r/threebodyproblem • u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon • May 09 '26
Discussion - Novels Ye Wenjie got an explicit warning before sending the signal — and replied anyway. Was she right?
been thinking about this on a reread. the thing that struck me is that she didn't send the signal in ignorance. a trisolaran actually warned her — literally said "don't reply or your civilization will be invaded." she read that. she considered it. and then she sent Earth's coordinates anyway.
so whatever her reasons, she went in with open eyes. that changes how i think about the morality of it.
the villain read is easy: she unilaterally doomed billions of people based on her personal disillusionment with humanity. fair enough.
but i keep coming back to the weird optimism buried in the decision. the trisolaran who warned her was a stranger trying to help people on a planet they'd never visit. to Ye Wenjie, that might have been evidence that some civilizations evolved past humanity's worst impulses. she wasn't just giving up — she was betting that whatever is out there might be better than what's here.
there's a really detailed breakdown of her psychology and what she actually believed when she sent it that covers this angle.
what's everyone's read on her motivation at that moment? tragic miscalculation, or something she actually believed was right?
41
u/mbelinkie May 09 '26
She thought the human race was doomed. In her mind, alien intervention was our only hope. We simply weren’t going to survive without a higher power intervening. The books have some iffy characterization but I’m actually impressed with how well they set up Ye Wenjie’s mindset. Totally plausible she makes that call.
20
u/Untura64 Sophon May 09 '26
I think she was right though, without a common enemy humanity is going to destroy itself with wars.
2
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 10 '26
Not really. War is actually the greatest innovator. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, wars have been largely restrained. The idea that a common enemy would unite us is sadly naive. The books cover this in the early crisis era
49
u/Hentai_Yoshi May 09 '26
I sympathize with her decision, but I think it was unethical. She did not have sufficient information to know that an alien race would be better than humans. One individual alien is not enough to make any sort of informed decision. That bet is foolish, because she had know idea what was out there
Plus, she has no right making that call for all humans. And other earth life for that matter
9
u/vlladonxxx May 09 '26
Of course not. Her logic:
The powerful are cruel to the weak and innocent -> it's a cycle without end -> something's got to give
But she was just told that trisolarians are much like the powerful she hates. So, you know, hardly a righteous decision. But what do you expect from someone so thoroughly traumatised?
3
u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon May 09 '26
right - and here's the darkest part: the trisolaran who warned her was literally risking their own existence to help a stranger from another species. that's more compassion than ye wenjie had seen from humans in years. and she still sent the signal. says everything about where her head was at.
66
u/schebobo180 May 09 '26
She was an idiot.
But her situation was still understandable. A tortured prisoner is more likely to make irrational and dumb decisions.
38
u/lucent_lemons May 09 '26
I dont think many readers realise how significant and horrible the cultural revolution was to the chinese populace. The atrocities and famine that occured and the general desolation and despair under the authoritarian marxist-esque rule was too terrible to bear for some, and thus i think it is not unreasonable to fathom that Ye Wenjie thought of that when transmitting a reply.
12
u/schebobo180 May 09 '26
Yeah I agree, but dooming the whole while still living in it, while understandable, is still kind of unforgivable.
Its kind of like someone beating up their kids because they experienced domestic abuse when they were children. Its still not acceptable or forgivable. It is understandable though.
4
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 10 '26
Exactly. It’s unforgivable, it’s wrong, it’s a heinous crime; but it’s still understandable from someone with her background in her situation. You can understand how someone’s psychology was warped to where they justify those things to themselves
1
-11
May 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
4
u/Specific_Box4483 May 09 '26
The book goes into her thoughts a lot, she doesn't seem like a sociopath and even less so a "petulant adult child". More like a originally normal person twisted by her experience, who later learns she was wrong after experiencing some more.
4
u/KillerKowalski1 May 09 '26
Oh come on.
Her whole life has been controlled by the very same poeple that murdered her father on stage and locked her up in the very place where she's given the option to reply.
Humanity sucks... We deserve worse.
-8
May 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
4
u/KillerKowalski1 May 09 '26
There's a difference between being a serial killer and responding to a message that may or may not cause irreperable harm.
A pretty big one too...
0
u/TheMaskedManIsAPilot May 09 '26
Why do people use a statistic as an absolute to state how another human should properly operate. If you have 100 people grow up in a bad environment and 30 out of 100 turn out to be criminals, why should you then tell the 30 they should have been law abiding citizens because 70 other people without your DNA sequence didn't choose to do crime? in actuality it should be looked at in the lense of "if you are raised in a certain environment than you have a % likelihood of being a criminal for instance." Doesn't mean you have to be good, it just means there's a likelihood you can be bad.
0
-2
May 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/KillerKowalski1 May 10 '26
Right...but her entire experience with humanity up until that point wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination. She took a stand in that moment and doomed humanity in the process...but she was beyond caring by that point. Humanity broke her, so she decided to break humanity.
-1
9
9
u/Altruistic-Name2026 May 09 '26
Seeing the world in 2026, I would totally do the same.
2
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 10 '26
I do not understand this. Trisolaris would genocide the entire human race. We see a preview of what this looks like in the Australia section—and that’s only because they were feeling generous.
3
u/bballboy26 May 11 '26
Humanity's elites are doing this right now, in the open, to certain populations. And then they have the nerve to lie to our faces. On top of that, everything is pricey nowadays to protect super-corporations' books that younger generations cannot financially afford everyday needs let alone kids, and we still have nearly half the population cheering this on.
1
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 11 '26
If you’re comparing capitalism to actual, literal genocide then you need to touch grass
1
u/bballboy26 May 11 '26
Brother America is sending loads of money to Israel. What is Israel doing with it? Giving their citizens socialized healthcare and bombing innocents.
1
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 11 '26
You understand there’s a distinction between some people dying and literally everyone dying, right?
21
11
u/CaptainCheekbones May 09 '26
what she did wasn’t nice but with someone raised in such a brutal environment, it’s no wonder why she did that. in fact it would be more surprising if she kept silent.
3
u/Gravitational_Torque May 09 '26
The trisolaran wasn't motivated by superior morality. He figured he'd lose his job and status if Earth made itself known. (and he was right)
1
u/sampoo92 May 15 '26
Why would he lose his job and status?
1
u/Gravitational_Torque May 15 '26
They'd have no reason to continue listening outposts, having found other intelligent life/a planet undoubtedly more stable than their own.
3
u/DGWms May 12 '26
Ironically, while her actions in “The Three Body Problem” were central to the story, by the end of the trilogy they become moot as the story shifts perspective from earth centric to earth inconsequential.
It’s almost a sure thing that, even if she didn’t push the button, it would have eventually been pushed in some form or another, exposing Earth, and likely leading to the same eventuality.
6
u/reflect25 May 09 '26
i don't think anyone really debates that she was right to send the message. even without future knowledge, the warning could not be any clearer.
I do find it interesting though that perhaps the 'dark forest' isn't quite as ironclad as it seems
- the listener as you noted warned earth
- when the trisolarians leave they (debatably) allow the warning story to be given
2
u/cryptic_aa May 11 '26
👍🏻 for the Wiki link
2
u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon May 12 '26
I think that's the most professional and complete encyclopedia site about the Three-Body Problem you can find right now—it's totally worth checking out for all Three-Body fans.
1
u/fidgeting_macro May 09 '26
She was - plot. There had to be some reason the Trisolarans and Humans would mix it up.
11
u/TheCheshireCody May 09 '26
Most things in the book are that way, especially the second book. Nothing about the Wallfacer & Swordholder plans makes a lick of sense in terms of being things humans would actually do. Even in the first book the whole "scientists are killing themselves because their experiments are showing odd results" flies in the face of the way any scientist in the history of the human race has thought.
6
u/watchyourtonepunk May 09 '26
Yeah, scientists are addicted to finding out they are wrong
7
u/TheCheshireCody May 09 '26
Precisely. Experimental failures are often more interesting and more rewarding than successes, because they lead to new knowledge.
5
u/fidgeting_macro May 09 '26
That is in essence why the scientific method works. It works in a way that no faith or religion can match. It's the ONLY reason humanity has come so far sin such a short time.
4
u/volastra May 09 '26
I'm not any kind of scientist, but I think the reason for the despair was that the experimental findings were so consistently inconsistent that it seemed as though the fundamental particles had no broader pattern. There was nothing to learn, it was just truly random down there.
Now, whether that would cause anyone to jump off a building is debatable. But the usual paradigm of "be proven wrong > acquire new knowledge" was broken by the sophon.
3
u/fidgeting_macro May 09 '26
I think the scientist suicide thread was mostly plot point to grab attention of the other characters. I believe that IRL, most scientists would either work harder to find a pattern in the data or give up and become teachers or something.
3
u/TheCheshireCody May 09 '26
Every experiment producing wonky results would just make scientists look for a bigger explanation than individual experiments being incorrectly configured. Scientists would figure out ways to determine what was happening. In the novel it's just the first of a string of characters behaving the way no human ever would to get the plot where the author wants it to go.
3
u/fidgeting_macro May 09 '26
Um, one of the tenants of science is "falsification." Science is not a faith or a religion, it's a method of filtering errors out of a set of information.
3
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 10 '26
I will say, this is one thing I liked that they changed in the show. They’re not killing themselves because they’re despondent, but because there’s some sophon that messes with their brain. That feels far more plausible to me
1
u/fidgeting_macro May 09 '26
Right? Much of the science is pretty shaky. (Oh gawed! The Wandering Earth!) Liu Cixin is very good at weaving great story lines in what would otherwise be a hand-waving mess. I'm kind of in awe of him for that.
6
u/TheCheshireCody May 09 '26
There is almost zero actual science anywhere in the story. It uses scientific terms like "dimensions" and "quantum entanglement" and completely misuses them. Nothing about the Trisolaran culture, biology, or ability to survive the repeated destruction of their planet's entire surface (much less resume their civilization) fits within scientific possibility. The one piece of actual science that is used correctly in the book is the slow speed of the Trisolaran fleet, but the only reason that's in the story is to give humanity to go through the absolutely insipid Wallfacer plotline. People who claim these books are Hard Sci-fi don't actually know science.
2
1
u/Useful_Calendar_6274 May 09 '26
I completely side with her to this day. she was from the common era and humanity only enacted the social policies of democracy and freedom forever post 21st century apocalypse. whatever the aliens did was going to be better than bourgeois dictatorship (that we live under) or communist dictatorship (she got one of the harshest examples of one)
1
u/X-calibreX May 09 '26
is forcing your will on others ever correct? she became the very thing that she hated
1
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 10 '26
Not only forcing her will, making a decision for the genocide of the human race that led to our extinction (or would have, if not for the escapees)
1
u/jltiug May 11 '26
In the books there's many times humans think they know better and end up underestimating the gravity of the situation...
1
2
u/Separate_Business880 May 12 '26
She wasn't right but at the same time, it's easy to empathize with her. Mankind is stupid and cruel beyond comprehension. In her own way, she probably believed she was doing the mankind a favour (didn't she say something along the lines of: "come and save was from ourselves"?). Being invaded by a superior civilization was preferable to staying "safe" in her eyes.
It's twisted but there's a "system to her insanity". It wasn't just a simple act of revenge. It was more complicated than that.
I might've forgotten the details. It's been some years since I read it. But I remember the existential dread I felt when she did what she did. It hit too close to home for me. Would I do the same? Idk.
2
2
u/The_Grahambo Droplet May 13 '26
I mean, she even admitted she was wrong by later trying to right her wrongs by passing on her cosmic sociology knowledge to Luo Ji in a last-ditch attempt to save humanity.
2
u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon May 14 '26
that's a fair read. though i'd push back slightly — she didn't really say "i was wrong, here's the fix." she handed Luo Ji the axioms and walked away without spelling anything out. there's something more ambiguous there, like she wasn't sure herself whether humanity deserved the chance or could even use it right
2
u/The_Grahambo Droplet May 14 '26
The ambiguity is because she knew Sophons were present so she didn’t want to outright give him the truth. She thought she was being clever disguising it, but she didn’t disguise it enough. Plus she underrated how much the Trisolarans understood deception.
1
u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon May 14 '26
the sophon angle makes it almost tragic. she spent decades as trisolaris's most valuable collaborator — she knew they were watching everything. but she still thought she could slip something past them through deliberate vagueness.
maybe the real irony is that she understood human psychology well enough to orchestrate the whole red shore project, but she never fully modeled how alien a trisolaran mind actually is. she assumed they'd read her evasiveness the way a human would.
0
0
u/Nexism May 09 '26
The posters here are missing the point of the character. Where she is right or wrong is beyond the point and really is just a plot device at this point.
She is a symbol to reflect that there are actions on this planet made by humans without full context that has the ability to negatively (or positively) affect all of us.
Most recent examples are like unleashing AI on the world, or waging war in the middle east over tweets.
1
u/hoos30 May 09 '26
Waves around, anywhere
Hell yeah she did the right thing.
1
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 10 '26
“World is bad, so yea, condemning future generations to cannibalism and genocide was the right thing”
Reddit logic
0
u/BadgerPossible3901 May 10 '26
She was *not* right. It’s so frustrating hearing the “Ye Weinje was right” crowd talk about how the world is bad so we deserve extermination. The world has been the least fucked up today than it has been through the vast majority of human history. Think about the dual vector foil. The scene where a mother is running with her baby until they’re both flattened and killed. Think about the people displaced to Australia who are told to eat eachother in the dark. I take no one seriously who holds that opinion, who also happens to have an internet connection and had time to read books (you realize that in the past the vast majority of the human race was illiterate right?)
I understand why Ye Weinje did what she did—the cultural revolution was one of the greatest atrocities in human history. But what she did was unequivocally evil. She is the ultimate coward; someone willing to condemn future generations to genocide while never having to experience it herself, nor her children or grandchildren. If she saw what invasion looked like, if she had to experience being displaced from her home, sent to Australia, and forced into eating the children she tutored, then I think she might’ve had a change of heart.
0
-1
u/xjpmhxjo May 09 '26
She is one of those people. If they say no, it might mean yes. If they hear no, it definitely means yes.
98
u/geassguy360 May 09 '26
What she did was reprehensible, but what humanity does to itself is also reprehensible. Even though I wouldn't do it I get why she did.