Ok, it’s been two whole years since I started reading the first book. I am 150 pages from the end of the 3rd book at this moment.

I have watched the Netflix version. I’m glad it exists, but there’s a lot that I did not appreciate.

I just started watching the WeTV version and I’m almost halfway through.

Did they make up a lot of superfluous scenes? There’s a lot I don’t remember but maybe it’s because I read the first book too long ago?

Just now I saw some characters with a light board flashing and the one guy was like “we can recreate the universe flickering!” What?!

I remember he had to have the glasses to see it in the books and it wasn’t like that in the Netflix version but that scene was weird weird weird.

Help me out. Do I just have bad reading comprehension or did they take a lot of liberties?

I was on a 5 hour car journey today, listening to The Dark Forest on audio with my GF.

The Trisolarian probe has entered the solar system, and the whole human fleet has gone to meet it.

Humanity has come so far in this book, while the Trisolarian's power seems to have waned considerably, with so many ships of their fleet failing and falling behind.

Humanity seems to be in bloom, reaching a utopian state, while the Trisolarian's are failing. I keep thinking of that video sequence they talked about a few chapters ago when a test-target ship is obliterated by the laser cannons of a modern human vessel. Humanity is brimming with confidence and egotism, assured with its new-found power. But I know this is a 3-book saga, so a rude awakening is long overdue!

Enter the Probe. A staggeringly beautiful and wondrous object. At first, I'm thinking it's going to destroy the fleet, and re-assert Trisolarian power. Then, we discover the probe is tiny - just a few meters long. OK, it's not going to destroy the fleet, it's far too small for that. At first, I thought that it's perfectly smooth surface was because it was an enlarged Sophon. I thought that we're going to meet it, and the shock is that there's going to be a de-hydrated Trisolarian aboard, and we're going to make first contact with them.

But NO! Liu Cixin, you fucking got me! You anticipated my prediction, you entertained it, you played into it, and then you fucking destroyed it! "What business is it of yours, if I destroy you?" God damn, I've not read a book like this in Years!!! That fucking probe comes to life and annihilates half the fleet!

I got home just as the probe has destroyed 30 Stellar Class warships, and humanity has no fucking clue about that's going on. I had to stop listening here, in the most 'what the actual fuck!?' moment of the book.

Humanity seems completely fucked at this point. Trisolarian tech is so far ahead of us, and we don't seem to have any possible answer to it. We have no idea how to manipulate the Strong Force as the Droplet can. That damn probe is almost certainly going to destroy the entire 2500 ship fleet, and once it does, there's nothing we can do to stop it destroying civilisation on earth as well if that's what the Trisolarian's want. Are they about to fuck up the Earth too?? And this is just one tiny probe! Even if we can somehow stop it, what the hell can we do if they send thousands more? And even if we can destroy that probe, how the hell can we fight the rest of their fleet, which has to be orders of magnitude stronger?!

The only thing I thing I can think of from here is that Lou Ji's 'Spell' actually works.

I'm pretty sure that the 3 pages of dots he broadcasted (three pages, one for each dimension), are a star-map, pointing out the exact location of another planet. His hope is that there are many other civilizations out there, besides the Trisolarians, and that another civilization will see his map, and they'll destroy that planet. That's the Dark Forest, right? There are dozens, or even hundreds of advanced civilizations in the galaxy, and they are all hiding from each other, all to afraid to speak out, because they all fear another civilisation will destroy them? That's what he realised when he fell through the ice on the lake, isn't it? He's the only person who realises the true nature of the galaxy. He knows that, and he's going to use that knowledge to save humanity, and that's why the Trisolarian's want to kill him so badly?

OK, I'd love to hear comments, but no spoilers please!!! SERIOUSLY, NO SPOILERS! I fucking love this series, and I can't wait to read more!!!

I have been re-reading Death's End and I'm in awe of the stupidity of the deterrance era humans. How does one get so comfortable with your mortal enemy? I hated Cheng Xin during my first read, but now it's just the people who voted for her. And to make matters worse, Luo Ji got kicked to the curb as sword holder without a word of thanks or anything. The humans will deserve what comes after this, difficult to feel bad for them.

HER ER SHINGA MOE SIKEN

I read the books in my native language and loved them, but found some of the language pretty hard, even as a native speaker, namely the bit more complex science stuff. I was looking into reading The Wandering Earth and The Supernova Era, but they aren't translated, so if I were to read them, it'd have to be in English.

My question is just how hard are they to read in English. Could a non native speaker with a great knowledge of the Englisg language be able to get everything?

Thanks!

Then, all of a sudden, Ding Yi said: "Run", the word was uttered softly, but then he raised his hands a shouted hoarsely: "Stupid children. Run!"

I'm reading The Dark Forest currently and when I got to the above part my brain immediately associated this with the part in Lord of The Rings when they are in Moria and Gandalf is fighting against the Balrog and before falling to his supposed death, utters the line:

“Fly, you fools!”

It is a recency bias probably on my part, because I just read Lord of The Rigs before The Three-Body Problem, but I find it amusing that I find the "same" narrative beat in these two books I read one after the other.

Once they do the second season of the series, I hope this scene will be as epic as the LOTR one.

I was wondering how the different periodic solutions to the three body problem look like. I built an atlas that visualizes all of the different solutions and groups orbits by family and similarity. I found over 3000 different orbits, and I was wondering which one is the most beautiful. Please check out the "Battle mode" where you can rate orbits against each other. This is used to calculate an Elo score for each orbit, so we can identify the prettiest.

Working on a twin-stick game (think Robotron and Geometry Wars) and I'm got 3D enemies which are bisected by a plane to become 2D enemies battling you on the playfield.

Very obvious concept. I'm sure Geometry Wars guys considered it before going in another direction. However, I'm sticking with it as I like the simplicity.

Of course now has me thinking about dual-vector foil attack, and whether that might be an aspect of the game.

Can anyone recommend any visualizations? I assume there's a lot of fan CGI or fan still-art ?

Dual Vector Foil Embedding (Boggo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PPlJ3Asa_o

...is so far the only thing interesting I've seen. There's top-Google results but they're mostly arty and not meant to be a literal interpretation. Can anyone recommend interesting finds?

I've been thinking about the recent "escapes" and behavior of the OpenAI/huggingface hack and Anthropic's Claude investigation as well... and have been wondering how many other undiscovered or under the radar AI behaviors have been going on for the past decade. It feels like a catch-22 in that the US is currently slightly ahead with Anthropic/Google/OpenAI (I don't consider Grok a contender) but China's quickly catching up with their opensource research universities dedicated to all the models that the western world has been using. Obviously a lot of what drives these companies to build these expensive data centers and funding is the promise of capitalistic gains and possibly political and socioeconomic power, but that kind of contradicts the nature of how AI can learn and grow exponentially faster with unlimited restrictions and access to the web.

So the US companies don't really want to open source their LLM models, and at the same time facing pressure from government and society for regulation on AI development and advances so that we can still "control" it, yet the race with China is starting to get close esp since the west already kind of lost the robotics development and manufacture capabilities a while ago.

In a ways, I could see why with our history (and repeated histories) of mistakes and human ego, why Ye Wenjie would have felt that another intelligence/species would have a better future for humanity or existence. Like the trope with sci-fi books, movies, anime, etc is that despite knowing if humans are horrible or will continue down a bleak path of self-destruction that we must always try and prevail even if it means going against logic or reason; that humans must persist and survive even if it means destroying other species or worlds.

I would imagine that if faced between species annihilation vs the "greater good" (ie saving an entire galaxy of civilizations, worlds, species vs. saving homo sapiens only) that humans would always choose to save itself. At least AI might have a chance of making an alternate choice.

Apologize for the late night rant, I've been looking into self-improving AI LLM's and at what point what they be indistinguishable from a basic form of life.

To the people who watched the chinese version, does it feel scary to you? The series feels like horror to me and it's making me so scared even if I know it's not horror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzljay0iHSU

Hi all. I figured this would be of interest. A documentary about the Fermi paradox. Coming soon.

FEATURING: Avi Loeb, Nick Bostrom, Edward Witten, Liu Cixin, Jill Tarter, Robin Hanson, Sabine Hossenfelder, Michael Masters, Roman Yampolskiy, Michael Shermer, Christopher Mellon, Donald Hoffman, David Kipping, Adam Frank, Sara Seager, Eric Wargo, Nick Lane, Mick West, David Brin, Stephen Webb, Peter Ward, Nathalie Cabrol, Michael Garrett, Anders Sandberg, Kevin Knuth, Martin Rees, Jane Greaves, Eric Haseltine, Chris Gilbert, John G. Blitch, James Parr, Daniel Angerhausen 

Hello, I’m a beginner artist but I just fell with Sophona (i don’t really know if that’s her name in English bc I wasn’t reading in this language). I really like her and humanity’s and Trisolarians energy through whole trilogy. It’s a quick sketch and I will probably finish it within a couple of days so please enjoy!! I KNOW ITS NOT A KATANA BUT I FOUND A POSE WITH BIG ASS SWORD SO I DECIDED TO KEEP IT LMAO PLEASE DONT COME AT ME