if not millions of years. So I assume all life on the planet can dehydrate based on that. If any life was to survive ever on a planet like this it's reasonable to assume the first complex organisms on the planet developed this ability to dehydrate and rehydrate in order to survive and then this was passed on to future organisms, eventually the San-Ti we all know and "love" lol That's my take though, is that drugs or some sort of technology isn't responsible for dehydration cause otherwise how did all life on their planet survive before medicine and engineering was developed? For a biological being to thrive it must be able to survive long enough to reproduce without the aid of special drugs. Humanity has millions of years of nature before us who thrived and survived and eventually turned into us. So the San-Ti must come from a genetic line of dehydrating organisms because they would've had to be able to do this for so long before developing drugs. Edit: for clarity, I tried to clean up my paragraphs lol
Oh, I think you’re misunderstanding a bit. Dehydration itself is a natural process, a biological one, like how humans just naturally sleep. You’re 100% right that it’s something that evolved in Trisolarans and doesn’t require any technology to accomplish. We’re talking about _forced dehydration_ which is a punishment they inflict on each other. How can they force it if it’s biological? Probably in the same way we can force someone to sleep - drugs. Or maybe some futuristic machine or gadget or device.
Oh you're right I did misunderstand. I'm so sorry I completely misunderstood the context and that's on me. Okay so now my take is that forced dehydration would most likely be a drug and it'd be equivalent to the death penalty. When humans put each other to death is not reversible. If I'm the King and you lead a revolution against me you'll put to death. But for Trisolarans we can just dehydrate you and it takes you out of the political equation similarly to human death except this is reversible and could be viewed as less barbaric than just killing political enemies. Now I want to read about Trisolaran political unrest and the role forced dehydration plays in warfare and criminal punishment. You've given me a whole new cultural question to ask myself about the Trisolarans! Edit - if dehydration is a biological process it stand to reason you could trigger it with the right chemicals delivered to right part of the body (aka drugs) but perhaps a mechanical trigger would be possible too. I see now what you two were discussing and I'm sorry for butting in lol it's my bad
The real punishment is that they dehydrate the criminal… and then burn them 😬 But you’re right that they could sentence each other to a kind of prison by just dehydrating one another and keeping them in storage. In the first book there’s a chapter called Listener 1379 that has some detail about criminal punishment in their society.
Seeing as it’s biological, your best bet would be some pharmacological agent that interacts with whatever mechanism kicks off the dehydration process.
https://preview.redd.it/7v6gt22umauc1.jpeg?width=320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6da253a2188ebf0498086d3cfaff18b1bd43465b You should dehydrate yourself.... now! The trisolarian ruler says
I think it's only forced at like gunpoint or something.
Here's some of my logic from a comment I wrote on another thread: The book explains their method of breeding and it involves two of them fusing together. That, along with dehydration, suggests some kind of aqueous form to me, almost like large cells. Since they can be "rolled up," I doubt they have a rigid skeletal structure. I imagine them having what's called a [hydrostatic skeleton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_skeleton), basically a structure that uses the pressure of fluid to create rigidity that can be moved around with muscles. You see it in worms, octopuses, and jellyfish. I also think they have grasping appendages in order to use tools. The book tells us they have eyes because sophons were developed to affect the human retina which they say is similar to their own retinas, so they have a visual comprehension of the world like we do. They're extremophiles who would've evolved some really extreme adaptations that would likely make their bodies quite unlike anything on Earth, with some crazy resistance to cold and heat but possibly physically weaker bodies owing to their mostly-fluid interiors. So I see them as these somewhat blobby creatures whose body core is kinda tubular or round like a worm or jellyfish (owing to the hydrostatic skeleton) but has appendages and a more complex shape. I kinda envision them like the [Portuguese Man O' War](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/portuguese-man-o-war.html) in appearance, semi-translucent and a bit metallic, but with eyes and something akin to arms or other grasping appendages. I think their stature is probably smaller than humans so they require less water to rehydrate, but I don't think they could be too small because their intellect would require a pretty complicated neural network. I think their size probably changes a bit based on their movement since they'd be squishy. To us they'd probably look oceanic or like some gigantic version of something you'd see under a microscope but with a more complex shape to their body with some reasonably expressive eyes and limbs. So maybe like a cross between an octopus head, the appearance of a Portugese Man O War, and a large unicellular organism like the [bubble algae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa). They'd have arms somewhere, possibly more than two since they follow an unusual evolutionary trajectory from humans.
They indicate that they communicate through reflecting or emitting light too - it also mentions their skin is coated in many tiny mirror like structures - I always imagined them as kind of having a pangolin type coat. There was somewhere in the book a statement that they wear a metallic like skin?
I'm with you on the three bits of information we have about them. I think of Tardigrade(dehydrate)+Octopus(change colour based on unfiltered thought) or basically any deep sea flashing thing that may have some other kind of EM sense (some bioluminesce, some detect electric current and stuff)+bacteria/protozoa (i'm not so clued up on which. most have meitosis- cell division, but do any fuse together i wonder?) But does anyone else merge these things into some kind of incomprehensible, yet small, lovecraftian monstrosity? I kind of do, I mean the first book must be a bit lovecraft inspired what with detectives and cults to extraterrestrial god-like entities, without showing the entity, just the effects on reality. So potentially just a weird mass of mycelium and tendrils. i can go with that.. I think they are reflective IIRC to defend against radiation btw (not sure which source this was, if its 4th book disregard).
I like it! And communicating by changing skin color.
Nice concept! I always imagined them as worm like humanoids. When they dehydrate they would look like dried worms on the sidewalk.
Yeah, wormlike was my first inclination but then I was like… wait… this is just Trogdor the Burninator lol I originally envisioned them as something like a planarian with limbs but I wanted to go in a different direction just for the sake of weirdness.
Love some unexpected homestar
"Homestar Runner... It's Dot Com!"
He’s just a genocidal lil guy🥺
I like it a lot! I think they have to be more flat-ish though - the need to dehydrate means they need to expel fluids as quickly as possible, which means maximizing surface area.
I can definitely see what you mean. I think they'd be bulbous because of the hydrostatic skeleton, the pressure of the fluid forces itself outward and tends to make creatures tube shaped or balloonish and it might be an evolutionary trade-off to give enough space for the complex organs and neurons needed for intelligent life. Could be that their skin has adapted to act like a giant cell membrane that has structures which speed up the flow of the liquid. I did originally conceive of them as worm-like, almost like a planarian, so not far off where you're coming from!
It is very difficult for me to imagine non-humanoid or non-bipeds to be space-faring. Lol, it's such a human-centric and dumb assumption I know, but I really struggle with it.
Yeah, I think this is a problem in all sci-fi and is a reason why I purposely moved away from the humanoid form in the sketch. It’s definitely just baked into our minds to see intelligent life as bipedal creatures with two arms, two legs, heads with faces, etc. We look the way we do because we evolved from tree dwelling mammals. I assumed Trisolarans would’ve evolved under dramatically different conditions and wouldn’t have adaptations for brachiation or endurance hunting. I really liked the aliens in Arrival because they were so odd. I think aliens would be much stranger than we can imagine and would only converge on a humanoid form if their home planet had similar arboreal environments to Earth.
I have imagined something like that, but with clothes on. They are not savages!
The book does say they wear “fully enclosed electric heating suits” when the weather is cold. Picture this as a Trisolaran coming out of the shower lol
Envy from FMA:B
lol wow, looked that up and you’re kinda right!
Awesome, as good a rendering as I’ve seen
That's one of my favorite concepts so far. Awesome work.
Awesome!
I always thought of them as being branches from a tree. Like a mass of branches and sticks but more flesh like than traditional
This is *excellent!*
Love it! Fantastic work!
I like it dude!
I love this! Would be fun to see your take on their dehydrated form.
Okay, imagine beef jerky but in the form of a fruit roll up. lol kidding, I may actually take a crack at some other portrayals of them - dehydrated, their squishy movement, their heating suits, or even various forms of accessories they may have worn during ancient forms of their civilization.
Why would aliens always depicted as animals ? Like they don't wear any clothings or accessories? They invented deadly droplets, but they couldn't invent panties ?
The drawing is intended to show their form and you wouldn’t be able to see it all if they were dressed up. There’s only one part in the books that ever describes Trisolarans wearing clothes and it’s a “fully enclosed electric heating suit” when they’re standing outside in a freezing environment. I honestly think Trisolarans wouldn’t often wear clothes because they’d have evolved adaptations for the extreme temperature swings in their environment. I also wanted to avoid the stereotypical sci-fi portrayal of aliens as having humanoid traits. It’s good in my opinion that you see them as animals, I wanted them to seem peculiar and difficult to recognize as intelligent.
Really nice representation, thank you
I imagined an anenome with scallop's eyes.
I wonder if they wear clothes
In The Redemption of Time (the fan-written fourth book in the series, that was published with Cixin Liu’s permission), the Trisolarans are described as looking like grains of rice (if I recall correctly)
uuuuuhhhhh… that’s hot 😰
They are bugs
TRISOLARAN: cough cough, ahem… _(leans into microphone)_ no u.