Is this discovery exciting? Or are we living in The Three-Body Problem?
I also never understood the wallfacers - why can’t they communicate via encryption, using a private key stored in each individuals mind alone?
I mean, or just practicing. Humans who put in the time can do pretty amazing stuff.
“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.”
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.
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...
They did.
:D
Strongly recommended reading.
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)
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.
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.
/s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Let's see...
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Oh god no, forget this.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
But IMHO the book 2 is the best and most intriguing anyways and that is totally unaffected...
Why would they specifically mess with the particle accelarators at this point? Why not with earlier physics?
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.
Their strength was information gathering and special effects.
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.
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).
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.
Read the rest of the series and this answer gets more interesting. I will not say any more about the outcome (spoilers)
There's a big difference between the scenarios.
People from North Sentinel Island might ask themselves the same question about us.
For what reason are the aliens trying trying to stop us from discovering new physics? Stop us from blowing ourselves up? Blowing them up?