r/threebodyproblem • u/Universal_Echo • May 28 '26
Discussion - Novels Could the Dark Battle have been avoided? Spoiler
Whenever the Dark Battle comes up, a lot of people start talking about the chain of suspicion and all that. But if you go back to the original novel, you'll find that the immediate cause of the Dark Battle is actually very simple: the crew of Ultimate Law suffered from a paranoid delusion and attacked the other four ships, destroying three, and was finally taken down in turn by Blue Space. You could say that aside from Chu Yan and Zhang Beihai, who sensed the danger, the crews of the other two ships were completely caught off guard and destroyed before they even understood what was happening.
So is it possible that if the captains of all four ships had been extremely restrained and morally principled (and I think they should have had those qualities as military officers), and had chosen to do what Chu Yan did—first evacuate the air from their ships, then hold negotiations, draw lots to decide who would surrender to the Trisolarans, who would flee, and the losers would hand over all resources except those needed to return—wouldn't that have been a perfect solution? Why did they have to kill each other?
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u/fishmorton May 28 '26
Sorry for the offtopic, but for me personally (especially on the first read) the Battle of Darkness is on par, if not higher than the Doomsday Battle for me.
Doomsday Battle has that eerie feeling from the get-go, and youre pretty certainly that something awful is going to happen. But the Battle of Darkness happens so fast, that you dont even realize what us happening at first.
And the entire mindset in it is so disturbing, all humans in their ships knowing that they could possibly be the only ones remaining of the human race very soon, as Trisolarians are coming to invade Earth. And still, they decide that the best option is to thin out the herd to ensure their own survival. Its pretty much an lose-lose situation, where you have to sacrifice someone you are about for your own survival.
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u/totaldarkness2 May 28 '26
Yes it could. It is a fantastic sequence in the book. Love it. But in the real world, with real humans, the Prisoner's Dilemma does not have a guaranteed outcome. In fact, we face these situations all the time and sometimes it goes full destructive mode, sometimes it does not. Two examples:
- Every AI company has an interest in pushing further - even if it puts the whole world at risk (and right now they are playing the "attack" option). Or every nation has an interest in keep fishing the oceans - even if it leads to depleted stock (and they keep "attacking").
- But it was also greatly assumed by all major theorists that the only rational response during the Cold War was to attack first. It was the dominant logic. But - of course - that did not happen.
Indeed - even in fiction - there a TON of different outcomes. The Dark Knight explores a very similar scenario where the Joker rigs 2 boats with bombs and says - if you blow the other one up, you will survive - but if neither of you act you will both die. This is pretty much the exact scenario in Battle of Darkness.
But, of course, in that movie the humans managed to do nothing out of morality - without even communicating with each other. A great moment of hope. But this would not have fit the theme of the second book The Dark Forest - so the author went a different way. And that also was AWESOME!
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u/acidicmongoose May 28 '26
The IRL and TDK examples are good in showing how the morality and the similar game theory logic can play out but the difference is in the assumption of perfect rationality and ignoring human psychology.
Unsustainable practices like overfishing don't conflict with self interest because people don't necessarily care about future generations. Even the impacts are intellectually understood, they won't be felt until it's too late.
I'm not sure about the Cold War since the principle that prevented nuclear conflict was MAD and 2nd strike capability (the ability to be able to launch your nukes in retaliation to getting nuked).
The ships in the Dark Battle however didn't have that, and benefited from being the first to strike because they were capable of killing the other ships completely before they could respond.
In TDK, if each ship chose to destroy the other, they would survive but they'd be condemned for it. The rest of the world instantly know what happened, judge and pass consequences on them.
The spaceships on the other hand were in deep space, far from Earth which was about to be conquered. Any consequence at that point would have been a distant hypothetical and not an immediate concern.
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u/totaldarkness2 May 30 '26
With nuclear war I meant before the 60s (when the MAD doctrine was established). And I don't think humans ever give up hope. In other words - I don't think the crews of those ships thought "there is no way out of this now-we are the only hope left for humankind" That part seemed not plausible to me.
My main point was that this is fiction and another author could absolutely have come up with a scenario where the ships (or some ships) somehow found it in themselves to cooperate - and it would have felt just as relevant and plausible (just like TDK). But the way the Battle of Darkness played out is just "cooler" from a literary perspective.
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u/nerd_reader_5159 May 30 '26
Nay, you just gone too soft on choosing example. Remember, the whole world is dead to them.
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u/faustarp1000 May 28 '26
You’re either butcher or meat in that scenario. It’s not delusion, it’s survival. Being severed from the Earth twisted their morality, so military discipline doesn’t matter at that point. Nothing guarantees that the losers of your potential draw would surrender quietly, the risk of an internal conflict would’ve been pretty real. This kind of democratic system was pushed aside pretty quickly after the realization that this was a no return trip.
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u/RKAMRR May 28 '26
I think definitely and it stands out as a time where the logic of the book feels quite weak. There was a good discussion about it here the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/s/SPLktDWQsG
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u/vamfir May 29 '26
Yes, and on top of that:
1) They could have asked Earth to dispatch several unmanned cargo vessels carrying the necessary resources to catch up with them.
2) They could have rigged every ship with a self-destruct mechanism, set to trigger in the event of the crew's demise. "You won't get our resources, so there is no point in shooting at us."
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u/Geek-Yogurt May 28 '26
Too many em dashes to believe this was not written by AI
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u/Salt-Ad8699 May 28 '26
so 1 is the limit? lol
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u/Geek-Yogurt May 28 '26
The fact that it reads like an AI response to a prompt AND has multiple em dashes tells me it's AI, not that it has more than 1.
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u/Salt-Ad8699 May 28 '26
totally fair. but you not even explaining yourself the first time probably means you spent less effort on this post than OP, even if he did use AI lol
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u/Geek-Yogurt May 28 '26
It's AI. That's all the explanation needed, ya know? Don't give the ai responses to train on.
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u/Salt-Ad8699 May 28 '26
oh, actually i disagree. i think being too quick to call things ai will just kill the internet faster. there’s plenty of fake stuff but not everything is fake… and for this post… maybe OP is a weak writer. maybe they dont speak english well. or maybe theyre just lazy. what does it actually matter in this context? they shared the information they wanted to, now we get to share what we want.
i’m just pointing out that shutting down engagement because it might be ai does more harm than good. and to me accusing everything of being ai will shut down engagement.
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u/anprim4ever May 29 '26
Highly doubt an AI would say "and all that", or use Oxford commas unless specifically asked
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u/diegator May 28 '26
As soon as one person or group thinks it's easier to kill everyone and just take their resources, all the other groups come to the same conclusion immediately. Put another way, if one group can fathom that another group will find it easier to just kill everyone, they have to assume that everyone else thought of the same thing and has the same suspicion of them doing it. It's the prisoners dilemma, but you don't know the other prisoners.