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It’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 doe
by f6v 5y ago
It’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?
- bo0tzz 5y agoSo how are you intending to do those calculations in your mind?
- danielheath 5y agoBy being a super-advanced space alien? I mean, or just practicing. Humans who put in the time can do pretty amazing stuff.
- alasdair_ 5y agoThere is a section in the novel Cryptonomicon where the protagonist is in a jail cell and monitored 24/7. He communicates with another person via a deck of cards, with all of the cryptography performed in the two people's minds. It's annoying to do but should certainly be possible if the fate of the world is at stake.
- EthanHeilman 5y agoThe sophons are not that powerful and have very limited capabilities. Humans perceived as being very powerful because we doesn't understand how they work and they are being used to frighten us. It's like showing a gun to someone who doesn't know what a gun is. The limitations such line of sight, range, limited ammo are not immediately obvious. It looks as though you have a god-like ability to strike anyone dead by wishing it.
- rsynnott 5y agoThe sophons aren’t particularly powerful, though. They interfere with particle physics experiments by actually interacting with the particle beam, but they can’t do much else. It’s mentioned at some point that the humans are worried they could interfere with computers, but clearly they can’t even do that (if they could, Lou Ji’s plan probably wouldn’t work).
- shoto_io 5y agoWhy not just for fun? Like riding horses even though you have a car.
- coldacid 5y agoOr trolling.
- dice 5y ago“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.” -- HHGTTG
- micromacrofoot 5y agoSpoiler: It took them so long to get to earth that they were concerned about humans becoming a formidable opponent in the meantime. Had human advancement not been halted humans would have much faster access to Mars than they would.
- whymad 5y agoTrue for what it is, but this is handled in the books. They literally don’t want our planet, they want our star. And the dark forest: without a history of correlated interaction we have no reason to believe they will allow us to live, so we can’t allow them to live, so they can’t allow us to live. Eliding a more major spoiler, they absolutely intended to annihilate us on arrival and they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for, ah, “those meddling kids”. Everything else was cloak and dagger. They definitely would have terraformed every planet in the system once they were sure we were gone. Or more likely deconstructed them, at that point in their development.
- wisty 5y agoIt's a good book, but while some elements are good sf it's not all hard sf. They're looking for a new planet and didn't even send a probe 50 years ago?
- EthanHeilman 5y agoBecause the trisolarans didn't know who was out there until they received a message from Earth. They were worried that if they sent a probe to another star then a more advanced civilization perhaps hiding around that star would see the probe arrive, trace the source and annihilate them.
- ansible 5y ago> True for what it is, but this is handled in the books. They literally don’t want our planet, they want our star. That's... an odd reason. There are plenty of stars out there, unless the aliens started out right next door (like in Alpha Centauri) there's not much reason to go after our star. I haven't read the books...
- mannerheim 5y ago> unless the aliens started out right next door (like in Alpha Centauri) They did.
- bkanber 5y ago
- ASalazarMX 5y agoSuper spoiler below: Their tri-solar system was too unstable to terraform, they needed a stable solar system to migrate to. Of course ours was the nearest with an habitable planet (otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story), so they can immediately colonize Earth, and probably begin the centuries-long process of terraforming the neighboring planets.
- shoto_io 5y agoOh great! I just started reading the book… /s
- cogman10 5y agoStill doesn't make sense. Why limit our tech when they ultimately want to just eliminate us all together? Drop a super virus on us or irradiate the whole planet. Any species capable of disrupting our particle accelerators is more than capable of wiping us from existence.
- dylan604 5y agoIt's kind of like nuclear warfare here on Earth. If you want to eliminate every living thing, then sure do some sort of scorched Earth type of thing. However, that leaves the planet in an un-inhabitable condition. If you need to wipe out the inhabitants but leave everything else so you can now use it, you need to not destroy everything in the first place. Otherwise, you now have to terraform a planet that you chose because you didn't need to terraform it.
- temporalparts 5y agoMore spoilers: In the book, they were scared of humanity's technological growth rate. They were observing our technological advances and noticed that it was significantly faster than theirs. While they were, at the time, technologically superior, they were afraid that after the 250+ years it would take for them to get to Earth, humanity would have become technologically superior; too strong for them to overtake.
- numlocked 5y ago
- AlexCoventry 5y agoThere's also the weird aspect that [rot13'd for spoilers] gur fbcubagf frrz gb or noyr gb vasyhrapr naq dhrel znggre, ohg pna'g frrz gb ernq crbcyr'f zvaqf be xvyy gurz.
- bo0tzz 5y agoGung'f abg dhvgr evtug, gurl qba'g npghnyyl unir gur znff gb rkreg zhpu vasyhrapr ba nalguvat
- bkanber 5y agoGurl jrer cebgbaf, evtug? Fb gurl ernyyl pna bayl nssrpg guvatf nebhaq gung znff naq raretl enatr. Gurl pna zrff jvgu cnegvpyr nppryrengbe rkcrevzragf ohg pna'g nssrpg gur znpeb jbeyq.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoTIL google translate doesn't do ROT13.
- Panoramix 5y agoSpoilers ahead It was such a letdown, the book starts great, and then the explanation turns out to be magical Alien proton computers? Yikes. It was so promising. I eventually read the whole trilogy, I have very mixed feelings about it. It had some pretty cool ideas but it's hard to get past all the giant plot holes and outlandish fantasy. I guess you have to be in the mood to constantly brush off the bad parts (and boy there are many) and plunge forward.
- visualradio 5y agoA more materialist approach would be to say that it is the artists and authors of such books which are influenced by cosmos and the three body problem is an error detection code for repairing memory errors in collective consciousness to prevent civilizations from repeating unpromising patterns of development which have already been simulated.
- megablast 5y agoThanks for the spoilers.
- cynicalkane 5y agoSpoilers. There are a few parts of the book, according to the translator, that are done in the manner of a Chinese folktale, which he tried to translate to a different style in English. I'm no expert, but I got the impression the sophont chapter was in this category. It has this otherworldly silliness with the multiple attempts to create a sophont going wrong in different dimensions, calculated to fit the repetitive pattern of a fairy tale. I think the thrust, which might be hard to read in translation, is this: we can't imagine the technology a superior alien species would come up with, so it's related as a fairy tale beyond technological realism. Anyway, I doubt it was meant to be hard sci-fi.
- shmageggy 5y ago> Anyway, I doubt it was meant to be hard sci-fi. Which was extremely disappointing, given that it was billed as such by many, and until the aforementioned mumbo-jumbo was doing a seemingly nice job on that front.
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y agoThe whole book is fun and creative fiction. Just enjoy it like you would enjoy any non-real TV or movie. If you haven’t read the series, saw the spoilers here, and are no longer thinking about it… don’t get discouraged. Pay off in Book 3 via the space concepts are worth it still. Mind blowing fun stuff
- cmurf 5y agoHuman story tellers are very attached to humanity, so the stories tend to anthropomorphize aliens. Most alien stories rehash old religious and hero stories. What do we have to offer aliens? In the category of vague as well as less is more, Arrival/Stories of Your Life and Others are about as compelling as it gets - humanity hasn't yet achieved full potential, going further out on a limb is folly (however entertaining it might be, it becomes less compelling). The more truly alien, the less in common we have in all respects, the more boring that story turns out to be because? We're a selfish, self-interested, loathsome species who consistently overestimates its importance. The more different a fellow human is, the vast majority of people reject that individual because of their (weird) non-social behaviors. So these alien stories strike me as deification, angels, devils, i.e. the supernatural, and don't adequately explain why or how any alien civilization would take interest in us, except via our own attachments to ourselves. This is central to good science fiction because they are stories ultimately about exploring something about humanity, it's not really about aliens at all. They're entirely incidental even if they seem important, aliens are just a literary device. But getting to science-non-fiction, a factual case of aliens, that's quite hard for most humans to imagine at all. Consider how poorly most people coped with covid, and then consider how much more traumatic an alien visit would be, even assuming they were nice. In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) those aliens were "nice" but with a really big caveat. (And neatly explained devils.) But again, humans are the central part of that story, not aliens. It wouldn't and couldn't have been interesting to focus on the interests of the aliens without us being part of the story - we're just too self-interested by nature. The aliens' interests would have been boring to us, we just don't have the necessary common frame of reference with such beings. How could we?
- cgh 5y agoThis trilogy features long sections from the perspective of the Trisolarans without any humans around and their motivations are central to the plot.