u/umyong

The Great Ravine is probably one of the most interesting unintended consequences in the Three Body Problem series. What's interesting is how it resonates with the current AI boom: there's an enormous amount of money and capital flooding into AI right now and so much so that banks and companies are inventing entirely new financial instruments to handle it.

That made me think about the Great Ravine, which, as I understand it, was caused by diverting too much of Earth's resources toward a single effort. It's a really compelling concept in economics: just pouring money into a project isn't necessarily good if the broader economy can't absorb it. The capital has to go somewhere productive, or the whole engine stalls out.

I'm no expert in economics or really anything 🤣 but I found that parallel similar. I'm curious whether others saw it the same way, or if you have a different interpretation.

One thing it did give me, somewhat ironically, is an appreciation for financial engineering. It seems like you actually need sophisticated mechanisms to direct where capital flows and how it gets deployed. Without that, you risk stalling the economic engine and creating something like the Great Ravine in real life.

From a science fiction standpoint, I loved these books. They’re incredibly imaginative and just a lot of fun to read.

I did have one thought about the ending, though. Before I finished, I’d read reviews saying how depressing it was, but I honestly didn’t see it that way. I wouldn’t call the ending hopeful, exactly, but I found it strangely serene—and actually very appropriate.

In a sense, we’re already just a tiny moment in the lifespan of the universe, so that part isn’t really any different from our reality. What I found fascinating was the idea that some beings actually got to experience the universe across such enormous stretches of time. There’s something almost beautiful about that. Right now, we could never experience time or the universe on anything close to that scale, so getting to imagine what that perspective might be like was one of the more interesting ideas in the books for me.