r/threebodyproblem

Hey everyone, as a huge fan of the series (and thanks to Claude) I’m working on a visualisation of the 3body game, so on the planet with the 3 suns above you. It is integrated live and generates a slightly different trajectory each time, with real star constellations in the sky.

It’s not perfect yet but it has been highly enjoyable for me to stare at it, refresh, stare, refresh, on repeat.

Hopefully some other fans out there enjoy it as much as I do. If you would like to contribute/have ideas please feel free to get in touch via the website.

Thinking of eventually making it more similar to the game with the fate of the planet after each era, or potentially allowing the astronaut to walk around on the planet/move the camera.

It looks best on laptop/desktop:

https://3body-swart.vercel.app/

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.

I'm mid through the second book at the part in which Da Shi came out of hibernation so no spoilers please.

I am aware of the timeline of the books and the whole idea of the plot but neverteless I would have wanted to read more about the characters from the first book, in the second one

Does anyone else feel like the second book just ignores everyone from the first book, except Da Shi?

This seems like an easy way to prevent sunlight from reaching Earth and freeze everyone to death. Why didn’t they do it?

In the canon of the Three-Body Problem book series (excluding the fanfiction and including the prequel), the fact that no mass can be transported faster than the speed of light is one of the things necessary for the dark forest theory to work in-universe, correct? Chains of suspicion wouldn't exist without the lightspeed limit... or would they? (queue vsause music lol) Would the vast differences between the cultures of distant civilizations be effective in creating long-enough chains of suspicion in order to create the dark forest state? Would different environments in different parts of the cosmos create different-enough cultures? Would the dark forest state realistically exist in a world like the Xeelee Sequence, where the different forms of life are so vastly different from each other (e.g. civilizations of dark matter, civilizations inside stars, civilizations made of logic trees or something, etc.)? Would the exponential growth of civilization simply inherently target other civilizations as enemies?

Obviously within canon the lightspeed limit is an extremely important factor for multiple different mechanisms and plot points. E.g. the cosmic horror of the universe being a paraplegic, and that the low value of the speed limit being a direct effect of many wars in the past. But I'm asking for the sake of exploration into the dark forest theory, as well as potentially to help any future worldbuilding projects that want to deal with dark forest-adjacent ideas in a cosmos without the speed limit.

Basically what I'd like to hear different thoughts on is this: If every mechanism in 3bp canon remains the same with exception that technology can enable FTL travel, would the dark forest state still exist?

Deep thinking and long and detailed discussions are welcome.

(This exact question hasn't been posed and/or discussed about before on this sub, right?)

Droplets are made of strong interaction material… Sounds a lot like a cluster of gluons. Well, looks like they found one - a Glueball. How long before it transforms from a sphere to a teardrop? 👀

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02498-1

I'm about halfway into book two, so I wouldn't be surprised if they are used in additional clever ways in the next half of the series, but I just can't stop wondering about their capabilities.

Can't high energy particles flip bits in computers? I'm surprised that hasn't been explored yet, but I'm probably overestimating what that would do.

How much of an effect could a single proton (or a small handful) have on the macroscopic level in theory?

...let me know if I can just wait and see :>

Hey guys, first time reading the novel and I had a question about the deeper/philosophical subtext of the novel, especially the way in which the novel can function as analogy for our obsession for believing utopian ideologies as a correction for our worldly miseries.

In the novel, clearly Ye’s motivation for believing in the potential of alien system is motivated from her trauma and pessimism. After the Cultural Revolution and her assessment of human behaviour, she deeply believes that this alien-force with function as a correction mechanism; a resetting of the world as we have fallen into the moral abyss. So, in a very similar fashion to religious or political ideologies, that ultimately provide a framework for compensating for your psychological pain, Ye’a desperate belief in Tsolaris also has a similar function as the belief is coded with the potentional of fixing her miserable view of the current human condition. 

Honestly I don’t care if it’s cut down to 6 episodes. I don’t even care if the droplet attack isn’t as jaw dropping as the book.

If they just get the battle of darkness right, where starship earth cannabalize itself for fuel and materials, I’ll die happy.

It’s D&D’s bread and butter, no “main character” is safe and the victor from the scrap is always someone least expected.

I can even picture it having Saul/luoji explain the chain of suspicion parallel to the crew of natural selection realizing someone has to do it. Raj/zhang beihan says his iconic last word “it’s alright, the result is the same” and gets zapped. Pans to ultimate law’s commander confirming his kills but pauses for a second when mentioning blue space, and their command deck just gets lasered. Pans out to the ship getting absolutely annihilated. Scene blacks out to credits

Next episode they introduce blue space retrieving supplies amongst the dead bodies of their comrades within the debris of ultimate law cutting to a scene “X hours before” with them preparing to put their ship into a vacuum

Creator: https://www.youtube.com/@DDWWEP

Los libros que quedan por adaptar son los más largos, sin embargo confirmaron que la segunda temporada será más corta, es posible que esto se deba a que los episodios serán largos pero también a que hayan recortado presupuesto y, por lo tanto, contenido. Yo no tengo muchas esperanzas ya que la serie no tuvo la repercusión que esperaban, lo cual sería muy mala noticia dada las dimensiones de la historia, que requiere muchos efectos y hacerlo bien, por ejemplo, y esto es spoiler, hacer el CGI del sistema solar pasando de 3d a 2d no solo debe quedar bien, sino aterrador, porque en el libro es así.

Sobre que no tengamos noticias a estas alturas, yo creo que algo salió mal pero no lo están diciendo, sin embargo quieren cumplir con lo que prometieron, que es estrenarla este año, pero personalmente estoy siendo pesimista así que no me toméis en cuenta. Vosotros que pensáis?

Yo, por suerte, he leído los libros así que ya se como continúa la historia, y se lo recomiendo a todo el mundo, sobre todo si la serie resulta ser decepcionante.

Think about it:

1. Ye Wenjie only starts the crisis because the men around her betray humanity first. She is reported by a male colleague after revealing her environmental concerns, leading to further punishment. At the Red Coast Base, the male leadership exploits her talents while keeping her isolated and under strict control.
2. Luo Ji is a selfish, womanizing slacker who has to be manipulated into saving the world.
3. Thomas Wade is an authoritarian psychopath willing to sacrifice anyone.
4. Yun Tianming is an obsessive simp whose entire life revolves around a woman.
5. Zhang Beihai lies to everyone and murders innocent people.
6. Mike Evans is a delusional extremist.
7. The male leaders repeatedly fumble humanity’s future.

How many more incompetent, violent, selfish, or morally compromised men does Liu Cixin have to write before we admit he hates men?

Or… maybe fictional characters making terrible decisions isn’t the same thing as the author endorsing those traits for an entire sex (ergo not misandrist).

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, this post is satire to help show how the books don’t have misogyny or misandry.

If I missed any incompetent men, please let me know in the comments lol.

I will agree on this - does the trilogy contain moments and themes that can reasonably be criticized as gender stereotypical? Yes. There is evidence for that interpretation. But is the trilogy clearly a misogynistic work that argues women are inferior? That is much harder to demonstrate.

Side note: I support feminism in so far as they pursue gender equality. When feminism starts saying that women are superior to men, that’s when I will disagree. I will also disagree if someone says men are superior to women.

Guys so I just finished the first book after watching the S1 on Netflix. Controversial but honestly I liked the series more than the book. Sure the book answers a lot of the technical questions I had when I was watching the series( not the series fault, since a book has more bandwidth) but the storyline in the series kept me more hooked onto it than the book. Just the sequence of reveals were more delayed in the series which kept me at the edge. But the book didn’t do the same, a lot was revealed too quickly.

Wondering if someone else felt the same way

If the dark forest existed, then humanity should currently be able to observe the sudden destruction of any star. But we haven't—we only see stars being born and dying naturally.

There is too much empty space in the universe, which contradicts the notion of limited resources.

The Trisolarans were already able to use instantaneous communication tools. By extension, future civilizations will naturally be able to use such tools—and then the so‑called chain of suspicion would cease to exist.

Both the Trisolarans and Earth later discovered black domains. As for more advanced civilizations, they engage in dimensional warfare—so they wouldn't bother with an ant like us.

I don't think it's likely that a galaxy could harbor enough alien civilizations to lead to a dark forest situation.

There's one thing we can say about our universe: not every rock has an alien on it.

But not everywhere is empty. It is quite possible that there are numerous planets harboring anaerobic microbial life even within our own galactic neighborhood.These kinds of things are contagious and persistent and find a way around; we've even found suspicious fossil structures on ancient Mars that show microbial mats formed when there was liquid water on its surface.

A telescope or anything that could make a spacecraft is probably so rare that this is likely the first time something like this has appeared in the thirteen-billion-year-old Milky Way galaxy.

Even with chemical rocket technology, it would take autonomous machines about 300 million years to colonize or transform the entire Milky Way Galaxy. This is a very short time considering the Milky Way's age of 13 billion years.

Of the thousands of alien civilizations that have emerged throughout billions of years of galaxy history, even if just one of their artificial intelligences showed uncontrolled expansion or destructive tendencies, it would be enough to take over the entire galaxy(Or they can directly assign this purpose to their artificial intelligence).

But that's clearly not the case. Because we appeared here 13 billion years later.This means that intelligent life should be extremely rare.

Based on the idea of physicist John von Neumann, this concept envisions a civilization traveling to other planets and building replicated and continuously expanded spacecraft (Von Neumann machines) using the resources found there.

Such probes, traveling at 10% of the speed of light, could completely colonize the entire galaxy in just a few hundred thousand years.

The absence of such a sign in the Milky Way significantly increases the likelihood that no other technologically advanced civilization exists in the galaxy.Even if the propagation speed of these machines is assumed to be 10% of the speed of light, the probability per galaxy that half the universe hasn't been consumed by these machines would have to be extremely low.

This shows us that to go from microbes to a technological civilization, a lot of things need to go right and not go wrong. This isn't inevitable progress, it's more like winning the lottery.