Robin:

Hello, Agnes. Hello, Arnold.

Arnold:

Hello, Robin.

Robin:

Welcome back as a second time or third time guest?

Arnold:

Third time.

Robin:

Third time, all right.

Agnes:

Maybe more than third.

Robin:

Well, we'll have to look it up, but at least third then, huh?

Arnold:

All right. Yeah.

Robin:

Well, we agreed today to talk about the three-body problem. which is a novel Arnold and I have read actually the whole series and a TV show that Agnes and Arnold and I have just watched in the last few days.

Agnes:

I have also read the entire series.

Robin:

Oh, really? OK.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

You don't remember it that well?

Agnes:

No. I don't remember anything that happened in the past, basically, and I read it in the past. But I have watched the show, so.

Robin:

Oh, OK, great. Well, all right, then. I guess I suggest we first react to it as art, and then react to it as science or engineering, like, what's more technically wrong with it, but I to me the most striking feature of it as art is that, like compared to most science fiction today was more of a throwback. in terms of the books, a throwback to sort of taking science seriously, having a big sort of emotional weight about science and technology and humanity's future, and having characters who care a lot about that sort of a grand trajectory and vision. That's one of the nice things about the book, but the TV show wanted to soften that. So they took a bunch of characters and made them all friends and made them care more about each other's friendship than they did about the future of civilization. And I guess that's needed to attract viewers who aren't us, maybe viewers more like Agnes. What do you think, Agnes? Did you like that better?

Agnes:

I read the books, so I'm someone who was attracted to the original story. But I guess I think that, I mean, I think both of, I did not see the Chinese version and both of the two of you did. And my understanding was that the Chinese version was closer to the books. And in a TV show, I mean, what is going to be conveyed is what can be conveyed visually. And there's, you know, emotion is something that can be conveyed visually and it's quite gripping. And so it's a bit harder to convey ideas. And so it may be the medium of TV, by contrast to the medium of novel, even novels were incredibly popular. So people apparently liked the thing he did in the novels, right? But maybe the medium of TV is more hospitable to a focus on the human connections, but you could tell better than I could since you've watched the version that does less of that.

Robin:

I think it's more about which emotions are appealed to. The classic science fiction emotions are emotions and characters can express them and we can relate to that. It's just a different palette of emotions. I would think that is here we're going with the friendship emotions and the friend bonding emotions. And that's the thing they're adding, replacing the other more grand history of civilization emotions.

Arnold:

So I think an important difference between the three-body problem story in the show and in the books from older science fiction is that, so, I mean, science fiction really blew up especially after World War II, and especially sort of with the explosion of interest in science and technology, you know, with the atomic bomb and so on, and where The idea behind science fiction and part of the appeal of it was very much to look at the power of ideas but really specifically through the power of ideas through technology, right? That is that ideas would be the main things in life. They would be the driving forces in civilization, but they would be the driving forces and the main things in life by being the road to technology. That is by making certain kinds of technology and progress and development possible. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about the three body problem story is that it's about the power of ideas in a similar way, but it's almost very deliberately, it's maybe a sort of internet age version of the classical science fiction story, it almost deliberately focuses on those problems which are independent of technology, right? So we get a bunch of places in this story where the technology doesn't really matter. And the most dramatic in the books is the destruction of the fleet of the human ships, where all of our technological development has turned out to be sort of stupid and irrelevant. But the most powerful idea is this one that we get right at the end of the show, quite cryptically, I found. This is something that perplexes me, and maybe we can talk about it. But this joke that Ye Wenjie tells him in the graveyard, tells Saul in the graveyard, who's the version of Luo Ji, is that's the dangerous idea. That's the reason why the Tricellarians, the aliens are trying to kill him. And that idea is dangerous in a way that has very little to do with technology. It has very little to do with a weapon that might be built or a system of defense or something that might be constructed. The most dangerous ideas are actually not the technological ones. I think even the story that's building up to that Um, the dangerous ideas are, are like this, the ideas that build sympathy with the aliens right so that the, the aliens main weapon in the human world in the whole first part of the season is this video game. which it's very impressive the way that they do it, but you certainly don't need that fancy helmet and all of that stuff. That's all just bluff, right? You could totally just sell that video game on Steam. I would 100% buy it. My first reaction when I was reading these books is that I would love to play this game and figure out a scientific puzzle in a world, you know, with other people who have competing theories and stuff like that. That sounded like a hell of a good time to me. But the weapon wasn't technological. It was a way of generating sympathy for the aliens, alienating human beings from their own loyalty to their species and all of that stuff. So the weapon turned out not to be a technological weapon, or the idea turned out not to have technological significance, but really just something like, in that case, moral significance.

Robin:

I mean, my read of classic science fiction is that, you know, it was about not just the power of technologies, but also the power of other big ideas on the biggest scale. So science fiction, let's think of foundation series or something. It's not just the technology, it's the vision of how to relate to an entire civilization and its history and the kind of emotional and strategic attitudes you could have toward that. And that's, been a long part of science fiction, the key distinctive thing is to even be thinking about these large scales, these grand themes, and to have that sort of be the main character or setting. And that's the sort of thing that is distinctive about this kind of science fiction. And say, like, something like Star Wars hardly does that. Say, it's a grand epic tale, but there's hardly any big ideas, and big ideas aren't characters. So that's what I like about this. And I liked about this kind of science fiction, but it's just noteworthy that the producers here didn't have that much confidence in it. They thought they needed to add a pretty big friends team element to carry people along.

Agnes:

But like the, if we, if we, if we just look at the, I dunno, big ideas, vision of the future, power of science element of say the show, it's about fighting aliens. It's actually not that much about the future. What unites human beings is not the idea that science is cool and we could achieve amazing things. It's just like, we need to protect ourselves. And so in terms of, I don't know, valorizing or inciting awe or something about the power of science, I didn't feel that The show really did that. I'm not sure that the books did it either. Right.

Robin:

I would say science isn't the key concept in science fiction. The key concept is grand scale.

Agnes:

Or the idea that the future can be different from the present. Like the idea that the future will be like substantially different. Like the only interest we have in that idea in the show is maybe if it's different, we can defeat the aliens.

Robin:

we will see more change in the rest of the show. There's gonna be a lot of technical change and the world is gonna change a lot. And so that'll be part of the story. But yes, I mean, in some sense, this is a story about how technology isn't enough or isn't the main thing. The main thing is like how well we emotionally commit ourselves to our species or our civilization. And are we tough? And I mean, this is a lot about toughness really. uh in the through-body problems. His fundamental story is that we will survive or thrive based not just on our technology but on our mental toughness, our willingness to think on strategically large scales and to make the tough actions required by the strategy we figure out.

Agnes:

There's also something odd about the show where both, like, two of the characters that are going to be pivotal to the future of humanity are seen as being good for that role because they don't care about it. So that's true of Saul, Woji, and it's true of the brain, the guy whose head is thrown out into outer space. And it's, like, considered a virtue of them as fighters in this battle that they don't care about it. I don't know what to make of that.

Arnold:

Yeah, so Luo Ji and I hope Saul, cause there'll be a, we'll see this in the second season if that happens, is sort of one of my favorite characters of all time. I really like, he really speaks to me because he's very, very lazy and he doesn't like to do things. There's just something about that that really does speak to me. And he has to be, you know, like he really has to be pushed into this role. He's very reluctant to take it on, and he's not reluctant to take it on out of any kind of humility. He just can't be bothered. And ultimately the levers of his motivation are not loyalty to humanity or a kind of like, yeah, like a fierce willingness to fight or something like that. Believers are sort of much simpler than that. And, I mean, are we spoiling the series? Sure. Let's do that.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Arnold:

Yeah, spoilers.

Agnes:

Also, they might change it. So we're giving spoilers that might be false.

Arnold:

In the books, Luo Ji's story more or less ends with the handing off of the responsibility for protecting humanity via a signaling device that would tell everybody else in the universe where Earth is and where the Tricelarian homeworld is, and therefore would doom both worlds. It's a sort of mutually assured destruction tool, and he's in control of it such that if the Tricelarians ever threaten the humans, he'll set it off, right? And that's how he deters ultimately the Tricelarian invasion. And this is handed off to the character that will one day be Jyn, right? that is in the series, and she's not willing to do this. That is, she loves humanity, and she feels for the Tricelarians, and she has this kind of like real altruistic moral seriousness about her that Luo Ji just doesn't. But that makes Luo Ji deeply capable of protecting humanity, and it makes her totally incapable of protecting humanity. And she totally screws it up. And Wade is actually the other person, the other candidate for the person who could take over this role. And he was, you know, seen in the book as even more terrifying than Luo Ji, ultimately. That is, he's even scarier. And I mean, something that I like about the way that they did the show was that they really gave you the sense that this alien invasion thing is the best thing to ever happen to Wade. Like, cause he's, he's loving this. I mean, there's this very complicated, powerful adversary. He gets to engage with them and like do this big project and fight. And like a peaceful world was just a nightmare for him. And, and what he really wants is like, like a good fight. And he gets to have his good fight, but he doesn't actually care about humanity very much. That it's, it's like an element of the show is that these like, these, much more personal, trivial, simpler, less moral motivations are actually much more powerful and effective motivations than are the moral ones.

Robin:

So I think that answers Agnes's question in the sense that if you just started off the book with everybody having the proper strategic attitudes appropriate to the situation, you know, the characters wouldn't grow and we, the reader, wouldn't grow. So he populates his story with a range of motivations and a range of stances. And then we get to see their consequences over the course of the story. And that teaches us the lesson of what kinds of personalities and attitudes are functional in the universe, at least in the universe of the sort he describes. And that's part of his lesson. That's part of the story he wants to tell us. People need to be a little harder and tougher if we're going to survive in the universe.

Arnold:

Yeah, right. And the story really does, I mean, if I, you know, recalling the books, and I'm going to be very interested to see the way that the Netflix show handles this, because I can't I would be really surprised if they just left this in here, but the books are really critical of liberal society in that sense, right? I mean, the second environment that we get in the books, this sort of like pre, this world 400 years in the future is like, just before the aliens arrive, is like a sort of, you know, Star Trek liberalism dream. and it totally, totally fails to protect them.

Robin:

We certainly do see our immediate, our first, you know, character of the woman in the radar facility and her love of environmentalism and her distrust of authority. And we certainly see those things go wrong. So the story wasn't at all afraid to let us lay out that consequence, which is part of his moral is that that sort of an attitude is very dangerous.

Arnold:

Right, right. Right, but I so and I do want to, and this is really spoiling things for the very end of the series, but I do want to point out that for everything that session Lou, and maybe the show will do to. build up an attitude like Wade's, that is a kind of scrappy, fighty, no holds barred, you know, always advanced kind of attitude as the attitude that actually leads to survival. At the end of the story, the thing that makes life possible is ultimately that soft, warm, altruistic, loving, attitude that the jinn, I guess, will ultimately have. That is that, in a certain sense, the choice of whether or not there will be another universe is her choice. And she says yes against her self-interest for no reason other than just a kind of universal love. And so there is that final twist in the story where it isn't ultimately about hard-nosed, scrappy fighting. There is a place where human beings and that warm human feeling belong.

Robin:

But either way, it is fundamentally a morality tale about the morality of certain kinds of stances toward conflict and survival.

Agnes:

Is it? Arnold, do you agree that it's a morality tale? What is the moral?

Arnold:

If I were to sum up the moral of the books, it would be that the universe is absolutely chock full of dangerous species struggling to survive and willing to do anything to survive. And we are one of those species and we have to act much more like them. in order to survive. That is, we have to be much more willing to sort of do whatever it takes and set aside our sentimental feelings and allegiances and stuff like that in order to survive. But that the thing that makes us human beings, the thing that makes human beings special is that deep down, we have this element in us that would have, if not for the arrival of the Tricelarians, gone out and announced ourselves to the universe cheerfully and gotten ourselves annihilated, right? That was our inevitable destiny, if not for the Tricelarian invasion. We would have been totally destroyed because we're these friendly creatures who have this kind of like connection with one another that is totally incompatible with that sort of brutal survivalism, and that that thing in us takes us all the way to the end. That's something that stays with us and that's important to us, and that that's what makes us human, and that that's something worth preserving, even given the fact that it's extremely dangerous. That's what I would say is the moral of the story. I mean, I don't know if stories really have morals, but that's a reasonable way to pick them apart.

Agnes:

But that seems like two morals that are in tension with one another.

Arnold:

Yes, right.

Robin:

Lots of morality tales are like that. Yeah.

Agnes:

Okay. So we can say it's a tale of multiple moralities simultaneously. It doesn't really tell you how to trade them off against each other.

Robin:

But like for many stories, part of the appeal is it playing in that space and making you think about those big moral issues. That's, you know, a lot of random events in the world don't do that. And this is designed to do that.

Arnold:

Yeah. Right. That is the moral of the story is a moral about that tension. But it isn't decisively against or for either attitude.

Agnes:

So let's just think about Ye Wenjie's decision to press the button.

Arnold:

Yeah.

Agnes:

Right. When she's going to communicate. So she's, you know, received a message from the Tricelarians. She doesn't know anything about them at this point. And she's been cautioned, like, not to respond because somehow there's a very altruistic Tricelarian out there. And then morality tale wise, what are we supposed to learn from how she responds to this? And here her backstory is going to be relevant that she sort of saw the worst of the communist revolution and saw her own father killed and was like, had to labor in oppressive conditions and was put into jail unfairly and all this other stuff that makes her kind of hate humanity. Anyway, what do we make of that decision?

Robin:

her point of view as presented is that a random draw from civilizations in the universe would have to be better than that. So her expectations are pretty high for what alien civilizations are like, and that makes her think, you know, letting them come take over has got to be better than letting humans who do this sort of thing, you know, rule our world. And then the moral is that she's just wrong. The typical behavior out there is much worse than she saw in the Cultural Revolution. That was tame compared to the kind of destruction that aliens are going to do. And that's the moral is that you have to be much more pessimistic about the universe.

Arnold:

Yeah, I mean, in a narrative, if a character makes a decision on the basis of an idea, and then later comes to regret that idea and that decision, and then the narrative, at least in relation to that character, breaks off, that's usually a very good reason to interpret the author as rejecting that idea. And that is what happens with her. That is, ultimately, she comes to understand that what she did was a mistake, and precisely because of what, as Robin said, she comes to understand the behavior of other aliens as not being better than that of human beings, and in fact, being much worse generally. That is the tribe. It's, you know, throughout the story, the Tricelarian civilization is just way worse than human civilization in every dimension.

Robin:

It's way less free, it's way poorer, it's way... It has one ironic way it's better, in that they don't even understand lies. Yeah right the thing they're most offended by about us right they we seem evil to them because we lie and they can't even imagine lies and so whatever else they're bad about they see us as terrible because of that one feature so that allows us to relativism there that they can see us as terrible even though we see them as terrible.

Arnold:

Yeah, I don't quite remember how this was handled in the book. But so one thing I didn't like about the way that they did it in the show, and maybe also therefore in the book, because I don't remember, but is that they said we don't trust, that is, liars are not trustworthy. And it seemed to me that the idea that they would have access to a concept of trust was very unlikely.

Robin:

They can't understand lying, but they understand misdemeanor.

Arnold:

That line suggested that they had some native understanding of the idea that trustworthiness was moral and untrustworthiness was immoral. Untrustworthiness was bad, but they wouldn't have any of those ideas, right?

Robin:

I think they could have had betrayal without lies.

Arnold:

Yeah, maybe. Right. Um, I, but my sense is that the right thing for the show to the right way to put that would have been that, though, though maybe this would have been a little too abstract and complicated to present would have been the the Tricylorians reaction to discovering that we can lie isn't that they should find us to be bad or evil or something like that, but that they should find the prospect of cooperation to be terrifically dangerous. I mean, if I went into a room with a bunch of people and I had to compete for scarce resources and they didn't even have the idea of lying, I would possess all of those resources almost immediately, right? It would be trivially easy to get just total domination.

Robin:

I mean, if that were true, then this probably couldn't have evolved. So I think we have to somehow presume that if a whole civilization evolved where they don't lie, somehow that can't be a huge penalty.

Arnold:

Yeah, right. So, I mean, the explanation in the books is that the Tricelarians are, their cognitive processes are visible on the surfaces of them and they communicate because they can interpret what I guess for us would be like neurons firing or something like that, because those are just visible. And so they can't hide things without physically hiding their own bodies. which you would think would leave more room for lying than they seem to admit. But yeah, I mean, it seems like what they should be is just scared of us. But yeah, maybe you're right. I mean, maybe it's just better to have a society without lies, even all other things equal, even if it isn't, say, a moral decision. It's just an incapability. But yeah, so this decision that she makes to press the button I mean, one thing is, and this is something that they got rid of in the show in order to simplify the storyline a bit, is that Ye Wen-je was a one side, she was in a faction, a moderate faction within the alien sympathizers. that wanted to eventually coexist with and be ruled by the aliens, right? So she wanted to surrender humanity's autonomy to these aliens so that the aliens could manage us and that we would do better. And that's consistent with Robin's description of her understanding of the button pushing decision. Evans was not of that view. Evans understood that aliens would not, that they would come and they would just kill all human beings. And so there was a radical faction among the alien sympathizers that wanted this, that just thought human beings are bad, we should all die, this is an effective way to wipe this out while preserving other forms of life on this planet maybe.

Robin:

And so that was kind of bizarre. Why assume they will preserve all the other life on the planet and just kill the humans?

Arnold:

Right. I agree that that doesn't make any sense.

Robin:

It's part of a hopeful alien sympathizers that is they're projecting their wishes onto the aliens. And that's part of the morality tale is beware of that sort of a hopeful projection.

Arnold:

Right. And so we might also ask if it had been Evans pushing the button, he would have been pushing the button for different reasons, namely not in order to see an improvement in the human situation by surrendering our autonomy to aliens, but rather just to see the elimination of human beings. And that's a slightly more surprising decision to make.

Agnes:

So that actually suggests a connection between the two morals. So the one moral is human beings should try to survive and maybe even be brutal for the sake of survival. And the other is human beings should preserve what is distinctively good about us. And maybe the decisions in the first novel where there's a bunch of people who kind of hate humanity and are plotting against it, show that there is a question about what is going to motivate humanity to even want to survive. And the answer to that question is going to have to be some kind of positive estimation of what is distinctive about us. That is, unless we preserve what's good and distinctive about us, we're not going to want to survive. We're not going to be motivated to survive. And I think that also connects to the point about lies. That is, certainly the aliens see their own inability to lie as an advantage. And they see it as a self-evident form of superiority over us. But I think the whole idea of the wall facer project is that it isn't. That is that human interiority, our ability to keep thoughts to ourselves is maybe going to be a big part of our distinctive value and lying is what allows us to preserve that. And that's just part of the value of humanity. It's part of what is like lovable and warm and positive about us that we each have a kind of sacrosanct interior.

Robin:

So another part of the art of the show in the book In my mind, that was stood out even more in the Chinese TV show was the enormous reverence for physics and physics research that you've almost never see even in documentaries about physics today. you know the author and these characters really love and revere fundamental physics and there's this whole you know idea that if fundamental physics was somehow broken and hard to understand people would just commit suicide right and left because of their deep love for the idea of order. I find this kind of crazy and plausible, but that was sort of the initial setup of the mystery of the book before we even know there are aliens. What we know is there are these physicists with their deep love of physics, and it's somehow being hard to understand. They're killing themselves right and left for the fact that in a few months, they haven't been able to figure out some physics puzzle. You know, they don't have decades to try. They just take a few months and they start killing themselves.

Agnes:

I interpreted the movie, the TV show as changing, potentially changing that with respect to the book. That is that the, that the, you know, when they would see the countdown, if they stopped doing their research, it would go away. And if they continue to do their research, then what's her name would come and kill them and make it look like a suicide. So I thought this is how I interpreted what happened in the show, is that those were not suicide. Now, the one person who jumps into the thing, she does commit suicide, but- Right, but at least other characters find this plausible, even if it's not true.

Robin:

Other people are believing that they are committing suicide. So there's still a perception.

Arnold:

But Agnes is right that the showrunners clearly don't think, I agree with you that that's a very, very weird premise. Because I think Agnes is right that the deaths of the physicist is largely chalked up to direct tricellarian intervention, whereas in the books, it really is just like, oh, these readouts from these colliders are not consistent with our theories.

Robin:

We see many first-person presentations of this anxiety in the book and in the Chinese TV series, that these people are just torn emotionally by the fact that things aren't making sense.

Arnold:

Yeah. Yeah, so that is a remarkable attitude. I mean, what do you think is behind that?

Robin:

Well, I just think he's an old style science fiction person, basically. He grew up in reading old style science fiction, and he's channeling the old style reverence of science, which was there. And he is expressing that here. And that's part of the charm is that we get to see old style science fiction set by new author in a new context because he's kind of more of an old style person that way. But I think- It doesn't seem old style to me.

Agnes:

It's actually quite, I can't, can you think of another, I mean, you know more science fiction than I do, but science fiction where people do things like commit suicide because they can't understand things. That's just quite an unusual.

Arnold:

So maybe it's that old style reverence for science and physics and the prospects of knowledge, but the thing that's new about it is the very possibility of the collapse of that endeavor. That is at least, I mean, I haven't read a ton of old science fiction, but at least from what I have read, The idea that the universe should be deeply unintelligible is not something that really comes up, right? That's not a serious theme of that genre. Whereas in... It's constantly in the background of... So that's more of like roadside picnic.

Robin:

which really emphasizes that theme, which is the very classic, perhaps the best Soviet science fiction novel about just a strange world that doesn't make any sense and never will. I think this does sort of drive one of his sort of the biggest mistakes from realism point of view, which is these aliens have access to these so phones which will pop around the world and do all sorts of things. And they're going to try to stop our civilization from advancing by messing with the minds of people looking at particle accelerators. And you go, you could just smash the economy, you know, much more directly. People just mess with other machines and other infrastructure we need. What's with the obsession with particle accelerator people? It just seems way off. In the novel, actually, the alien people managed to make some nuclear bombs. they have this spectacular video game technology that if you could make technology like that, you could use that to do all sorts of disruption of the world. I mean, it seems like the obvious from an economist thing is they could take down world civilization dramatically by just smashing stuff. And then there won't be much money to pay particle accelerators, but instead all the focus is on like they spend over half of their effort on these SOFONs just messing with the minds of people who look at the data from particle accelerators, as if that was the center of our civilization.

Arnold:

In defense of the books, or in defense of that element of the story, I mean, the SOFONs are sent immediately after the fleet, when it's sort of understood that humans will vastly outstrip the Tricelarians technologically by the time that their trip is finished.

Robin:

Only if they keep growing. But yeah, right.

Arnold:

And so they send the SOFONs with the job to stop their growth. But as soon as the SOFONs arrive, what they do is get exposed to human culture. And apparently, and this is slightly puzzling, decide that some number of human beings who are alienated from human civilization should become their allies. I think it's unclear to me why they would ever decide to make that happen, but they do. It's not crazy. But once they do that, I mean, one of the elements that sort of shows up much more so in the third book is that very early on in this story, Tricelarian culture is almost totally captured by human culture. That is they, human culture becomes like it's a Greek and Roman thing where the Romans take over the Greeks, but then Roman culture gets really deeply captured by Greek culture. And so, I mean, one way to explain it is that messing with our colliders and our physicists is a way to leave our culture intact for a society that even as it's advancing to destroy it, is really interested in seeing as much of this culture as they can. And they get really interested in human stories and human movies and human love stories and affairs. And like all of this stuff becomes really fascinating to them.

Robin:

And that's, I mean, you know- Like if they could have smashed the economy and left lots of love stories and music and stuff to enjoy.

Arnold:

Well, no, because I mean, if you smash the economy and then we're all just scrapping around in the dirt, I mean, you don't get to see the, you know, like what the- They want the live culture. Yeah, they want a live culture. And what the Tricelarians do, once peace has been established with the human beings on the basis of this mutually assured destruction threat, the Sophons and the Tricelarians spend all their time asking human beings about romantic relationships. They're just really interested in those things.

Robin:

They could have smashed the economy and still asked us about romantic relationships.

Arnold:

No, but I think Agnes is right. I mean, you know, they want a live culture.

Robin:

They don't want one that's... They could have a live culture. They could have just smashed it enough that we can't grow technologically. I mean, that's what they're trying to do with these, you know, colliders is they're just trying to hinder our technological growth. But, you know, again, they could have smashed Silicon Valley. They could have gone around and just smash things that actually do innovation, that grow the economy. Colliders just don't do that much for human growth.

Arnold:

They eventually do. When they send the droplet, the droplet does just come through and just blow stuff up.

Robin:

Right. Well, that shows that they learned by that point. But I think it's part of the emotion of the movie is this idea the reverence for this science and the reverence for physics is part of the conceit there is that if you wanted to hurt us, that's the thing you would hurt because that's the thing we most treasure about ourselves.

Arnold:

That's true.

Agnes:

I find it very striking that the very first, like, we can judge, yeah, Wenjia for having made the wrong decision, but she makes the wrong decision based on an encounter. Where, like, the very first experience she has of a Tricelerion is of one who says, protect yourselves, don't come, right? Which gives her a very particular kind of information about what kind of a group of people this is. And then later on, we're like, oh, okay, that was bad information. Like, they're not like that at all. But they are a little bit like that as, you know. No, no.

Arnold:

The information that it would have given her is that they aren't like this individual. That is, the funny thing about that exchange was that the person she made contact with on Trisolaris was just her. It was another person who was totally alienated from their culture, who thought that their own people were better off dead than continuing on the path that they were continuing. and who, for those reasons, didn't want this communication to continue. And they eventually get punished, right? In fact, they get punished in exactly the same way that Ye Wenjie gets punished, with freedom and the ability to then watch the situation that she's created degenerate. And so, I mean, what she would have learned about the society is actually that it is in fact very dangerous and bad, but that it has also has these alienated members like her. And it just so happens that the corresponding person is alienated in the other direction.

Robin:

So at this time, I feel like we should bring up sort of the technical criticism of the book or whether you accept it, because, you know, basically, you know, the moment she sends out this message, it's you know there's some amplification in the sun that amplification can't possibly be directly targeted at that particular star it's going to go in lots of different directions so right there you know not only do they get this message but lots of other aliens in the universe and get the message from earth right there so all the rest of this plot about hiding earth earth was unhidden right then and she didn't really need to reply for them to find earth. That's also not very plausible. They need to know how far away she is by the timing of her reply, but they should just be able to look in that direction.

Arnold:

Well, so, so I guess the question is if you get a signal, right? So if we got a radio signal, like the wow signal, which they, they sort of bring up as the, um, uh, the inspiration for that story, I guess, uh, if we got a signal like the wow signal and, um, What would we know just on the basis of having gotten the signal? We would know, I guess, because of the positions and timing of that signal's arrival on Earth. We know the direction it came from, roughly.

Robin:

Now, if we had had big antennas, we could go much more precisely where it came from. So if we happen to not be looking in the direction, then the direction will be not so precise.

Arnold:

Right.

Robin:

But I mean, more fundamentally, I mean, more fundamentally, the context here is this star is the closest star to Earth in the entire galaxy.

Arnold:

Yeah, right. And we run into other people immediately.

Robin:

So the closest star to Earth has an advanced civilization. And they've got this real three-body problem that really hurts civilization. Nevertheless, they have a civilization. So that kind of suggests that pretty much every star around is going to have civilizations. So that means you don't have to look very far to find neighbors.

Arnold:

So you don't have to look at all, you can just start sending weapons out.

Robin:

Right, or probes out. But you can just, you know, so we recently, Noah Smith had a blog post about the technical implausibility. But he's right that once you have telescopes, you can just look for civilizations elsewhere.

Arnold:

And so you don't even need... A criticism I've had of Noah's thing is, that may be true. I mean, the suggestion in in the book is that human beings are almost unique in our failure to understand the need to hide.

Robin:

That that's a very rare cultural development, and then... Solarians aren't hiding either in terms of how they structure their planets or something, like telescopes would see them too.

Arnold:

Well, so what the Tricelarians might do is, very early on in their civilization, concentrate quite a lot of resources on making sure that a telescope focused on their world is unlikely to pick up anything significant, unless somebody was really, really investigating. That is, if somebody is just doing a sweep, they're not going to pick anything up. And then it's just a question of, is the hiding side or the seeking side a winner in an ultimate technological sense. And it's not super implausible that the hiding side wins.

Robin:

if you spend a lot of effort hiding, right? I mean, you have to, because look, you know, they can do this 11 dimensional, enormous computer crammed into a proton. If you can do that, you could make telescopes. You can make pretty big ones at much lower cost. And you can look pretty precisely at a long distance. I don't know if you know that basically you can use a star as a lens and have a, You know, the detector on the other side of the star and basically see really high resolution for a long distance using a star as a lens. And of course, if life is this common that by the time they you know they could just be sending probes all over the place. Thousands of nearby systems to look things up close. They don't need to wait to send a thousand warships or in a colonization way, but that the first time you ever send anything also seems a little crazy, especially since there's supposed to be like really old civilization.

Arnold:

Yeah, no, I agree that the conceit that they wouldn't want to come to earth in particular, given that, I mean, for one thing, if what they're interested in, because obviously it's not a big impediment to them to start a civilization on a world without a biosphere. Their own biosphere has been destroyed hundreds of times.

Robin:

I mean, the whole problem they have is the three body problem. It's really easy to see what other stars don't have three stars, right?

Arnold:

Right, right.

Robin:

All the other one body stars are really easy to find. Like, let's just go to one of those.

Arnold:

Right. Right. So I don't know. I mean, you need to come up with some additional plot premises to get the idea that they would actually want to come here or communicate with us or anything like that. But I don't know, maybe Robin, you can tell, you can say a little bit more about, because this, you know, one of the central ideas in Technically, the thing that I find so impressive about the novels, not as getting the science right or anything, but just as a work of science fiction, is the way that Shenshen Liu manages to use a fairly small set of science fiction premises to explain a huge number of actual real features of our universe, right? So the fact that it has three dimensions, the fact that the speed of light is such as it is, the dark matter, dark energy problem, all of these all get explained with a very small number of premises. And I find that really impressive. But the dark forest is, I think, of those premises, the only one that's really substantive as a sort of sociological premise. And a lot of people have come away from these books, read these books and thought, oh yeah, that sounds true. And I don't know. I mean, so I'd like to hear what you have to say about that as a proposition.

Robin:

In Noah's post, he makes two main points that you can see before the fold, probably are the two main points. One is just, you can build telescopes and see lots of things from a long distance. And the other is this idea that this dark forest isn't really a plausible long-term equilibrium. So you might think, okay, if you stick your head up, somebody comes smashing you, but you wonder who's going to come smash you exactly, because whoever comes to smash you, they're going to expose themselves to someone who's watching them. And so, like, you need somebody who's willing to go out and smash to make the equilibrium such that nobody sticks their head up for fear of getting smashed. And now the question is, if somebody is willing to go out and smash, then why aren't they willing to grow and become visible themselves? Because they are making themselves visible.

Arnold:

So smashing, it turns out, doesn't expose you in the books. That is, in the third book, the smasher, the one that eventually gets it, is on a ship purpose-built to fire a weapon from a mobile position that doesn't give away the location of their home world. Presumably, it's not going to be too far away. Right. Yeah. I mean, the idea is that people are going to have ships out there in order to disguise the location. Origin. Yeah.

Robin:

Right. But one way to think, I mean, here's what persuades me, which is just, you can imagine civilizations like staying low, hiding down, then not creating that many resources, because that would be visible, and then sending out lots of little probes to do things. The alternative is you send a lot of probes to a large volume, and then you suddenly turn them all on at once, and you say, grow as fast as you can. If people come and smash you, you could just still win out, because you have this big volume you're growing in, and they only can knock out so many things, because they aren't that big. And if you have a big enough volume, it would seem, and you turn it all at once, and it grows fast enough, you just win. You fill the volume, and now their little destructive things just can't destroy it. that would work over some timescale. And so, but the universe is 14 billion years old. And so, you know, in this story, we've just got a few hundred years. So there's this really, you know, puzzle in the book. How is it that the timescales are even at all similar here? And there are terms of their development at ours. And then, you know, especially given how old the universe is. So, you know, if you're trying to have this dark forest equilibrium last for billions of years, you really have to address why somebody couldn't send out probes to 10 million stars, each of them ready to turn on the same moment, and then they grow over 10 million stars. How is it that a small number of separated, uncoordinated civilizations managed to stop that? It just, I can't see.

Arnold:

Yeah, so the explanation in the book, so far as I remember, is that there come to be, within a society, very, very, very strong norms against colonization. And these norms are on the grounds that if you send out a colony, then you've already broken the, that is the mother planet and the colony automatically know where each other are and eventually destroy one another. And so, the usual response to the dark forest situation on the part of any given world is to close itself off physically from the rest of the universe and then just sort of like live in its solar system. So, I mean, but that maybe begs the question again.

Robin:

I mean, the praise to make here is that virtually all the rest of space opera science fiction just completely ignores this question.

Arnold:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Robin:

And at least he's engaging the question of why the universe is so empty and he deserves credit for at least engaging that. And even most science fiction novels don't do that. Yeah. They find it quite hard.

Agnes:

Robin, you have often complained about the lack of sociological complexity in a lot of fiction and a lot of fantasy. I wonder what you think about the world of Three-Body Problem on that front. I guess that the TV show is maybe worse on that front than the books.

Robin:

the thing that most stands out in the tv show is that there's this guy put in charge of the whole anti-alien campaign and we never saw like what's the politics between picking this guy how is this a compromise between various competing powers you know there's a scene with raj where raj is like

Agnes:

Well, why should I listen to you? And he's like, you should ask me for my ID. And then he's like, what ID can we imagine? Could you have shown him? Alien defense force. Did you just make this on your printer? So yeah, right. So somehow, the entire world has coordinated to put one guy in charge.

Robin:

And that could happen, but there'd be a huge interesting story behind it. yeah yeah you know that wouldn't happen fast and it would happen all sorts of people would you know maneuver for advantage here to try to put their people in charge of it and you know that would be a really whole interesting story so we just presume that away here just one guy's in charge and somehow it happened and yes so i i i asked ada palmer because i ran into her here and she's she's i think notable as a science fiction author who um

Arnold:

develops a genuinely novel sociological order in our books. I mean, it's not, you know, totally out of the order of what we know, but it really is pretty new. And I asked her why we don't get more sociological complexity in science fiction. And her explanation was that science fiction at its heart is about the value of the continuation of the present order. That is, it's about how important and good it is that the present order be sustained in order to make progress into the future. And that that progress is technological and scientific and not social. And so it sort of built into the very structure of sci-fi that it really generally declines to explore novel situations and social situations. And that it's really fantasy that was the genre that gets into this. because it's about the past.

Robin:

So if we think of, say, Star Wars or Dune, and a number of other science fiction stories, what's striking to me, and socially, is that they only ever show very simple social structures and organizations, unless they show a villain. Villains can have vast, big empires and hierarchies, but heroes, they're always in little tiny, you know, inns and, and you know somebody runs a place they sell drinks and then another person happens to be an individual courier from one place to another there's all these like individual uh you know consultants and one-person businesses yeah and tiny social organization little tiny towns etc and people like that even if you look it's like we watched star wars recently like that there's this apparently you know rebel organization and you never like know its organizational chart or who's at what level or if there's ever any conflicts in the organizational chart of some people wanting to make their rebel rebellion go one way versus another that's all abstracted from it's all just a couple of people you know heroically fighting and even in dune you know you don't you see the empire maybe having big structures but honestly this is true in a lot of fantasy. I think basically we aren't very comfortable with modern complicated social structures and we would rather see stories where they just edit that out and show us simpler soko structures unless you want a villain and then one of the ways to make them villainous is to introduce a modern social structure into the villains because we don't trust that so much.

Arnold:

Yeah, you really see that in Andor, where Andor is actually quite sociologically complex. I mean, relatively, in that it talks quite a lot about the bad guys. Yeah, right. The relationship, the good guys are very simply organized. Right. But yeah, right. So that's all bad guy stuff, especially to the extent that we're sort of like talking about corporate structures. A lot of recent sort of video games and media and stuff will be centered on sort of the corporate dystopia and the idea that these corporate social structures are bad precisely because they're complex. and alienating and unheroic and bureaucratic and all of this stuff. And that that's precisely what makes them villainous.

Robin:

And you noticeably that the bad guy human group has these splits. The good guy human group doesn't show any splits. In the Tricelerons we see very little splits there, right? So the only time we ever allowed to see plausible internal organizational conflict is again with the villains.

Arnold:

Yeah, though, I mean, one thing that is interesting about the three-body novels is that the Tricelarian social structure is basically unexplored. We never get any clearer picture of what it is, other than we get some indication that it's totalitarian. Whereas the human social structure, we do get quite a bit of politics. I mean, there are various different kinds of democracy. There are corporate structures that show up in the sort of second and third books that are important. Conflicts between government and corporate interests. You know, I mean, so you do get some. That's generally not seen positively. That is liberal democracy is usually not the good guy in these stories. It's usually the fumbling idiot that causes more and more disaster, but... Saved by the dedicated team, small team. Yeah, like one thing to hand Cheshin Liu is that there is quite a lot of social complexity on the human side. And it isn't that the humans are seen as villains to the extent that they're socially complex. It's that at worst they're seen as sort of bumblers or something like that. But as it were, it's our social complexity in the three body stories that is the social complexity. It's not, you know, the empire or something like that.

Robin:

So in the movie and in the book, at one point, the aliens find out that we lie, and then they have this almost toddler-like tantrum where they send a message to everybody saying you are bugs. And this doesn't even pass the simplest test of strategic consideration. So we have this universe of all these very clever strategies, mutual destruction and all that. And here they just blurt, not only do they blurt it out to one person, they go out of their way to blurt this to everyone. And they could just not say it. I mean, clearly, even though they don't lie, they must have the idea of just not saying something sometimes. And here they just make everyone their enemy And for no good reason.

Agnes:

And they unite the entire planet.

Arnold:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. So especially in the books, the immediate thing that happens is that all intra-human conflicts end. But that's a terrible thing to do with your enemy, is unite them.

Robin:

But surely they could think of the consequence of that action. So it's as if they were just this emotional toddler who throws a tantrum in response to being told they can't have something they want or something, except they decide to scream their tantrum to the entire planet.

Agnes:

And they had to be able to just say nothing because, in fact, they just choose to say nothing from that point on. All the time, yeah.

Robin:

It's not like they don't understand they could stop talking.

Arnold:

Yeah, so I mean, so I really didn't like this season finale of this show. But as I've been enjoying it so far, and I like the way it's been going, given that I think that the acting and the dialogue are pretty shaky, I found it surprisingly engaging. But the season finale really just felt like it didn't work. That is, it had no, Yeah, no real recognizable narrative buildup and resolution and it was just very ambivalent, but they really like this bug scene that comes at the end of the first novel. It's different characters, but this speech about, oh, you can't get rid of the bugs because they're Which I, you know, anybody counting the number of insect species we drive extinct every year is probably- The whole dark forest theory says that bugs can be gotten rid of.

Robin:

That's kind of the whole premise. You nuke their star and damn it, you do get rid of all their bugs.

Arnold:

Yeah. And as Sheshun Liu, I mean, Sheshun Liu leans on this bug, seen as heavily as this as the show does to the point where I might even imagine that the bug you're all bugs message is just a way to build that up. The show does an admirable job sort of incorporating it into the attitudes, its demoralizing effects into the attitudes of the characters. But one of the interesting things in the books is that he backs off this bug observation. The character who gives the bug speech, it turns out, we learn later, doesn't believe a word of it. They can't do this in the show because it's Daxi who's doing the speech and he's not the relevant character. But yeah, so we, I mean, we learned later that this whole bug speech is just a ruse. It's just the guy who's giving the speech thinks we're totally screwed and we need to run. We need to come up with a way to just get the hell out of here. And so, I mean, apparently, you know, Xie Xunlu himself is sort of ambivalent about it, Yeah, maybe it's just a narrative flaw that's so much emphasis, both in the books and in the show are placed on this very inspiring sounding, but very incoherent moment where they say, look for all of our efforts, we haven't been able to get rid of the bugs.

Robin:

So I think when the aliens call us bugs, not only does that make not make strategic sense for them but then they depict not only do we unite but then we riot and destroy things like I find that very psychologically implausible. That would be the least likely time for humans to go out and riot and destroy their cities or their governments or something.

Arnold:

I found that really puzzling too. They were like rioting saying, and the people in the show had them chanting, we're not bugs. It's like, we didn't call you bugs. Who are you talking to? It's like, mashing storefronts to screw the Tricelarians is a very strange, very strange behavior. But yeah, I couldn't make much sense of that.

Agnes:

We should probably stop, because we've been on for an hour.

Robin:

All right. Well, it was nice to see you again in show number three. We've done two, then, Arnold, or three. Yeah, yeah. It was a pleasure. We'll have to figure out the number. All right.