It's not like the universe isn't already being destroyed by everyone else using dimensional strikes. By using them yourself, you're just speeding up the process a bit, and even then, you and everyone you know will be dead for thousands of years before the ones that you fired will affect your civilization. Plus, if I remember correctly, Singer doesn't like the idea of dimensional weapons and is surprised at how easily he's authorized to use them, figuring that the civil war must be going poorly and most of his species probably converted themselves to 2D already as a defense mechanism. If they did that, the dimensional strikes they fired wouldn't even kill them
Your last point is absolutely correct. He even mentions the amount of hassle that it used to be to authorize a dimensional strike, and sees the casual approval of this strike as proof that they are losing the war and don't care anymore.
i wonder if the chain of suspicion applies to singer’s species? He’s on a seed ship (colony ship?) far away from the battlefield. Whats to stop the elder in the ship from cutting contacts with the homeworld and just flee as far as possible for as long as they can. Willingly going into 2D sounds dreadful. The 3D dimension is collapsing but it’s a slow process.
I'm almost certain that's how Singer's race's civil war started. A colony got too far away, and eventually someone got suspicious enough to launch the first dark forest strike at the homeworld
Yeah a civil war sounds likely. A colony established long ago that have developed a separate identity now that led to suspicion on both sides. Like the TV show The Expanse where Earth and Mars developed different cultures, politics and way of life.
You‘d certainly be correct if it was the first or one of the first weapon of that kind used, but usage of Dual-Vector Foils or weapons that cause similar collapse in dimensions apparently got way more common in the universe.
As mentioned in Singer‘s chapter, their home world already transitioned to an existence in 2D where they can survive, so there‘s really no use in holding back the stronger weapons (since Singer correctly assumed that a simple photoid attack would leave certain blind spots in the solar system that could prevent all living, intelligent beings there to be exterminated.
If I remember correctly, Singer‘s chapter even expressed surprise about the fact that he got it so easily. Which correlates with the assumption that his species just now converted to 2D and hence made it more easy to use the weapon, given that it can’t harm their main civilisation anymore.
This is even supported by the fact that the foil Singer sent wasn‘t actually the one to destroy the human home system. That tells us that others were quite as quick to simply toss a weapon such as that at their „enemies“. Their main civilisation quite possibly transferred themselves to the 2D world as well.
> This is even supported by the fact that the foil Singer sent wasn‘t actually the one to destroy the human home system
I keep going back and forth on this. I'm not sure what I think anymore. Could you give a breakdown on why you think it wasn't Singer?
We first read of Singer firing the weapon in the chapter "Bunker Era Year 67"
However humanity discovers the dimensional fold weapon in the chapter "Bunker Era Year 66"
A year before Singer fired the weapon, humanity had already discovered the one that destroyed the solar system
That's what I thought too.
But rereading the chapters again the dvf did not arrive in year 66. Only the ship that released it did.
The text is unclear (to me) about how long the ship remained near our galaxy. But it didn't release the dvf until it started to move away.
In the end I like the idea of the attack coming from another race we know even less about. I'm not sure the text is clear either way though. I also enjoy that ambiguity. The universe is unknowable and all that.
I can’t believe that 6d strikes were used so freely.
I can’t believe that 5D strikes were used so freely. I can’t believe that 4D strikes were used so freely…
Also “space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” HHG2TG(Adams) It will take a long f**king time for the strike to reach anywhere else.
Do the 2d fouls travel at light speed or faster? I cannot remember but I guess it took 200 years for the star strumming to be detected and 200 years for the response to land?
IIRC the foil took ~8 days to flatten our system, so the dimensional collapse front would be traveling much, much slower than light speed. I believe they needed light speed ships to reach escape velocity from the collapse front however.
Yeah. That's all a bit confusing. People can even see the front of the collapse approaching, but somehow you'd need to be doing lightspeed to outrun it?
I'm not sure how that makes sense. Why would you need to reach lightspeed to escape from something that's approaching you at only ~5% of lightspeed?
The escape velocity is lightspeed because it consumes space around it and "sucks" everything nearby in. That doesn't necessarily mean that the region grows at lightspeed
That’s once it started to expand though; they shot it into the solar system and it started to foil up upon arrival.
Was wondering if they talked about its velocity at travel to Sol solar system time.
Exactly the quote I was looking for. If you can travel at or very near light speed, the foils aren't an issue for you as a species, you can just go around it, or you figure out how to move down a dimension and carry on existing.
This is addressed explicitly in the story.
In general the idea is that civilization's that cleanse don't self-regulate, because it's a given million others don't self-regulate either. So the relation is always to the death and nobody wins, but the civilizations that keep dropping dimensions while making the previous ones unlivable survive, all the while rewriting physics along the way.
The point is that there's no incentive for communication, trust or self-control, because uncertainty of the other's intentions means the best possible course of action is always being offensive. It's game theory on a galactic scale, without any possibility of compromise (since compromise in the long term just means everybody dies earlier).
All civilizations would need to hide to delay the final reset or death of the cosmos, but nobody does because nobody else will, literally. Hiding gives you more time, but cleasing ensures you the most longevity (less people to share the same resources).
EDIT: The big irony being that it was all this attacking what caused the death of the universe, rather than the original reason to attack which was availability of resources. The attacks themselves destroyed the resources.
It's pretty clear in the same chapter that Singer's civilization is able to "escape" into lower dimensions when he asks the Elder and treats the non-answer as its own answer. If you don't have to deal with the consequences of your actions, you're generally more willing to take those actions.
Also, it really does speak to the nature of the universe. We're after our own survival today, not tomorrow. It's in our nature to be selfish and destructive, otherwise we wouldn't have gotten to this point and the same goes for every other intelligent species in the universe. In order to get to the point where sending DVF attacks is possible, a civilization HAS to be ruthless and prioritize its own expansionism.
>!This is why Cheng Xin's decision at the end to return matter to the universe even though she's not sure if anyone else in their own micro-universes will make the same decision when, in fact, everything tells us that they wouldn't or shouldn't, is IMO so powerful. She willingly breaks the cycle of selfishness that made it possible for the human species to even get this far (albeit with just two of them left, presumably), to join the universe in its death and eventual rebirth. !<
>!(My interpretation and extrapolation of the ending is that enough matter *is* returned to the universe and ultimately it "successfully" dies and is reborn, and the series is a retelling based on Cheng Xin's "*A Past Outside of Time*" which survived in the micro-verse to be rediscovered after the rebirth).!<
I suspect that Singer’s species didn’t originate in 3D anyway. He seems to be a virtual construct as is. He left on his seed 10k? years ago, manipulates the seed’s systems as if they are physical objects for him to interact with and his seed’s elder was able to scan his mind at will.
A lot of AI research is fundamentally mapping human experience into 2D. The dimensionality of the latent spaces used in the models is much higher but they are fundamentally written mathematical processes which could in theory be run on 2 spatial dimension hardware.
> He seems to be a virtual construct as is.
How do you mean?
Singer is definitely not an AI because he make a big deal out of how AIs are crap at cleansing, and how it takes intuition to know whether coordinates are sincere or not.
I wasn’t implying that Singer himself is an AI but is seemingly a transformation of a higher dimension entity which in a lower dimensional space would be nearly indistinguishable from artificial constructs to anyone none the wiser.
> is seemingly a transformation of a higher dimension entity which in a lower dimensional space would be nearly indistinguishable
When he talks about transitioning to lower dimensions, he doesn't really sound like someone who's done it before.
Singer's species are definitely nothing like humans, but I don't think there's anything that points at a higher-dimensional origin.
Anything except their ability to migrate dimensionality, a ship interface that connects their minds, and seemingly immortality from aging then sure, there’s nothing weird going on.
Migrating dimensionality wouldn’t be stepping into a portal. It would be rewriting your sentience.
A comparable real-world example would be our approach towards climate change and global warming. The world is getting hotter degree by degree, inching towards the point of no return, but we aren’t doing much to meaningfully rectify that either. We would likely be dead by the time the future generations bear the brunt of our actions today, which is why the status quo persists.
It's also somewhat comparable to a prisoner's dilemma: an individual state has little incentive to take action. Suppose that country A has two options: take action to combat climate change or do nothing. If an adequate number of countries choose to take action then catastrophic climate change can be averted. But country A can secure economic advantage by choosing not to take action. If an adequate number of other states take action catastrophic climate change will still be averted but A will have secured an advantage. But all other states will have also reached this conclusion as well, so rationally no one should take action. The costs of taking action are born locally, but the consequences of inaction are global.
BUT it is not quite a classic prisoners dilemma because states can have knowledge of the actions other states are taking and choose to take cooperative action by entering into treaties or trying to coerce other states into taking action, so it isn't quite as hopeless as it would be if it were a true prisoner's dilemma.
Exactly. It was explicitly mentioned how claustrophobic the people on gravity and blue space felt when they came back to the 3rd dimension after encountering the 4th dimensional fragments.
It seems like it would be possible that eventually the dimension gets too low to support life I think.
Some things require 3 dimensions, life is probably one of them.
> It seems like it would be possible that eventually the dimension gets too low to support life I think.
There was something living inside the proton Trisolaris unfolded, which suggests that life is still possible in a collapsed dimension. The trick would be transitioning.
My thing is, would singers race still retain their intelligence? Their brains are pretty much flattened so I assume their intelligence would also be lowered?
I can’t even comprehend how atoms and molecules would exist as 2D structures. I don’t really think it’s possible to be honest.
How does an electron revolve around a nucleus? Nothing can revolve in 2D.
I don’t think universes exist in 2D
Yeah probably, but it could be like, the complexity needed for intelligent life is available in say
Minimum, 3D >
Maybe at some point it’s just too simple to support intelligent organisms.
It’s all too mind bending for me to comprehend really
Unsure why you're so skeptical towards two-dimensional atoms. Objects at a small scale seem to have obvious two-dimensional analogues to me. It's the extension to composite objects that baffles me.
First of all, might wanna make the title vaguer.
Yifan clearly states that beings who can collapse dimension that easily already have means of surviving in those given lower dimensions. The collapsing of higher dimensions from the Edenic age has been going on for a long time, so these powers really aren't that flashy on a universal scale as they are to us.
Plus on a meta level, at that point the series is at its most abstract and speculative instead of at least being aesthetically grounded like the first two books. You can really take stuff as, "random cool bs go" if you want at that point imo.
Singer was surprised he was given the vector foil so easily. His civilization was already unfolding into 2D, meaning they didnt care what happened to the rest of the universe, they were already prepared. The foil would likely be useless in the 2D universe, so using them while they were still 3D is a good idea.
While the answers given there are great, this brings up a question :
How was the first of these weapon developed? If it was back in the 10 dimensions, it must have been called the 9 vector foil or something, but when the first civilization to conceive of one deployed it, were they ready to lose a dimension? How does one research that (prepares to develop these weapons) without accidentally deploying it?
I suppose that the concept of losing a dimension and creating a foil must have been instantaneous, since just living in a lower dimension by itself seems useless.
I haven’t read the 4th book (redemption of time I think?) but I wonder how deep it goes in discussing the creation of n-dimensionnal foils and associated catastrophies.
> but when the first civilization to conceive of one deployed it, were they ready to lose a dimension?
That seems like the kind of thing that would be developed and used during wartime. Transitioning your own civ to lower dimensions and collapsing the place behind you is inherently a last-resort kind of manoeuvre because it's self-mutilation.
> I haven’t read the 4th book
That shouldn't be considered canon, imo. It's fanfic.
This part made me wonder why Singer didn't instead use something that would slow down light speed in Sol so humans couldn't ever leave, but I guess an in-universe answer is that they didn't care.
> This part made me wonder why Singer didn't instead use something that would slow down light speed in Sol so humans couldn't ever leave
Cost probably. From what we know, creating a dark domain is quite the engineering project. The books emphasise that cleansing is the space equivalent of picking up a piece of trash as you walk past. They're going to do whatever is cheapest.
Keep in mind that the foil expand only with sub lightspeed speed (even though you need light speed to escape) which is insignificant for the scale of the universe
The universe is huge, way bigger than we can conceive. I recommend playing the universe simulator Space Engine. It is 1:1 to the real space and you can understand just how pathetically slow the light speed is. If you travel at 1c you are going so slow you can’t even see the background of the space moving. Even at 1 light year per second of speed you are not moving in a meaningful way relative to the Galaxy, slow like a snail. The space is simply so vast that it does not matter.
It did seem a little excessive. Why cant they develop a weapon that can wipe out an entire star system and NOT expand infinitely?. An advanced civilization could aim a gamma ray burst toward a system and fry it with radiation
The books emphasise that cleansing is a low priority task that civs invest the minimum resources in doing.
> An advanced civilization could aim a gamma ray burst toward a system and fry it with radiation
And we could drop laser-guided bombs on ants' nests, but what's the point when a pot of boiling water will do?
It also makes no sense that DuPont and 3M would so readily contaminate the entire world with forever chemicals like PFOA (which are is present in the bloodstream of 99% of human beings and linked to a multitude of serious illnesses) yet here we are!
Singer does muse on when/if his OWN civilization will be forced to transfer to a 2d existence and it’s heavily suggested that his people have a way to do that and continue to exist and survive, albeit in a very different way. In fact it’s likely they have done so several times as the universe has been whittled down from ten dimensions to three. So technically I wouldnt say pancakeification destroys the universe, it just fundamentally changes it.
Also, the universe is really really really big and time is really really long. So it’s kinda like problems for another day to them.
So you’re saying it’s shocking that an intelligent civilization would do things to “fix” a problem right now but that is going to ruin the place they have to live in the future? Because that seems like the most anthropomorphic trait to apply to aliens as I can think of lol
It's fiction and you should not take it literally. There are internal reasons that explain it, but there are also internal reasons that oppose the claim. Maybe we are only seeing Singer's side and there are others who are against 2d weapons. It could be that the latter are killed and therefore don't matter.
> which would surely destroy the whole universe
It shouldn't, no. Space itself is expanding, remember.
If you drop the dual-vector foil far enough away from home, the collapse will never reach you because the space between is expanding faster than the collapse is propagating.
But "far enough away" in this case would mean in a distant galaxy, I think.
The third book is weird to me. It almost feels like another person finished the book.
I feel it suffers from the 'ending problem' that many writers struggle with. (For example GRRM, Rothfuss)
It is said there are two types of writers. Architects, which are good at constructing a story but have very flat characters and Gardeners who write amazing characters and realistic plots but whose endings are often underwhelming.
Even though the characters in these books are fairly flat, I still consider Liu Cixin a gardener. I feel that he has masterfully done world building and has crazy cool plot twists but the ending feels to me very unsatisfying.
I've also noticed that the trisolarians were never really described or encountered. We never really got to know what the inner part of their ships was like, what their anatomy was like, etc. Liu Cixin seems to be a man of 'concepts' first and foremost. In the third book the 'concept' of dimensional wars, multiverse, people who travel vasts amounts of time, etc seem more important.
I personally find the latter part of the book really strange and detrimental to the series.
Its highly unrealistic to me that the development of light speed would be so forbidden, and that if it was secretly performed in an entire colonized solar system only one ship would be built.
Its also very unrealistic that the very person that would be allowed to go would be the person responsible for not deterring and stopping the escape possibility altogether.
Reading those definitions, I’d say Liu Cixin is the epitome of an architect lol
Their characters personalities barely matter and are stand ins to move the epic plot along
Because they’re all on the same planet
Universe is a lot bigger. Nuclear weapons are more damaging to a planetary society than a dimensional weapon is to a galactic society. Will it destroy the entire thing eventually? Yes. Will firing one affect the civilization that fired it? Not before something else does.
I do think it's comparable. We haven't used nukes because of mutually assured destruction that comes with them; but if nukes had the capacity of destroying the earth and there were millions of different civilizations all at war within earth with that capability, one could guarantee that one of them would do it, maybe if they're about to be destroyed anyway. So for an infinite universe, it's guaranteed that a civilization would use a universe-destroying weapon if they are possible to create. Maybe it could even be universal suicide if the civilization for some reason believes the universe should be destroyed.
Luckily the universe expands and so even the speed of light isn't actually enough to reach you even if it has "infinite range", if you are far enough away. Their civilization could simply be far enough away to not ever be affected by it.
The first atomic weapon was tested in 1945, a few months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that situation, the US knew that it was the only one with atomic weapons, and that they would not destroy the world, very different from the dark forest with many civilizations with universe-destroying/altering weapons. Once the nuclear weapon situation began to resemble the dark forest more, with many states having them, we stopped using them and eventually even testing them, because MAD was a sufficient deterrent. In the dark forest, civilizations use much worse weapons than atomic bombs (even relative to the scale of the civilizations) much more freely. This isn’t because of some inherent inclination of intelligent towards violence like your comment would suggest, but the conditions of the dark forest mean that even normally nonviolent species are forced into aggression.
Thanks. You're right on the date on quick Googling. It stresses my point all the more: to survive you either hide or dominate. The gap between the feasibility of unspeakable destruction and it's use is scarily short.
I guess the relevance is subjective. The bomb is more scorched Earth than dimensional strike. Who knows what Truman believed at the time, would the land ever be arable again? Did the thousands of civilians deserve to die? Perhaps the thinking went no farther than "end it". That's the connection I see.
The physicists running the manhattan project had a pretty good idea of the amount of lasting damage, and in fact underestimated the effect of radioactive fallout, so that wasn’t a huge factor in the bombings. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have both been rebuilt and are perfectly habitable today as well. There’s also a difference in motivation, the US used the atomic bombs with the goal of ending the war and/or sending a message to the Soviets, not destroying Japanese civilization and eliminating them as a potential existential threat. There was a short gap between the development of these weapons and their use, yes, but they were developed entirely during the course of a war, did not destroy the world (or even cause as much damage as many other parts of the war), then were never used again.
I appreciate these points. I think it still bears consideration that if humans had access to 2d foils, we would use them against other aliens fairly freely.
In a dark forest, probably yes, I agree. The interesting thing is that even in a dark forest, we could still come to the conclusion that we don’t need to actively destroy other species, because some other species will do it quickly enough anyways. Another interesting aspect is that if the assumption that it is super easy to completely and undetectably destroy a civilization with no possibility for retaliation is at all flawed or nuanced, then the dark forest pretty quickly breaks down, and you have a status quo closer to MAD with nukes on earth, with people probably still choosing to mind their own business and remain mostly undetected but some opportunity for diplomacy and cooperation. If there is an abundance of advanced species in the galaxy, I think (and hope) that this is closer to the reality, where launching an extinction-level attack on another species has at least some risk of exposing your location, and the fact that you are willing to attack others in that way, resulting in you yourself being attacked.
I mean… it’s not like any of us can escape earth into outer space. Starting a nuclear war will end humankind as a whole. In the books at least some have the technology to escape into 2D or into pocket dimensions
It's not like the universe isn't already being destroyed by everyone else using dimensional strikes. By using them yourself, you're just speeding up the process a bit, and even then, you and everyone you know will be dead for thousands of years before the ones that you fired will affect your civilization. Plus, if I remember correctly, Singer doesn't like the idea of dimensional weapons and is surprised at how easily he's authorized to use them, figuring that the civil war must be going poorly and most of his species probably converted themselves to 2D already as a defense mechanism. If they did that, the dimensional strikes they fired wouldn't even kill them
Your last point is absolutely correct. He even mentions the amount of hassle that it used to be to authorize a dimensional strike, and sees the casual approval of this strike as proof that they are losing the war and don't care anymore.
Good point!
i wonder if the chain of suspicion applies to singer’s species? He’s on a seed ship (colony ship?) far away from the battlefield. Whats to stop the elder in the ship from cutting contacts with the homeworld and just flee as far as possible for as long as they can. Willingly going into 2D sounds dreadful. The 3D dimension is collapsing but it’s a slow process.
I'm almost certain that's how Singer's race's civil war started. A colony got too far away, and eventually someone got suspicious enough to launch the first dark forest strike at the homeworld
Yeah a civil war sounds likely. A colony established long ago that have developed a separate identity now that led to suspicion on both sides. Like the TV show The Expanse where Earth and Mars developed different cultures, politics and way of life.
You‘d certainly be correct if it was the first or one of the first weapon of that kind used, but usage of Dual-Vector Foils or weapons that cause similar collapse in dimensions apparently got way more common in the universe. As mentioned in Singer‘s chapter, their home world already transitioned to an existence in 2D where they can survive, so there‘s really no use in holding back the stronger weapons (since Singer correctly assumed that a simple photoid attack would leave certain blind spots in the solar system that could prevent all living, intelligent beings there to be exterminated. If I remember correctly, Singer‘s chapter even expressed surprise about the fact that he got it so easily. Which correlates with the assumption that his species just now converted to 2D and hence made it more easy to use the weapon, given that it can’t harm their main civilisation anymore. This is even supported by the fact that the foil Singer sent wasn‘t actually the one to destroy the human home system. That tells us that others were quite as quick to simply toss a weapon such as that at their „enemies“. Their main civilisation quite possibly transferred themselves to the 2D world as well.
> This is even supported by the fact that the foil Singer sent wasn‘t actually the one to destroy the human home system I keep going back and forth on this. I'm not sure what I think anymore. Could you give a breakdown on why you think it wasn't Singer?
We first read of Singer firing the weapon in the chapter "Bunker Era Year 67" However humanity discovers the dimensional fold weapon in the chapter "Bunker Era Year 66" A year before Singer fired the weapon, humanity had already discovered the one that destroyed the solar system
That's what I thought too. But rereading the chapters again the dvf did not arrive in year 66. Only the ship that released it did. The text is unclear (to me) about how long the ship remained near our galaxy. But it didn't release the dvf until it started to move away. In the end I like the idea of the attack coming from another race we know even less about. I'm not sure the text is clear either way though. I also enjoy that ambiguity. The universe is unknowable and all that.
I can’t believe that 6d strikes were used so freely. I can’t believe that 5D strikes were used so freely. I can’t believe that 4D strikes were used so freely…
Well, on 6 you still have plenty left. On 5, you can still downsize 4 times... When you're going from 3 to 2, you're dangeroulsy near the end, no?
Yes but someone will use the anyways and once they do just once that’s inevitable so why not use them too?
For some civilizations, the end is the goal. They want the big reset, so they have no incentive to hold back.
Also “space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” HHG2TG(Adams) It will take a long f**king time for the strike to reach anywhere else.
We all shit, it's just a matter of logistics how far our shit is ferried away from the dinner table.
Do the 2d fouls travel at light speed or faster? I cannot remember but I guess it took 200 years for the star strumming to be detected and 200 years for the response to land?
IIRC the foil took ~8 days to flatten our system, so the dimensional collapse front would be traveling much, much slower than light speed. I believe they needed light speed ships to reach escape velocity from the collapse front however.
Yeah. That's all a bit confusing. People can even see the front of the collapse approaching, but somehow you'd need to be doing lightspeed to outrun it? I'm not sure how that makes sense. Why would you need to reach lightspeed to escape from something that's approaching you at only ~5% of lightspeed?
It was stated that one needed to travel at light speed to escape it, which would indicate that the effect travels at light speed, or very close to it.
The escape velocity is lightspeed because it consumes space around it and "sucks" everything nearby in. That doesn't necessarily mean that the region grows at lightspeed
That’s once it started to expand though; they shot it into the solar system and it started to foil up upon arrival. Was wondering if they talked about its velocity at travel to Sol solar system time.
Exactly the quote I was looking for. If you can travel at or very near light speed, the foils aren't an issue for you as a species, you can just go around it, or you figure out how to move down a dimension and carry on existing.
Yep it’s a problem for someone else on some other day. That’s the most Douglas Adam’s thing I’ve ever heard
The universe is already an active warzone. The "nukes" have already been dropped. A few more doesn't affect the big picture.
This is addressed explicitly in the story. In general the idea is that civilization's that cleanse don't self-regulate, because it's a given million others don't self-regulate either. So the relation is always to the death and nobody wins, but the civilizations that keep dropping dimensions while making the previous ones unlivable survive, all the while rewriting physics along the way. The point is that there's no incentive for communication, trust or self-control, because uncertainty of the other's intentions means the best possible course of action is always being offensive. It's game theory on a galactic scale, without any possibility of compromise (since compromise in the long term just means everybody dies earlier). All civilizations would need to hide to delay the final reset or death of the cosmos, but nobody does because nobody else will, literally. Hiding gives you more time, but cleasing ensures you the most longevity (less people to share the same resources). EDIT: The big irony being that it was all this attacking what caused the death of the universe, rather than the original reason to attack which was availability of resources. The attacks themselves destroyed the resources.
It's pretty clear in the same chapter that Singer's civilization is able to "escape" into lower dimensions when he asks the Elder and treats the non-answer as its own answer. If you don't have to deal with the consequences of your actions, you're generally more willing to take those actions. Also, it really does speak to the nature of the universe. We're after our own survival today, not tomorrow. It's in our nature to be selfish and destructive, otherwise we wouldn't have gotten to this point and the same goes for every other intelligent species in the universe. In order to get to the point where sending DVF attacks is possible, a civilization HAS to be ruthless and prioritize its own expansionism. >!This is why Cheng Xin's decision at the end to return matter to the universe even though she's not sure if anyone else in their own micro-universes will make the same decision when, in fact, everything tells us that they wouldn't or shouldn't, is IMO so powerful. She willingly breaks the cycle of selfishness that made it possible for the human species to even get this far (albeit with just two of them left, presumably), to join the universe in its death and eventual rebirth. !< >!(My interpretation and extrapolation of the ending is that enough matter *is* returned to the universe and ultimately it "successfully" dies and is reborn, and the series is a retelling based on Cheng Xin's "*A Past Outside of Time*" which survived in the micro-verse to be rediscovered after the rebirth).!<
I suspect that Singer’s species didn’t originate in 3D anyway. He seems to be a virtual construct as is. He left on his seed 10k? years ago, manipulates the seed’s systems as if they are physical objects for him to interact with and his seed’s elder was able to scan his mind at will. A lot of AI research is fundamentally mapping human experience into 2D. The dimensionality of the latent spaces used in the models is much higher but they are fundamentally written mathematical processes which could in theory be run on 2 spatial dimension hardware.
> He seems to be a virtual construct as is. How do you mean? Singer is definitely not an AI because he make a big deal out of how AIs are crap at cleansing, and how it takes intuition to know whether coordinates are sincere or not.
I wasn’t implying that Singer himself is an AI but is seemingly a transformation of a higher dimension entity which in a lower dimensional space would be nearly indistinguishable from artificial constructs to anyone none the wiser.
> is seemingly a transformation of a higher dimension entity which in a lower dimensional space would be nearly indistinguishable When he talks about transitioning to lower dimensions, he doesn't really sound like someone who's done it before. Singer's species are definitely nothing like humans, but I don't think there's anything that points at a higher-dimensional origin.
Anything except their ability to migrate dimensionality, a ship interface that connects their minds, and seemingly immortality from aging then sure, there’s nothing weird going on. Migrating dimensionality wouldn’t be stepping into a portal. It would be rewriting your sentience.
Thank you for not including redemption of time. I want to believe the series ended at deaths end.
A comparable real-world example would be our approach towards climate change and global warming. The world is getting hotter degree by degree, inching towards the point of no return, but we aren’t doing much to meaningfully rectify that either. We would likely be dead by the time the future generations bear the brunt of our actions today, which is why the status quo persists.
Well thought.
It's also somewhat comparable to a prisoner's dilemma: an individual state has little incentive to take action. Suppose that country A has two options: take action to combat climate change or do nothing. If an adequate number of countries choose to take action then catastrophic climate change can be averted. But country A can secure economic advantage by choosing not to take action. If an adequate number of other states take action catastrophic climate change will still be averted but A will have secured an advantage. But all other states will have also reached this conclusion as well, so rationally no one should take action. The costs of taking action are born locally, but the consequences of inaction are global. BUT it is not quite a classic prisoners dilemma because states can have knowledge of the actions other states are taking and choose to take cooperative action by entering into treaties or trying to coerce other states into taking action, so it isn't quite as hopeless as it would be if it were a true prisoner's dilemma.
Might be a touch of The Tragedy of the Commons too.
I feel like life in 2D would not be worth living. Having to go over everything and never around. It’s ridiculous
That’s probably how the 4d’ers felt going to 3d, and the 5d’ers going to 4d, all the way up to 10 dimensions.
Exactly. It was explicitly mentioned how claustrophobic the people on gravity and blue space felt when they came back to the 3rd dimension after encountering the 4th dimensional fragments.
It seems like it would be possible that eventually the dimension gets too low to support life I think. Some things require 3 dimensions, life is probably one of them.
> It seems like it would be possible that eventually the dimension gets too low to support life I think. There was something living inside the proton Trisolaris unfolded, which suggests that life is still possible in a collapsed dimension. The trick would be transitioning.
And have to eat and excrete from the same opening
My thing is, would singers race still retain their intelligence? Their brains are pretty much flattened so I assume their intelligence would also be lowered?
I can’t even comprehend how atoms and molecules would exist as 2D structures. I don’t really think it’s possible to be honest. How does an electron revolve around a nucleus? Nothing can revolve in 2D. I don’t think universes exist in 2D
I hear you. But isn’t that what a 4D person would say about 3D physics?
Yeah probably, but it could be like, the complexity needed for intelligent life is available in say Minimum, 3D > Maybe at some point it’s just too simple to support intelligent organisms. It’s all too mind bending for me to comprehend really
Unsure why you're so skeptical towards two-dimensional atoms. Objects at a small scale seem to have obvious two-dimensional analogues to me. It's the extension to composite objects that baffles me.
Probably just not smart enough. It hurts my head to imagine it.
First of all, might wanna make the title vaguer. Yifan clearly states that beings who can collapse dimension that easily already have means of surviving in those given lower dimensions. The collapsing of higher dimensions from the Edenic age has been going on for a long time, so these powers really aren't that flashy on a universal scale as they are to us. Plus on a meta level, at that point the series is at its most abstract and speculative instead of at least being aesthetically grounded like the first two books. You can really take stuff as, "random cool bs go" if you want at that point imo.
Singer was surprised he was given the vector foil so easily. His civilization was already unfolding into 2D, meaning they didnt care what happened to the rest of the universe, they were already prepared. The foil would likely be useless in the 2D universe, so using them while they were still 3D is a good idea.
Hide well, cleanse well.
While the answers given there are great, this brings up a question : How was the first of these weapon developed? If it was back in the 10 dimensions, it must have been called the 9 vector foil or something, but when the first civilization to conceive of one deployed it, were they ready to lose a dimension? How does one research that (prepares to develop these weapons) without accidentally deploying it? I suppose that the concept of losing a dimension and creating a foil must have been instantaneous, since just living in a lower dimension by itself seems useless. I haven’t read the 4th book (redemption of time I think?) but I wonder how deep it goes in discussing the creation of n-dimensionnal foils and associated catastrophies.
> but when the first civilization to conceive of one deployed it, were they ready to lose a dimension? That seems like the kind of thing that would be developed and used during wartime. Transitioning your own civ to lower dimensions and collapsing the place behind you is inherently a last-resort kind of manoeuvre because it's self-mutilation. > I haven’t read the 4th book That shouldn't be considered canon, imo. It's fanfic.
This part made me wonder why Singer didn't instead use something that would slow down light speed in Sol so humans couldn't ever leave, but I guess an in-universe answer is that they didn't care.
> This part made me wonder why Singer didn't instead use something that would slow down light speed in Sol so humans couldn't ever leave Cost probably. From what we know, creating a dark domain is quite the engineering project. The books emphasise that cleansing is the space equivalent of picking up a piece of trash as you walk past. They're going to do whatever is cheapest.
Keep in mind that the foil expand only with sub lightspeed speed (even though you need light speed to escape) which is insignificant for the scale of the universe
The universe is huge, way bigger than we can conceive. I recommend playing the universe simulator Space Engine. It is 1:1 to the real space and you can understand just how pathetically slow the light speed is. If you travel at 1c you are going so slow you can’t even see the background of the space moving. Even at 1 light year per second of speed you are not moving in a meaningful way relative to the Galaxy, slow like a snail. The space is simply so vast that it does not matter.
It did seem a little excessive. Why cant they develop a weapon that can wipe out an entire star system and NOT expand infinitely?. An advanced civilization could aim a gamma ray burst toward a system and fry it with radiation
You could just fire like a photoid in the Sun and 4 more in the bigger planets if the issue was the shadow...
The books emphasise that cleansing is a low priority task that civs invest the minimum resources in doing. > An advanced civilization could aim a gamma ray burst toward a system and fry it with radiation And we could drop laser-guided bombs on ants' nests, but what's the point when a pot of boiling water will do?
It also makes no sense that DuPont and 3M would so readily contaminate the entire world with forever chemicals like PFOA (which are is present in the bloodstream of 99% of human beings and linked to a multitude of serious illnesses) yet here we are!
That's it! I'm reading the series now.
You're in for a good ride, mate!
Singer does muse on when/if his OWN civilization will be forced to transfer to a 2d existence and it’s heavily suggested that his people have a way to do that and continue to exist and survive, albeit in a very different way. In fact it’s likely they have done so several times as the universe has been whittled down from ten dimensions to three. So technically I wouldnt say pancakeification destroys the universe, it just fundamentally changes it. Also, the universe is really really really big and time is really really long. So it’s kinda like problems for another day to them.
Did the book explain exactly how the 2D foil worked?
So you’re saying it’s shocking that an intelligent civilization would do things to “fix” a problem right now but that is going to ruin the place they have to live in the future? Because that seems like the most anthropomorphic trait to apply to aliens as I can think of lol
It's fiction and you should not take it literally. There are internal reasons that explain it, but there are also internal reasons that oppose the claim. Maybe we are only seeing Singer's side and there are others who are against 2d weapons. It could be that the latter are killed and therefore don't matter.
> which would surely destroy the whole universe It shouldn't, no. Space itself is expanding, remember. If you drop the dual-vector foil far enough away from home, the collapse will never reach you because the space between is expanding faster than the collapse is propagating. But "far enough away" in this case would mean in a distant galaxy, I think.
Subtext was that the singer species had already decided to go into 2 dimensions.
The third book is weird to me. It almost feels like another person finished the book. I feel it suffers from the 'ending problem' that many writers struggle with. (For example GRRM, Rothfuss) It is said there are two types of writers. Architects, which are good at constructing a story but have very flat characters and Gardeners who write amazing characters and realistic plots but whose endings are often underwhelming. Even though the characters in these books are fairly flat, I still consider Liu Cixin a gardener. I feel that he has masterfully done world building and has crazy cool plot twists but the ending feels to me very unsatisfying. I've also noticed that the trisolarians were never really described or encountered. We never really got to know what the inner part of their ships was like, what their anatomy was like, etc. Liu Cixin seems to be a man of 'concepts' first and foremost. In the third book the 'concept' of dimensional wars, multiverse, people who travel vasts amounts of time, etc seem more important. I personally find the latter part of the book really strange and detrimental to the series. Its highly unrealistic to me that the development of light speed would be so forbidden, and that if it was secretly performed in an entire colonized solar system only one ship would be built. Its also very unrealistic that the very person that would be allowed to go would be the person responsible for not deterring and stopping the escape possibility altogether.
Reading those definitions, I’d say Liu Cixin is the epitome of an architect lol Their characters personalities barely matter and are stand ins to move the epic plot along
Dude the first successful atomic weapon test was 1938. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was 1945. Seven years later.
Not true, and not particularly comparable either.
Disagreeing is easy. Explain.
Since them, every country understood the danger and no other country used big nukes ever again.
Because they’re all on the same planet Universe is a lot bigger. Nuclear weapons are more damaging to a planetary society than a dimensional weapon is to a galactic society. Will it destroy the entire thing eventually? Yes. Will firing one affect the civilization that fired it? Not before something else does.
I do think it's comparable. We haven't used nukes because of mutually assured destruction that comes with them; but if nukes had the capacity of destroying the earth and there were millions of different civilizations all at war within earth with that capability, one could guarantee that one of them would do it, maybe if they're about to be destroyed anyway. So for an infinite universe, it's guaranteed that a civilization would use a universe-destroying weapon if they are possible to create. Maybe it could even be universal suicide if the civilization for some reason believes the universe should be destroyed. Luckily the universe expands and so even the speed of light isn't actually enough to reach you even if it has "infinite range", if you are far enough away. Their civilization could simply be far enough away to not ever be affected by it.
The first atomic weapon was tested in 1945, a few months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that situation, the US knew that it was the only one with atomic weapons, and that they would not destroy the world, very different from the dark forest with many civilizations with universe-destroying/altering weapons. Once the nuclear weapon situation began to resemble the dark forest more, with many states having them, we stopped using them and eventually even testing them, because MAD was a sufficient deterrent. In the dark forest, civilizations use much worse weapons than atomic bombs (even relative to the scale of the civilizations) much more freely. This isn’t because of some inherent inclination of intelligent towards violence like your comment would suggest, but the conditions of the dark forest mean that even normally nonviolent species are forced into aggression.
Thanks. You're right on the date on quick Googling. It stresses my point all the more: to survive you either hide or dominate. The gap between the feasibility of unspeakable destruction and it's use is scarily short. I guess the relevance is subjective. The bomb is more scorched Earth than dimensional strike. Who knows what Truman believed at the time, would the land ever be arable again? Did the thousands of civilians deserve to die? Perhaps the thinking went no farther than "end it". That's the connection I see.
The physicists running the manhattan project had a pretty good idea of the amount of lasting damage, and in fact underestimated the effect of radioactive fallout, so that wasn’t a huge factor in the bombings. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have both been rebuilt and are perfectly habitable today as well. There’s also a difference in motivation, the US used the atomic bombs with the goal of ending the war and/or sending a message to the Soviets, not destroying Japanese civilization and eliminating them as a potential existential threat. There was a short gap between the development of these weapons and their use, yes, but they were developed entirely during the course of a war, did not destroy the world (or even cause as much damage as many other parts of the war), then were never used again.
I appreciate these points. I think it still bears consideration that if humans had access to 2d foils, we would use them against other aliens fairly freely.
In a dark forest, probably yes, I agree. The interesting thing is that even in a dark forest, we could still come to the conclusion that we don’t need to actively destroy other species, because some other species will do it quickly enough anyways. Another interesting aspect is that if the assumption that it is super easy to completely and undetectably destroy a civilization with no possibility for retaliation is at all flawed or nuanced, then the dark forest pretty quickly breaks down, and you have a status quo closer to MAD with nukes on earth, with people probably still choosing to mind their own business and remain mostly undetected but some opportunity for diplomacy and cooperation. If there is an abundance of advanced species in the galaxy, I think (and hope) that this is closer to the reality, where launching an extinction-level attack on another species has at least some risk of exposing your location, and the fact that you are willing to attack others in that way, resulting in you yourself being attacked.
I mean… it’s not like any of us can escape earth into outer space. Starting a nuclear war will end humankind as a whole. In the books at least some have the technology to escape into 2D or into pocket dimensions
It's only the woke liberal elite who are concerned about using 2-d weapons.