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?
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)
People from North Sentinel Island might ask themselves the same question about us.
There's a big difference between the scenarios.