450 years before the Invasion - Putting things in perspective (Cixin Liu's Three-body Problem)

[Simon Laub]

Has just spotted (a little late) a New York Times article "Obama’s
Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books"
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books.html)
tell us that the former president reads presidential biographies to
provide context, countering the tendency to think "that whatever’s going
on right now
is uniquely disastrous or amazing or difficult".

Even more interestingly the article tell us that the former
president has read the Hugo Award-winning apocalyptic sci-fi epic "The
Three-Body Problem" by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. Interestingly!

Clearly, a good book for putting things in perspective...
According to Obama: "The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to
read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly
petty — not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade".

Guided by Obamas praise I also picked up the series,
and it is indeed and interesting series of books (The Three-Body
Problem, The Dark Forest and Death's End).

---

Starting in the era of the "Cultural Revolution" (Launched by Mao
Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, the revolution
hoped to get rid of all capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese
society, and replace it all with Maoism) we find ourselves on the
exercise grounds of Tsinghua University, where a mass "struggle session"
attended by thousands has been going on for nearly two hours. A public
rally intended to humiliate and break down the enemies of
the revolution through verbal and physical abuse until they confessed
to their crimes before the crowd.

Interesting, but sort of difficult to see how that leads to an alien
invasion, as described in Obamas "review"..

But, well as you read on it becomes clear that there actually is a red
thread here

-->

The cultural revolution would (of course) proclaim that scientitic
accomplishments should be given proper names like "resistance law",
quantum constant" etc., not names like "Ohms law" or "Plancks constant"
etc. after the bourgeois physicists "who stole the fruits of the working
masses and put their names on them".
As the revolution spirals out of control, and Mao had
alleged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and
society at large, millions of people were persecuted and suffered a wide
range of abuses, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, hard labor, execution.
Which obviously lead to resentment, and plans for revenge...

We meet Ye Wenjie, an astrophysics alumna from Tsinghua University,
who has witnessed her father (guilty of being an intellectual) being
beaten to death by Red Guards.
She has now been branded a bourgeois traitor, and is forced to join a
labor brigade in Inner Mongolia.

Long after these horrible events, Ye finds herself working at radio
facility, where she discovers a technique to amplify outgoing radio
waves by bouncing them off the sun and sends an interstellar message.
The plot thickens as she receives a message from a concerned alien
pacifist from the planet Trisolaris, that tell her not to respond alien
messages... Great!

But, well, logically, as she has come to despise humankind, she invites
the aliens to come and "reform" humanity. The alien planet Trisolaris
has three suns - and Chaotic Eras occur when Trisolaris is pulled by
more than one sun - I.e. the Three-Body Problem - So, no wonder that the
Trisolarians are eager to find a new home planet...
A Trisolaran invasion force departs, traveling at 1/100-th of
lightspeed, so it will take them 450 years to arrive...

Eventually, the "happy message" of the coming invasion is spread to
other disgruntled members of Earths society, who plan to work as a fifth
column for the Trisolarians, preparing the destruction of humanity.

Yet again, the plot thickens, as Cixin Liu takes us to the present day,
where particle physicists kill themselves, and where the
world's governments communicate closely with each other, realizing that
they have to work together in preparation for the coming invasion
(now common knowledge apparently).

Rather cleverly, Cixin Liu lets the aliens create eleven-dimensional
supercomputers, which when viewed in three dimensions, looks like mere
protons. These guys are then send to Earth to disrupt all of Earth's
particle accelerators.
As the aliens reason that physics is a cornerstorne of science, and
shutting down particle accelerators will stop humanitys technological
advancement in physics for the next 400 years, or so,
and thus make it much easier to conquer Earth.
So, there we go - the reason why fundamental physics hasn't progressed
that much in recent years... ? :)

Interestingly, just as Trisolaran society becomes a religion for some on
Earth, Earths society has the same effect on some members of the
Trisolaran society - so all sides conclude that the flow of cultural
information must be strictly controlled.
A nice twist, as citizens of Earth prepare for the "Doomsday" battle
with the invaders (see "Dark Forest").

Always rather logical, Cixin Liu then tell us that human salvation
ultimately comes down to human ingenuity, and with only 450 years to the
Doomsday battle, it makes sense to use a century to elevate human brains
before moving on to more practical war preparations...
Still, if everything else fails humans can always threaten to blow
up Earth, and deny the Trisolarians the possibility of settling on our
wonderful blue planet, instead of their wretched planetary system.

Or, perhaps, we could block sunlight from our Sun, in order to send
messages throughout the Galaxy, about what is going on here, inviting
others to join the battle?

In Cixin Liu's view not without risks, as he sees the galaxy as
a dark forest, where civilizations are hunters stalking through the
trees like ghosts. If you meet someone else - fire and eliminate.
Indeed, no wonder that there is a Fermi paradox - Noone wants to tell
others about their existence... except naive humans, perhaps.

In the end, in Deaths Ends, it seems that Earth and the Trisolarians can
co-exist peacefully, as equals without the terrible threat of MAD
(mutually assured destruction), but well, history/time never ends, times
passes and new things happens...

Eventually, even more advanced civilizations enter the "game" and change
the laws of physics themselves, thereby threatening the existence of the
Universe itself... Of course. And so it goes onto pocket Universes, and
beyond.

- - -

Highly entertaining - and no wonder that Obama found the books a good
counter measure to the tendency to think "that whatever’s going on right
now is uniquely disastrous or amazing or difficult".

Awesome!

For more see "The Three-Body Problem",
"The Dark Forest" and "Death's End" by Cixin Liu.


-Simon

www.simonlaub.net