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I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, which explore the concept of aliens using their super advanced technology to mess with the resul
by pseudobry 5y ago
I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, which explore the concept of aliens using their super advanced technology to mess with the results of Earth's particle accelerators, thereby stopping humanity's ability to develop technology based on new physics.
Is this discovery exciting? Or are we living in The Three-Body Problem?
- bequanna 5y agoInteresting. For what reason are the aliens trying trying to stop us from discovering new physics? Stop us from blowing ourselves up? Blowing them up?
- sylens 5y agoWithout ruining too much of the books (they are worth a read), there is conflict between us and the aliens and limiting technological progress is an important part of their strategy
- godelski 5y agoThe aliens are coming to Earth to take it over. They aren't much more advanced than us and so don't want us to be more advanced than the fleet that arrives (it takes them a few hundred years to get to Earth).
- FinanceAnon 5y agoIf aliens don't like us, then why wouldn't they just destroy us, rather than troll our physicists and mess with the results? Why would they specifically mess with the particle accelarators at this point? Why not with earlier physics?
- kingkawn 5y agoBecause they're hundreds of years of space travel away so they send sentient protons to sabotage our particle physics so that we can't develop advanced enough technology to stop them by the time they arrive.
- sweetheart 5y agoWhile the entire series is absolutely incredible, I _loved_ the premise of human beings knowing 400 years in advance that aliens are coming. Such a fascinating start to the trilogy.
- joshspankit 5y agoHere’s a possibility: They are in the next universe over, and so far the only thing that passes between is gravity. Fine-grained control over gravity could allow them to mess with things but not destroy us (if they even wished to. I don’t even think Earth would vote to destroy an unknown civilization if the roles were reversed)
- maininformer 5y agomaybe we are their toys, or maybe our emotions is their energy source
- AdamN 5y agoIn the book that's the state of human science when they learn of our existence. Also, they want our planet and it will take them a long time to get to earth - so long in fact that they predict that if our physics is allowed to mature they won't be able to beat us militarily by that time. They need to stop progress asap.
- gizmo686 5y agoSpoilers below: The Three Body Problem trilogy breaks down if you think about it too hard. The in-universe explanation was that the aliens did want to destroy us, and had an attack fleet heading towards us. However, the attack fleet was relativly slow, and they were concerned that by the time it reached us we would have advanced to the point where we might win in a fight. To prevent this, they sent smaller probes to us at near light speed. In theory, these weren't capable of causing significant damage, but they could cause enough of an effect that they could make the results of particle accelerators useless. Without being able to use particle accelerators, we wouldn't be able to advance our knowledge of fundamental physics, so the aliens were confident that when their attack fleet reached us we would be defenseless. By itself, what I have written is not particularly absurd, but if you look at the other things those advanced probes ended up being able to do, they could have easily just killed everyone.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoKilling everyone is too much to ask, remember they were ultimately just protons, physically they're not more powerful than cosmic rays. Their strength was information gathering and special effects.
- gizmo686 5y agoProtons that could cause controlled visual hallucinations in people. If they can cause that level of interference with our nervous system, they can kill us. Even if they were somehow limited to visual hallucinations, a well timed hallucination is easily lethal. They probably ought to be able to hack into computer systems with that as well.
- HotHotLava 5y agoTbf, from the way they were described it should have been fairly easy to defeat the Sophons even without any science-fiction technology; just build e.g. 10-20 particle accelerators distributed over the world and take measurements close enough in time to each other that you cannot be at multiple sites without exceeding the speed of light. Then at most 3 of them could be corrupted for any given run, and these can be thrown out as statistical noise.
- JetSetWilly 5y agoBecause your interstellar equivalent of the CIA can obtain the political capital to prevent a civilisational rival from emerging via subtle manipulations, but it can't obtain the political capital and consensus needed to commit wholesale genocide. There's a big difference between the scenarios.
- rsynnott 5y agoIn this case the subtle manipulations were just a holding pattern while they waited on the genocide; it was going to take them 400 years to get here.
- midrus 5y agoMaybe because we're their big brother tv show or just their zoo
- nolok 5y agoHaven't read those specific books, but "keep the species at the level they were when discovered for preservation" is a very common trope of such things, and usually mapped on how humanity considers that "preserving a species" means keeping it exactly as they were when first discovered.
- yarky 5y agoIf you insist on looking at it from our perspective, how about curiosity? Let's see how far they (us) keep trying to make sense out of this nonsense. Trolling in the name of science I guess. People from North Sentinel Island might ask themselves the same question about us.
- artursapek 5y agoI troll people I don't like all the time
- f6v 5y agoIt’s a great book, but it suffers from the same old issue. A civilization that is capable of packing a robot into particle by manipulating higher dimensions doesn’t need to take our planet. They could terraform Mars or any other planet they want.
- s5300 5y agoPerhaps we look to be an exceptional vacation spot, and there are space Karen's who desire an "all natural" planet instead of a terraformed one.
- hllooo 5y agoiirc the solar system contained the closest planets, which is why they chose it. I don't think it matters if they want mars or earth, there's no way we would let them do that (send a massive military fleet definitely just to mars). they wanted to ensure their technology remained superior by the time they arrived
- alasdair_ 5y agoI had the same problem with the books. If the sophon is that omniscient and that powerful, it could do far more than just mess with experiments. I also never understood the wallfacers - why can’t they communicate via encryption, using a private key stored in each individuals mind alone?
- micromacrofoot 5y agoCouldn't trisolarans have broken the encryption? Many of our old methods of encryption have been rendered obsolete by our own technology.
- bo0tzz 5y agoHow would you use that private key without it 'leaving' your mind?
- danielheath 5y agoThe same way you use a private key in a computer without transmitting it?
- amelius 5y agoOr perhaps the laws of physics that we observe are becoming more complicated over time, as a consequence of some deeper law of physics.
- alasdair_ 5y agoThe simulation we all live in is getting a new patch with higher resolution models.
- blackboxlogic 5y agoI wonder if we're in PROD, STAGE, QA or DEV? waves humanly
- majkinetor 5y agoYou spoiled it for me, I am on 1/4 of the first book :S
- whytaka 5y agoOh blood, I just got this book. Is this a huge spoiler?
- pseudosudoer 5y agoDon't worry, I'll just use a sophon to revert your memory.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoIt's plot-establishing, but not a huge spoiler.
- svennek 5y agoWell, it kinda spoils some/most of book 1. But IMHO the book 2 is the best and most intriguing anyways and that is totally unaffected...
- rsynnott 5y agoEh, it's hinted at, pretty early on. If you knew there were aliens in the book, I don't think it's THAT huge a spoiler.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoNo not at all. Keep reading.
- kryptn 5y agoSame. It's been on my list, but this is more detail than I wanted to see.
- efsavage 5y agoRest easy, there is a lot more to the books than that.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoIn the books, the Sophons got in the way of the accelerated particle beam but somehow avoided being destroyed themselves. They wouldn't have allowed a new particle to be discovered.
- godelski 5y agoThey were destroyed but could bring themselves back together. The thing is that the particles are intelligent so could break apart in random ways that didn't match what particle physicists expected (they would then recombine outside the detector as to not be exposed).
- rsynnott 5y agoIn the Three Body Problem, the naughty aliens break reproducibility in particle accelerator experiments; they start giving random results. So we're good for now.
- tomudding 5y agoUnrelated to this topic, but Death's End is also a great book if you haven't started reading it. I can also recommend Ball Lightning which more or less takes place before the events in the The Three-Body Problem.
- misiti3780 5y agowhich book was better?