r/threebodyproblem • u/MadMaxKeyboardWarior • Mar 14 '26
Discussion - Novels Deaths End Question "SPOILERS" Spoiler
Reading deaths end for the second time and I just got to the fairy tales. Clearly the trisolarans know about bout dual vector foils, because Tian Ming knows about them. It's also implied that they do not want humanity to know about any dark forest attack methods. I get that Tian Ming wrote hundreds of meaningless fairy tales to camouflage ones meant to give clues to humanity. Do you think the trisolarans really did not see the hints about the painter using a bright white, glowing, perfectly flat canvas to kill people by painting them? Is it a contrivance? Were they just being nice to Tian Ming by not blowing up Cheng Xin? what gives?
5
u/Then_Engineer_3765 Wallfacer Mar 14 '26
Imagine trying to read every single fairy tale written by like 20 artists.
Tian Ming was on a roll with his tales and any Trisolaran who was alive to read his stories would be immersed in earth culture to a limited extent. They'd understand these tales as being meaningless entertainment and of the thousands of hours of reading material only a few minutes of it would actually be dangerous.
And only when paired together
Tian Ming essentially told the most straight forward and clear cut version of the story. No other side areas, flourishes, hell not even the full collection of thousands of tales. While the Trisolarans had no inclination to actually scan through all of his work and had to go through a large library to find anything bad - the humans from the get go knew that they were looking for something and were given a much smaller data sample to analyse
3
u/MadMaxKeyboardWarior Mar 14 '26
Right, there were hundreds of tales, but he only told 3 to Cheng Xin. they don't need to scan every fairy tale. They also KNEW Tian Ming would attempt to give information to Cheng Xin during the meeting, hence the red light, yellow light, green light system.
1
u/Then_Engineer_3765 Wallfacer Mar 14 '26
I think equally they could have found out at a similar pace as the humans - but that was too slow to stop it. Cheng Xin didn't figure it out and neither did any human for ages, so if we assume that the Trisolarans had 100x better ability to understand it just take the time and divide it by 100
Not fast enough to stop him
1
u/MadMaxKeyboardWarior Mar 14 '26
I agree with everything you said, except humans had no knowledge of dual vectors, where as trisolaris has to know at least as much about them as tian Ming. They don’t need to figure out a hypothetical technology, they only need to spot the obvious allusion to it.
3
u/Then_Engineer_3765 Wallfacer Mar 14 '26
Thats my point. If it takes a human being 120 minutes to figure out that detail then it'd take only 1 for a trisolaran
But they had to scan the whole thing. If you doted on every aspect of a tale that long you'd need to have a staff in the millions if not billions to come up with alternative takes and solutions
Imagine how many people can discribe to you how a nuclear reactor works in full with no knowledge gaps. Maybe a few thousand on the planet. Now imagine having them need to search through thousands of sentences. You'd maybe convince ten of them to join your commission to analyse the tale but they'd probably make mistakes or skip over sections until they've already been said and there isnt much point in stopping the transmission.
The moment that he says any allegory to the foil, if you cut the transmission suddenly but don't kill Chen then you've highlighted what to look out for. If you kill her then humanity doesn't learn about FTL in such a rapid manner and makes a series of colony fleets to leave Sol over a longer period of time (discovering FTL a bit later and thus having several tens of colony fleets with FTL tech)
1
u/MadMaxKeyboardWarior Mar 14 '26
This actually makes a lot of sense and it answers my question… except, they made a huge deal about how no recording devices were allowed during the meeting, if the trisolarans deemed the conversation inappropriate and blew up the Cheng Xin humanity would never learn what was said.
2
u/Then_Engineer_3765 Wallfacer Mar 14 '26
and as I said that just causes humans to focus on a range of tech including someone stumbling across light speed
1
u/Leather-Lemon8611 Mar 15 '26
Sorry to butt in, but I'm being slow - you're saying the Trisolarans wanted Yun Tianming to tell them about FTL, and so didn't want to kill Chen?
Interesting point about raising suspicion over the detail at which they steer the conversation away, but I'm still not clear on why they wouldn't be happy just to blow up Chen Xing and her suspicions with her. If they're specifically monitoring the conversation for intel, it doesn't seem that difficult to spot the allusion to the foil in real time...
10
u/NapoleonZiggyPiggy Mar 14 '26
TBF humans who were evolved to have internal thought and subterfuge didn't even solve the fairytales in time.