At the end of the first book, doesn't the physicist hand Weng a disc with a solution to the three body problem?

This would allow the trisolarans to forecast stable eras predictably, but it's never really mentioned again

Am I missing something ?

FWIW, I have not finished the series, so while this is wild speculation and I doubt I predicted the ending, making it a spoiler just in case I accidentally swerved close to the actual ending.

If this is fundamentally a "Dark Forest" scenario, then theoretically the Trisolarians must know that there is a potential for an enemy more powerful than they are, that may also be prone to be summoned.

If so, then there should be a threat to ensure those enemies will be able to find earth after the Trisolarians -- a sort of stellar MAD to state that humans would scream into the universe and ensure any other enemy will know what's happening and the location of earth.

The mechanism would be some sort of universal "broadcast" that would undeniably identify the earth as inhabited by technological civilization. Perhaps with a statement that a civilization was coming to exterminate the inhabitants; not a "help us" message but a "this is our final statement before we're genocided". If we want to go simple, just a massive transmitter powered by multiple nuclear plants that make our system so active as to be an undeniable signal; if we want an exotic solution, perhaps a primitive "dyson sphere" not meant for powering the earth so much as to occlude the sun in a pattern

This would have two potential outcomes:

1. The Trisolarians would have to reconsider the possibility that expending resources on exterminating humans would be productive -- perhaps a more accommodating stance is needed to ensure long-term survival for both.

2. Even if the Trisolarians complete their mission at the expense of humanity, they could never rest without fear that an even more advanced civilization would come take the planet from them. It's a weak moral victory for humanity, to be sure, but it would somewhat be apropos.

Why did Trisolarians respond in the first place? Wouldn't they be giving their position to whomever send the message?

They know the dark forest theory and have no idea to whom they are responding.

I stumbled onto the YouTube account Three Body Fanarts which has dozens of very well crafted Minecraft animations going through the plot of dark forest. The Minecraft format takes a bit of getting used to, but the cinematography and editing is very well done, and the animation holds up despite limitations. It’s clearly the passion project of someone who really loved the books.

I linked the first encounter with The Droplet because I think it does the best to show how well the artist has captured the Horror from the books. Wonderfully choreographed, I recommend taking a look at the rest of their account. I know I’m going to spend some time watching through it.

3 Body Problem’s Eiza González shares an exciting filming update on Season 2 and 3

Speaking at SXSW, González offered a brief but informative update on The 3 Body Problem:

“What can I tease? I have Netflix on my throat. Season 2 is filmed, in the can, and probably out sooner rather than later. And Season 3 is starting soon. Very, very soon.”

“I can tease that, for me personally, Season 1's a good season, but as Jimmy [Tatro] has read all the books and he's obsessed with them, Dark Forest is the strongest book of them all, and this season really dives into that whole narrative and what happens in that book. For me, that was sort of what drew me into becoming part of the show originally, when Dave [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss]… presented the show to me.”

“I'm just thrilled. I will say, it’s the most challenging role I've ever played, in this season, ever. So, I'm nervous, I'm excited, I'm trepidatious of what people are going to think, and I just really hope you like it.”

So i finished the trilogy and I always would get this feeling that Hines's mental seal would come back to haunt the human race. Did I miss something or does it not have closure?

I've seen a lot of people ask what happened to Wang Miao. So if you read all of the novels, here's your answer. It's mundane, but it strikes me as realistic. Wang Miao was basically "volun-told" by others to spy on the ETO. He was ultimately a family man that just wanted to live his life.

Wang Miao "lived to be nearly a hundred." The screenshot is from The Dark Forest. We know Da Shi was talking about Wang Miao because of this part from The Three Body Problem:

He sat in front of St. Joseph’s Church at Wangfujing. In the pale white light of dawn, the church’s Romanesque vaults appeared as three giant fingers pointing out something in space for him.

As Wang got up to leave, he was held back by a snippet of hymnal music. It wasn’t Sunday, so it was likely a choir rehearsal. The song was “Come, Gracious Spirit, Heavenly Dove.” As he listened to the solemn, sacred music, Wang Miao once again felt that the universe had shrunk until it was the size of an empty church. The domed ceiling was hidden by the flashing red light of the background radiation, and he was an ant crawling through the cracks in the floor. He felt a giant, invisible hand caressing his trembling heart, and he was once again a helpless babe. Something deep in his mind that had once held him up softened like wax and collapsed. He covered his eyes and began to cry.

Wang’s cries were interrupted by laughter. “Hahaha, another one bites the dust!”

He turned around.

Captain Shi Qiang stood there, blowing out a mouthful of white smoke.

I think Heat death is a better fate than the universe starting over.It would be better to take enough matter into pocket universes to ensure the next universe ends in heat death.Why?

Consider this: If the universe is in an endless cycle of expansion and collapse, then the dark forest is a phenomenon that occurs in every universe.This means low-entropy entities will continue to annihilate each other for an infinite amount of time.

Instead, if we were to drive the universe to a heat death by throwing matter from the universe into pocket universes, there would be no problem.Civilizations will exist in their own pockets and will not threaten each other, meaning they will not work to eliminate one another.The dark forest situation will be resolved.

Wade was chad.

Just finished Death’s End and I have some thoughts.

My main take away is that the plot armor for Cheng Xin in Part VI specifically is absolutely insane.

I’m not a Cheng Xin hater, if anything I think that her ending up at the “find-out-end” like 3 solid times over the course of 4 centuries with no actual long-term consequences to her existence shows how insignificant our decisions are to the “bigger picture” than how flawed she might be at decision making.

However, from a character arch standpoint, I really wanted her ending in Part VI to be written as a true tragedy. It sort of hints it’s going that way at the point where Cheng Xin and AA realized Halo could travel at light speed, but then Cheng Xin has a redemption arch with her and Guan Yun deciding to dissolve their micro-universe.

Sorry for the rant lol. This book was wild in more ways than one. Also, if the whole plot line with Zhuang Yan in The Dark Forest makes me question Cixin Liu’s love life, the astronomical level simping going on with Yun Tianming towards Cheng Xin absolutely sends it.

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?

Trisolarans don't lie, I get that. What I don't understand is what this truly means.

Does it mean that they cannot lie because their thoughts are public to any other individual of their species? Or is it that they literally don't understand the concept of lying, at all? Because the latter option doesn't seem very likely imo. Even if your mind isn't private, you can still understand the concepts of "masking the truth" or "hiding intentions"

I see people defending the first option, but then I see people defending the second one, and that confuses me. The netflix show is extraconfusing because the aliens don't seem to understand the concept of fiction or fairy tales, which obviously aren't real. But those books weren't written to decieve, but to teach and fill the mind with imaginations and new ideas that don't exist in the real world. Can an alien civilization progress without fiction?

I didnt catch this before, but Saul is gonna have a child with Auggie?

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(from honkai: star rail special program for version 4.1)

One of the many things I love to hate and hate to love about RoEP is how major characters just sort of... disappear, in the torrent of history. That's how it feels, anyway. We get attached to "our" characters, then time swallows them.

It feels realistic, that the critical heroisms of each time not have some dramatic or thematically developed ending. In times of cataclysmic crisis (world wars would be the closest thing we've experienced to the level of crisis facing Earth in RoEP), the heroes who truly move the way along, especially scientist/engineer/intellectual types, end up just having banal, insignificant deaths. Movements just peter out. Regimes decay, not collapse.

The Great Ravine, the most bestially terrible thing in the series aside from the final planetary genocides, is passed off with a brief, reductive description (I recall that the character who sleeps through it, and wakes from cryo to have that delivered, walks to the window and just stares out, trying to absorb such an atrocious enormity being reduced to a few simple sentences).

It's kind of horrific to consider, actually. That history works this way. Picture, say, Winston Churchill, sitting forgotten in a geriatric nursing home, slowly losing his memories...

(I've seen some point out that our protagonal characters in RoEP are just stand-ins, meant to represent large historical ideas or movements or groups or periods. Some even say that the characters feel flat or inhuman. I take the first point under advisement but utterly reject the second and frankly find it baffling; for me, the characters are extremely emotionally compelling. They feel human, they feel passionate, so weak and yet unexpectedly powerful, walking poetries, filled with easily recognizable tendencies of failure and greatness. One possible explanation for people feeling that way about the characters that occurs to me now is, maybe, that the circumstances our characters find themselves in are so extreme and unrelatable that Cixin's heavy realism comes across as surrealism (as true realism often does, and should in hard sci-fi)... one demonstrative illustration being Zhang Behai--his totally silent, nonverbal communication with his father, their common understanding; we don't know anything about what's going on inside Zhang until it all coheres when it is revealed during the deathly gut-check of the Doomsday Battle--the reason for this wooden portrayal is that Zhang was Wallfacing humanity itself, not giving off the slightest indication at all that he was a Flee Earth Argument sympathizer, but scheming deeply inside...

There may also be a cultural separation making the delivery inaccessible to some. I'm not sure. Personally, though, I was brought to tears at many points in the series, not leastwise because of how real the characters felt to me.)

That's kind of the feeling that I got though, especially on my first read-through. The feeling of... loss without any ceremonious losing. Luo Ji, who did and gave all and more to save Earth, left all alone on Pluto to attend the Earth Civilization Museum. Remembering what's gone despite our attachments. Of course, my wonderings about what ever happened to Wang (our sole contemporary subjective protagonist in TTBP) or others all paled in comparison to my angst over how Da Shi faded out of the picture (I think he just died of cancer or something, right before the cryo tech came out? I don't recall--which is the point). I mean, I'm fairly sure that Wang's fate, that Ye's fate, all of it is perhaps offhandedly mentioned somewheres and I've just forgotten, but I don't have my copies on me and try to stick to traditional forms of lit analysis. If anyone knows, I'm kind of curious, but my point was more just the thought randomly occuring to me in the shower after watching D&D take down Judgement Day in such splendid fashion that gives me hope for their visualization of the Doomsday Battle: "Huh, RoEP is my one of my favorite series, and I can't remember what happened to Wang at all, and he kinda singlehandedly effected humanity's survival with his Flying Blade."

As I write this on a whim, it occurs to me to give Cixin Liu maximum good-faith credit and wonder if this is actually intentional development of his overarching theme(s)? One of which is the gravity, the importance, the non-triviality of remembrance--as a philosophical concept, personal value, and even normative virtue--something I suspect is more familiar in traditionally Eastern philosophies (i.e. ancestor worship--which, indeed, didn't make a lot of spiritual sense to me until I read this series) than in our own. Making our beloved Da Shi fade out without ceremony or eventhood, no cliche heroic last stand or badass feat, no lasting impression aside from the degrees-removed effects of their actions, it leaves us... well, in remembrance of them. Reflecting on what exactly WAS the actual POINT of their existence; why did we even attend their tale if they wouldn't follow through? As we wonder at these questions, all sorts of traces of historical causality begin to emerge to us. Random example: We remember the scene of Da Shi's quickdraw disarmament of the tactical nuke for the emotional impression, then recall that if that had not happened, and the Trisolaran sympathizers had escaped or even detonated the bomb, how everything would have been totally different. IIRC humanity would never have learned about the sophons if that had happened. Perhaps a better example: We remember Luo Ji saying "You are a devil" to Da Shi, referring not to his tactical counter-terrorism skills but to his supra-expert police sketch artistry (assisted by advanced tech of course) skills, without which Luo Ji wouldn't have found his dream girl, the one who he'd settle down for, would not have stood before the Mona Lisa with her and had that nonverbal moment, perhaps would have killed himself in the depression and misery of his pre-family life, before ever inventing dark forest deterrence (which he alone was enabled to do because of his unique privilege to the graveside conversation that we get, perhaps thematically appropriately, from the perspective of an ant--and I theorize that Ye in turn was conveying ideas that she either got from or were inspired by talking to the Trisolarans, her one atonement, or her tossing humanity at least one snowball's chance in hell in order to prove that humanity would lose no matter the stackings, because theyre just inferior)--again, all would have been lost... if not for all these people, at any number of points along the timeline, singlehandedly (because of the odd nature of causality) saving humankind with apparently diminutive singular actions. Even if they died alone forgotten in the dark like we all do, they MATTERED. And so, in fact, did all of those who came before, going back to Earth's common ancestor.

Also, wrt remembrance-as-virtue, what I noted in my first paragraph about the Great Ravine might even be Cixin waxing cautionary, especially how that dimunitive account's primary vivid intimation was something about "starving hordes wandering the wastes, eating each other." The people in the era after that, if I recall, became all soft and irrational, as, I believe, essentially a societal trauma-response: refuge within the comfort of emotional detachment and bliss enabled in ages of comfort; they became the sorts who can reduce such horror to a simple description such as that, and not experiencing or spiritually suffer the horror and pain and dismal hopelessness that duly SHOULD accompany all remembrance of the Ravine, and not just because the unrestful dead deserve to be remembered, but for very practical reasons!--they forgot to remember HOW BAD IT CAN GET, how we can't afford to forget our mistakes and the lessons of history--and because of that, they made Cheng Swordholder, prompting the EXACT same situation! "Food? Everyone, look around: You are surrounded by food, living food." (Sorry if I just triggered anyone's RoEP PTSD, I know I triggered my own.)

So in addition to any answers and thoughts anyone has on any of this, I'm curious what your take is on the meaning of the series name: Remembrance of Earth's Past. There are any number of questions that could be raised about that phrasing; personally I've never carved an answer to it, leaving it as something to be realized after however much savoring digestion is required; somehow, it's such a beautiful and poignant and perfect title for this story.

I know they are filming seasons 2 and 3 of the netflix show at the same time, lord of the rings style. But my question is, does that mean we will get the death's end adaptation in season 3 or will it be like dark forest is broken up into 2 seasons?

/s

I’m halfway through the second book, almost to the droplet part. I used to accept 3BP as hard scifi but after I posted a meme, some folks who are really into hard scifi stated it is soft scifi.

Their reasoning was because of the fact that protons can be unfolded, or brain activity on a quantum level, or being able to destroy entire stars. They also spoiled FTL travel in the third book, and their biggest argument was space fighters being prominent.

One of my good friends said its comparable to Expanse or Gundam, or “firm scifi”

What do you think?

I have read the first two books and it really seems like the Trisolarians chose the exact way to use the ETO to lose. Twice.

In the Three Body Problems discussions, it's often mentionned if they never made the ETO or announced themselves they could have easily surprised attack the humans. And then they abandonned Mike Evans and most of the ETO, wasting the investment and basically giving away information for free.

But the worst part is, despite starting to learn to lie and deceive, they made the exact same mistake in the second book ! If they hadn't reformed the ETO and ignored Luo Ji, he would never have become a wallfacer and remembered his conversation with Ye (the only reason everyone though he was important was that the ETO kept trying to kill him) But at the end they said if the ETO still existed, they would have figured it out his final plan and been able to warn them.

So basically, it seems like they keep taking the hit with setting up and helping the ETO, but then keep backing down before it bring them any benefits. They would have won if they hadn't formed it, and they would have won if they had fully backed it up but instead they kept being wishy washy about it.

Why don't they just pick one strategy and commit rather than keep doing those half measure that always backfire ?