[pseudobry]

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?

[f6v]

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.

[whymad]

True 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.

[ansible]

> 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...

[godelski]

> unless the aliens started out right next door (like in Alpha Centauri)

This is where the aliens are (a trinary system). It still takes them 400 years to get to Earth and so they are trying to stifle Earth's technological advancements because 1) we know they are coming 2) our technological growth is faster than them (this is partially explained due to different biological and environmental factors. The aliens can't lie to one another and have environmental factors that frequently wipe out or pause their technological advancements). The aliens in question are supposed to be only a few hundred years (max) ahead of us technologically (or smaller than the difference in time that it takes them to get here)

[mannerheim]

> unless the aliens started out right next door (like in Alpha Centauri)

They did.

[bkanber]

> unless the aliens started out right next door (like in Alpha Centauri)

:D

Strongly recommended reading.

[rsynnott]

They are indeed right next door. Also, it’s a crowded universe, and no-one wants to be noticed, so just showing up at Tau Ceti or whatever would be very unwise; there might already be someone there.

The major bit of artistic license is that their Alpha Centauri is way more broken than ours; the real one isn’t all that badly behaved.

It’s implied that the whole situation is very unusual; interstellar invasions don’t happen as a rule and they’re only doing it because their star(s) is basically broken.

[seanc]

Well, the thesis is that with exponential growth and a modest amount of time there _aren't_ plenty of stars out there.

[Dylan16807]

If you're growing that fast, then a system or two is a rounding error. You won't have plenty no matter what you do, so how about not wiping out other species for that extra smidge?

[wisty]

It'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]

Because 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.

[Panoramix]

Spoilers 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]

A 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.

[cynicalkane]

Spoilers.

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]

> 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.

[jjoske]

There where some good ideas in it but it never really worked for me, I have often wondered if it was translation issues.

[megablast]

Thanks for the spoilers.

[ASalazarMX]

Super 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.

[rnjesus]

an aside: i really wish hn had a redaction-style, click-to-reveal spoiler system. not that i don’t appreciate the spoiler warning here — it’s quite kind that people mark their comments as-such — but even when i’ve seen “spoiler warnings” for other content that i’d rather not be spoiled on, it’s very hard to not skim the next few proceeding lines out of habit (especially on mobile). i can’t imagine i’m the only one who does this.

[ASalazarMX]

.siht ekil meht etirw dluoc ew ebyaM

Let's see...

.stenalp gnirobhgien eht gnimrofarret fo ssecorp gnol-seirutnec eht nigeb ylbaborp dna ,htraE ezinoloc yletaidemmi nac yeht os ,)yrots a fo hcum eb t'ndluow ereht esiwrehto( tenalp elbatibah na htiw tseraen eht saw sruo esruoc fO .ot etargim ot metsys ralos elbats a dedeen yeht ,mrofarret ot elbatsnu oot saw metsys ralos-irt riehT

Oh god no, forget this.

[cogman10]

Still 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.

[temporalparts]

More 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.

[SkyMarshal]

They could send the subatomic particles from Trisolaris to Earth at light speed, and then use the entangled pair of particles (one on earth, its mate on Trisolaris) to monitor events on earth in real-time.

As already said, that preserves the planet, prevents a potential enemy from further developing technologically, and enables real-time monitoring of and interference with that enemy's activities.

[roywiggins]

>and then use the entangled pair of particles (one on earth, its mate on Trisolaris) to monitor events on earth in real-time.

This, of course, breaks the known laws of physics, since lightspeed is a hard limit on the speed of causality. You can't use entanglement that way in the real world (if QM is anywhere close to correct)

[AmericanChopper]

The sophons themselves were a piece of magic science fiction. Which I think is fine because the author really doesn’t ask you to suspend your disbelief all that much throughout the books. The star plucking is another example, as far as we know you can’t use a star to do that.

But accelerating them towards earth “at the speed of light” isn’t exactly a problem. The LHC accelerates protons to about 3 m/s less than the speed of light, and as far as the plot is concerned the sophons travelling here at the speed of light, or some tiny fraction of a percent less than the speed of light doesn’t make any difference.

[iainmerrick]

Right, that was the huge issue I had with the story. In most respects it seemed to be trying hard to be speculative hard SF in the Arthur C Clarke vein (i.e. fine to introduce exotic new physics, but only very carefully and consistently) so it was very surprising to have that gaping hole at the centre.

The aliens had instantaneous communications, and could directly influence events on earth, but still had to travel at sublight speeds? It wanted at least an acknowledgement of the inconsistency, and a token effort at explanation. As others have noted, it’s not at all clear why they couldn’t simply have killed off the humans remotely.

[Vecr]

I can't reply to roywiggins for some reason, but it's possible that the solar systems are closer in other dimensions or something like that. Probably not though, because the higher dimensions are so small. I assume the author didn't think about it until it was too late, or they couldn't fix it.

[EthanHeilman]

The book makes the claim that the sophons they send over are very limited. It seems reasonable to surmise that they could not create a super virus. Yet they can disrupt sub-atomic experiments. We are talking about an advanced basically magic tech the author made up for the purposes of the plot. So the author can set the rules that the magic tech can do X but not Y.

[dylan604]

It'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.

[numlocked]

That was probably the plan; but the “tech-blocking particle” gets here at the speed of light, ensuring that we are still sufficiently behind, technologically, by the time their e.g. virus or radiation gizmos arrive. It “freezes” development to ensure that they still have technological superiority when the much-slower, barely-relativistic, big guns arrive.

[AmericanChopper]

They did also send weapons towards earth ahead of their fleet. They arrived much faster than their fleet, but much slower than the sophons.

[shoto_io]

Oh great! I just started reading the book…

/s

[WORMS_EAT_WORMS]

The 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

[s5300]

Perhaps 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.

[AlexCoventry]

There'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.

[bkanber]

Gurl 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.

[bo0tzz]

Gung'f abg dhvgr evtug, gurl qba'g npghnyyl unir gur znff gb rkreg zhpu vasyhrapr ba nalguvat

[BrissyCoder]

TIL google translate doesn't do ROT13.

[cmurf]

Human 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]

This trilogy features long sections from the perspective of the Trisolarans without any humans around and their motivations are central to the plot.

[shoto_io]

Why not just for fun? Like riding horses even though you have a car.

[coldacid]

Or trolling.

[dice]

  “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

[alasdair_]

I 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?

[EthanHeilman]

The 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]

The 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).

[bo0tzz]

How would you use that private key without it 'leaving' your mind?

[danielheath]

The same way you use a private key in a computer without transmitting it?

[bo0tzz]

So how are you intending to do those calculations in your mind?

[alasdair_]

There 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.

[danielheath]

By being a super-advanced space alien?

I mean, or just practicing. Humans who put in the time can do pretty amazing stuff.

[hllooo]

iirc 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

[micromacrofoot]

Spoiler: 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.

[majkinetor]

You spoiled it for me, I am on 1/4 of the first book :S

[efsavage]

Rest easy, there is a lot more to the books than that.

[kryptn]

Same. It's been on my list, but this is more detail than I wanted to see.

[whytaka]

Oh blood, I just got this book. Is this a huge spoiler?

[rsynnott]

Eh, 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.

[svennek]

Well, 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...

[pseudosudoer]

Don't worry, I'll just use a sophon to revert your memory.

[ASalazarMX]

It's plot-establishing, but not a huge spoiler.

[BrissyCoder]

No not at all. Keep reading.

[FinanceAnon]

If 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?

[gizmo686]

Spoilers 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.

[rsynnott]

The sophons don't seem to be able to do anything much beyond bother particle accelerators. The later droplet probes _are_ very nasty, but it's at least implied that those weren't even available at the time they set out.

[ASalazarMX]

Killing 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]

Protons 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]

Tbf, 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.

[xster]

I think the argument was that they could send Sophons faster than we can build particle accelerators.

[rsynnott]

This is addressed in the book; a new sophon is cheaper than a new particle accelerator.

[wdwvt1]

Totally agree with this, the effort to retard development could have been better spent with a myriad of ecosystem destroying actions or geopolitical manipulations. Also just send the indestructible probe to kill every human...

My bigger problem with this book was that the author seems to wholely confuse secrecy for strategy. The entire conceit behind the wallfacers seemed ridiculous to me. The best strategic plan need not be secret (eg MAD). Make it clear that humanity will destroy every planet in the solar system and you've got at least MAD in the centuries the trisolarians will take to arrive.

[gizmo686]

More spoilers below:

They actualy did a fair amount of geopolitical manipulations. That formed most of the plot.

In the end, it turned out to be MAD that saved us, but setting up the MAD scenario involved secrecy from them (or else they would have stopped us before we could trigger it), and from the rest of humanity (because an official plan to destroy Earth would never have been approved).

[wdwvt1]

It seems like the manipulations were exceedingly silly. It seems like having the sophont start a nuclear war would be straightforward. It was hard for me to suspend disbelief in the sense that it had planet-sized computational power and the ability to manipulate some information on the subatomic level, but couldn't find a vulnerability in aging nuclear launch protocols? The history of near misses with human controlled nuclear weapons suggests a variety of vulnerabilities exist that wouldn't require e.g. directly hacking into command and control. Could it spoof images/data to a sub? Could it cause hallucinations in a large sensor array that feeds data to Norad or a Chinese/Russian equivalent?

Re MAD: I think a plan to destroy Earth would have been easily approved - much like it was in 1960-now, with ICBM and SSBN retaliatory strike capability. Obviously somewhat different in that those MAD-based nuclear wars would be extinctive but not deny the planet to the trisolarians, but the idea that human governments aren't ready to commit to that seems wrong given our history.

[bmh100]

The aliens specifically wanted Earth because of its life. A nuclear war would damage the planet's ecosystem too much.

[shhsshs]

> In the end, it turned out to be MAD that saved us

Read the rest of the series and this answer gets more interesting. I will not say any more about the outcome (spoilers)

[saiya-jin]

They cared about our stable single sun more than planets. We were not on the level to destroy our sun, or the planets themselves

[kingkawn]

Because 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]

While 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.

[AdamN]

In 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.

[nolok]

Haven'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]

If 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.

[joshspankit]

Here’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)

[JetSetWilly]

Because 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]

In 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.

[artursapek]

I troll people I don't like all the time

[maininformer]

maybe we are their toys, or maybe our emotions is their energy source

[midrus]

Maybe because we're their big brother tv show or just their zoo

[tomudding]

Unrelated 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.

[rsynnott]

In the Three Body Problem, the naughty aliens break reproducibility in particle accelerator experiments; they start giving random results. So we're good for now.

[amelius]

Or perhaps the laws of physics that we observe are becoming more complicated over time, as a consequence of some deeper law of physics.

[alasdair_]

The simulation we all live in is getting a new patch with higher resolution models.

[blackboxlogic]

I wonder if we're in PROD, STAGE, QA or DEV? waves humanly

[ASalazarMX]

In 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]

They 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).

[bequanna]

Interesting.

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]

Without 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]

The 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).

[misiti3780]

which book was better?