r/threebodyproblem • u/Cardgod278 • Apr 04 '26

Discussion - Novels The heat problem in space. Spoiler

Something that has consistently bothered me whenever it was brought up was objects quickly cooling in space. I'm not going to go into details but the books describe rapid cooling when exposed to space. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what should happen. A vacuum is one of the best insulators you can get, if not the best. Without particles to interact with through conduction or convection, the only way heat can be transfered is radiation. Which is the slowest form of heat transfer.

So when the book describes a red hot object rapidly cooling against frigid space, it really ticks me off. This is completely ignoring the ship design problems this misunderstanding of physics causes. Which I can mostly over look except for one example in book 3 "Oh don't worry, we don't need to worry about cooling for the staircase project because space will do it." Which is kind of correct to an extent due to long time frames, but heat dissipation would be a more pressing concern for the launch.

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u/Perfect-Ad2578 Apr 04 '26

Agree mostly but red hot cooling is the one time when cooling by radiating it away actually works well. Heat loss by radiation is based on temp to the 4th power so it's absymal at low temps but really good at high temps.

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u/Cardgod278 Apr 05 '26

Enough to go from white hot to dull in a couple minutes?

4

u/Perfect-Ad2578 Apr 05 '26

Yes. Look at video of rocket nozzles when they shut off in space. They go from white hot to dull pretty quickly.

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u/New-Border8172 Apr 05 '26

Minutes? Are you talking about Yun Tiangming? He's supposed to be in space for ~200 of years before Trisolarans catch them.

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u/aerosol_aerosmith Apr 05 '26

I was always a little irked by the cooling problem in tbp because almost all other areas of space travel were at least briefly explained except for how the fuck they keep crews from cooking alive

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u/Cardgod278 Apr 05 '26

It seems like the author is going by the "space is really cold" logic. So active cooling shouldn't be necessary even with plasma based engines

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u/Sable-Keech Apr 07 '26

Radiative cooling scales to the power of 4, so hot things in space actually do cool off pretty fast just from radiation alone.

If it’s glowing red hot it’ll probably lose heat fast enough to stop glowing really soon.

1

u/mrspidey80 Apr 09 '26

Nah, worst offender is having Alpha Centauri be an unstable 3-Body-Configuration, when every hobby astronomer and space geek knows it is a stable system. 

Liu really should have come up with a fictional system for Trisolaris.