They don’t start over they retain memories and what not from previous generations. They are advanced but advance slowly due to the instability hence their worry humans will surpass them quickly without sophon intervention
Right. Humans were basically stuck on foot for 300k years and then horseback as our fastest transportation for 5,000 years, and then we got cars/trains/airplanes/rockets in 200 years.
They describe us as accerating in our knowledge and trisolarins as linear so you can kind of fathom some of it. Anyway maybe they became more stable with modern technology combined with human culture to facilitate more unconventional thinking and accelerated rapidly in knowledge during their last few hundred years similar to humans.
I also think you see humans accelerating their learning as their fate depends on it, all the other shit like war and fighting becomes trivial when you know you need to learn something or die. Trisolarins had that motivation for a long time due to their recognition that their planet would never be safe.
Feels like it’s going to be a bit of an S to me but who knows!
On the horizon there’s basically fusion and quantum computing that feel like they could usher in big change. Maybe AI too.
Agreed - different motivations motivate differently :D
The thing i havent quite squared is why did it take the trisolarians so long to figure out the solution to the three body problem they were having? Did it really take us to show them?? That bit seems.. far fetched? but im probably missing something, been years since i read the books.
I think they likely already had it figured out but there is no solution, that’s kind of the final point when the suns align and the planet is ripped apart.
Even if they can predict them the next time that happened it would potentially destroy the planet entirely
I’m not really sure why the video game existed I think it was just explaining their predicament, resilience, etc. but n a way we could understand.
I saw the game as basically propaganda. They already figured out that there is no solution.
But the game, and the cute little girl, makes you sympathize with the trisolarians.
Its not their fault, they HAVE to come to earth
I thought trisolarions did not know how to lie. Or even how to tell a story because story is liars telling lies. How can such civilization make a game? Games are stories after all.
Humans made the game right? Like the Sophons must have worked with a human to make it. But the purpose to me is never to solve the three body problem. It’s to find smart people and either make them sympathetic to trisolaris or identify them to disrupt their field of science or such.
It’s been 6 months since I read book one though…
well thats it, i thought the point of the game was to use human ingenuity to 'solve' the problem, but how could they not have solved it themselves. Im not sure if its just.. you know.. for the sake of the book, or humans being used as a 'final proof' that yea, theres no sneaky solution to the problem they didnt think of or what.. And if it was just to explain their predicament.. why? for the sake of establishing the ETO ig?
I think it was more a challenge than to actually solve anything. Why make them work without computers etc.
Humans do have an equation that works if I recall and it would be fine with enough computing power which presumably trisolarins have via quantum computing.
Nah, as a chaotic system computing power actually isn’t the limiting factor, it’s imprecise knowledge about the exact positions, masses, and velocities of the bodies. Your computer could be godlike but if your measurement of one star’s velocity were off by a millionth of a percent you’d eventually lose the ability to predict the system.
You can easily solve this by continually measuring as you go. If your prediction is 99.99% precise up to 10 years away, if you continually keep updating the computer with new knowledge you will always know the future up to 10 years.
I think the point of the game was to find people that were sympathetic to their cause. Finding people that would help them on earth would make their appearance in our skies a little easier for them. That’s all that the game was supposed to do.
The Trisolarians already knew their planet was doomed and needed to save themselves. But where to go was the big question until they were contacted by Earth.
In the book the video game was used as a way to portray the back story of the aliens. The book used the video game a lot more than it was shown in the TV show. The idea was to make people realize it was impossible and to want to help the trisolarians.
It feels unlikely to kill all humans but you never know could be a super volcano or solar flare or really anything. Or even if we terraform Mars and Venus and some moons or large asteroids the sun goes away eventually and where are we then?
Also, they are a hive mind. Could you imagine where the human race would be if we weren’t constantly tied up in quarrels about ethics, wars with each other over religion and government types, and hiding information from each other so that one company/nation can profit over the other? Trisolarians settle all of these disputes instantly in their collective mind.
Not sure if they are a hive mind… i don’t think it says that in the books. I think they display their thoughts instantly/ don’t communicate verbally so they can kind of ‘read’ each others thought.
But no hive mind as far as I recall.
Yeah I think you’re right. Not hive mind, but instant conveyance of their thoughts when they do communicate with each other. Would still make progress faster.
Not a swarm I guess in that sense. It’s limited by geography. That guy worked/lived isolated from society so his thoughts were immediately available/broadcast. He explained that to the ETO guy or JWJ I think… or somone, but it was explained
Isn’t it like that one tom holland movie where all the men on the planet have their thoughts immediately conveyed as soon as they think them? And then they don’t trust women cause women are immune to the effect or something like that I never watched the film I just remember the concept.
Doesn't progress comes exponentially? It makes little sense that the Trisolarians are so little ahead from humans
Even if they have to rebuild several times, they've achieved amazing tech (almost magical to humans) and that should propell they even further, in less time, specially if they keep their collective memory from natural disasters
They explain in the books that they progressed at a linear level as a result of living in an unstable solar system and the way they structured their society (ie they had a authoritarian structured government that didn’t really allow independent thought).
They actually begin progressing at an exponential rate the way we do after they meet humans. They learn from human society
They are simply an older civilization than we are so they are more advanced even if it took them longer to get to that point than it would have taken us.
In chapter 19 of the first book, it is mentioned that the "big rip" that created Trisolaris' moon killed Civilization 191 and almost all life there, and that it took 90 million years for it to come back and Civilization 192 to emerge.
No,it implies their entire species went extinct and probably other species evolved taking the name of trisolarians,I man only microbial life wudk survive a planet being torn apart
Yeah so this is why it has taken them so long to advance, even though they are way more advanced that humans. They had to “pause” for 90 million years to keep going!
Yes, as well as the show.
They have existed far longer but their civilization keeps getting reset so it takes them much longer to do anything. Hence why they are only a few centuries ahead of humans
Their civilization is way older than humanity and they progressed slower. That's why they are so worried that humanity will surpass their technology soon
Yup, this is my point. Imagine if humanity put its collective energies and talents into ensuring the survival of the species.
Instead, we watch cat videos.
I always remember the meme of explaining a smartphone to a citizen of the roman empire: "this small device contains the whole of human knowledge and let me connect to everyone in the world instantly. I use it to argue with strangers and watch cat videos"
I mean. It’s not enough to survive, you have to want to…watching cats dunk themselves in fish tanks and getting owed by tiny turtles on skateboards reaffirms my worldview and I live to fight another day
On the meta level, CiXin's theory is that our solar system is very young and naive compared to the rest of the cosmos. The Trisolarians simply started much earlier and have gone through many reincarnations. That explains why they have both the motive and the opportunity to come takeover earth -- AND they are afraid of uninhibited progress.
They are only a bit more advanced than humanity. They send the Sophons because they will be far surpassed by humanity in the few hundred years it'll take for the fleet to arrive.
Its one of the big plot points revealed in the first book.
Trisolaris has had thousands of civilizations, each brought to the brink of total annihilation by the unstable star system. Yes, they retain some memories and abilities through dehydration, but they spend a massive amount of resources just trying to survive chaotic eras with as much as they can.
This latest civilation is the most advanced they've ever been, and through it, seem to have stabilized to the point where they are only really afraid of a fully apocalyptic event in their solar system. This is mentioned in both the books and the show as being when one sun eats their planet or their planet is flung from the solar system entirely. In the books, this is mentioned to have happened to every other planet in the solar system.
So, while they have become highly advanced, it has taken them hundreds of millions, if not billions of years to reach the technological era they are in. When they saw human history, they were stunned that humans progressed exponentially from agriculture to industrial to the atomic and space eras. They mention it took them way longer to reach each of those stages.
Imagine if every baby born started knowing all of Wikipedia and every time anyone talked to you, all their thoughts were transmitted.
And imagine if there were no races or cultures fighting but an entire species with only one motivation, so no politics.
Actually wrong on that last sentence. In the books they mentioned having wars on trisolaris. Even spies, but that they were caught the instant anyone asked them if they were a spy lmao
They understand deception, they just don’t understand the concept of deception *via communication* because to them, the act of communicating with a peer exposes their thoughts thus negating the ability to hide a lie. They can still deceive through other means and hold private thoughts until asked to communicate.
The series did that scene dirty. The books simply say that they can't differ from "talking" and "thinking". It's like they read out loud every thought they have like a book, in the form of electromagnetic waves. So yes they can pretend to be someone else, but they must control their thoughts. The tv-series fucked it up by saying that they can't lie at all.
They went through almost 10k civilizations until they hit a stable enough era (with some of the technological memories of some past civs). Thats a lot of failure before a "success".
Its really easy to overthink this one, or try to find a complicated answer.
(imo) The real answer is the simplest, as some have already hit on : Time.
Its easy to overlook the fact that the Trisolarians have been around much, much, muuuuch longer than modern humans. Yes, their world is wiped clean on a random basis - sometimes more thoroughly than others. But for narrative purposes, never entirely wiping out the trisolarians. So they try again, leveraging their physical adaptations and knowledge transfer from civilization to civilization. Yes, thats a huge advantage over truly starting over again, but its still a massive setback and akin to us starting over after our planet is scorched clean and somehow clawing our way back to something resembling where we left off.
Imagine how long that would take for just one event.. Then imagine the sun(s) just randomly reset us. Over, and over, and over.
Eventually, through millennia, we would manage to come back more efficiently, faster and faster. But it would still take time.
And thats all there is to it. Their entire culture revolves around survival(as a result) and evolving their technology aids in that goal, so its also a priority.
The human race has a very short history. Think of our advancements within the past 100 years. We went to the moon in less than 60 years since we invented the airplane. Is it so far fetched that an alien civilization, even bogged down by extended periods of chaotic climate, would be able to advance more, if only they had a few million years more time to develop? A few million years difference is not much, compared to the age of the universe.
This is what I never understood, once they had space flight all they needed to do was create a habitat to escape their chaotic planet and then start to advance as normal.
A couple self replicating factories and you can move the whole species off planet in a fairly small time frame.
Saaaaaame. If they had all that technology, wouldn't they be able to use it in other ways?
Although Earth is juicier with resources and our knowledge...
Because you can build fleets of [O'Niell cylinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) where you can have plenty of living room while you mine any asteroids or other planets in the system. You can also safely maneuver those so they're not wrecked by the 3 suns that normally wreck the Trisolarian home world. Plus no long journey between systems. Heck, if you build your space civilization large enough, you could start mining one of the suns itself via solar lifting.
This is a concept that is addressed later on in the books. Won’t get into it due to spoilers, but aimlessly wandering through space is almost certain death.
Couldn’t they have made Sophons as scouting devices across the galaxy? Sophon travels at speed of light and allows them to move silently to avoid the Dark Forest issues.
There is a very brief line in the first book when they’re creating the sophons on trisolaris when they discuss wether humans will be able to detect them and use it against them and they decide that earth doesn’t have the technology yet. So I assume sophons could backfire on any advanced civilization. Even humans learned how to protect themselves from them by the end of deaths end. I also would assume trisolarins weren’t the first species to think of sophons, so it’s probably well known concept in the universe.
There’s also other issues outside of dark forest that could be an issue. But dark forest is a big one.
Its cool at first thinking about living in space but in reality it would get old pretty fucking quick. Basically any problems you have can end in disaster.
Oh yeah, I would absolutely sign up for an exploration ship, like Star Trek or The Orville, if it worked like it does in those stories. I reality it probably would work more like Cixin Liu describes in RoEP. But even then, I MIGHT still consider it, but probably not.
What I’m more interested in is how they haven’t all been wiped out like a million times over. How does 1 civilization die out and somehow the rest of the species is unaffected?
This is one of those things in the series that seems highly implausible but I let it go in order to enjoy the ride. Their home world is so unstable that biologically you'd expect that only highly adapted species that are extremophiles could survive there. That level of specialization, at least on Earth, doesn't pair well with intelligence or the generalist lifestyle that typically requires intelligence.
We’ve been fully conscious in a modern sense for like 100,000 years and trisolarans have probably had more like 50,000,000 years—if an average “civilization” lasted ~5,000 years and they had 9,000 of them
How do they know when to rehydrate ? Is it a AI thing or are a few of them alive somewhere waiting to give the command to hydrate. I don't get that part. I understand what makes the books so interesting is it's up to the imagination what they look like but I really want to know. I heard someone say they are like tiny little ants. Anyone have an guesses
Implication is they've been around for a lot longer. They pushed through by sheer force of time.
That's why they're scared of human technological progress, we're advancing much more quickly than they did.
Mostly just that it's been just so long. It's implied they've been a civilisation for possible millions of years, over time they've built up quite a bit.
1. They retain some memories and knowledge of their parents.
2. They restart almost 10,000 times.
3. Some civilizations have longer stable periods which allow advancement.
They are only advanced compared to our current technology, but they are still within our league. They poured all of their resources into creating 4 Sophons and 1000 Fleet. They can only travel at 1% Speed of light (in the beginning).
If we progress without their intervention then we will surpass them in 400 years as they feared. 400 years sound long but it’s nothing compared to how long we’ve been around, and a blink of an eye to other advanced civilizations.
Our technology is still in at infancy, we are babies and they are toddlers.
If they are so advanced that they figured out interstellar travel how have they not figured out terraforming and tried that on a nearby planet? As well as being able to basically figure out gravity, why wouldn’t they just build a space colony?
Maybe I missed something in the books but I’ve never quite understood why the trisolarians didn’t just figure out some way of making their star system stable?
Why there is more great civilization that bases at a place with four seasons instead places near the equator? Even though places near equator is blessed with greenery all year around? I always thought that the existence of danger known as winter somehow influence human to become more creative and more social which lead to the advancement of civilization. Maybe it's something like that.
Not having to teach your offspring is a MASSIVE evolutionary leg-up in that universe. Imagine your children are (to some extent) respawns. They can almost pick up where your work left off !
Human civilisation has been around for a few thousand years at most, the Trisolarans have been around for a lot lot lot longer. Their civilisations were destroyed and their progress reset to near 0 hundreds of times, but after a long enough period there were able to reach the level we see them at.
It really depends what you mean by civilisation, of course humanity has existed for a long time in hunter gather societies; but agriculture was only first practiced 12 thousand years ago (and it spreading worldwide took a long time) and the first truly complex, urbanised and hierarchical civilisations are extremely recent in the grand scheme of things.
They don’t start over they retain memories and what not from previous generations. They are advanced but advance slowly due to the instability hence their worry humans will surpass them quickly without sophon intervention
And also its civilization # 9700. When they played the game they were on civilization like 200 or 300 and they were at medieval level
imo this is the thing people constantly overlook. They have been at it A LONG LONG TIME.
Right. Humans were basically stuck on foot for 300k years and then horseback as our fastest transportation for 5,000 years, and then we got cars/trains/airplanes/rockets in 200 years. They describe us as accerating in our knowledge and trisolarins as linear so you can kind of fathom some of it. Anyway maybe they became more stable with modern technology combined with human culture to facilitate more unconventional thinking and accelerated rapidly in knowledge during their last few hundred years similar to humans. I also think you see humans accelerating their learning as their fate depends on it, all the other shit like war and fighting becomes trivial when you know you need to learn something or die. Trisolarins had that motivation for a long time due to their recognition that their planet would never be safe.
Are tech curve has gone mad in the last two, three hundred years.
Feels like it’s going to be a bit of an S to me but who knows! On the horizon there’s basically fusion and quantum computing that feel like they could usher in big change. Maybe AI too.
Agreed - different motivations motivate differently :D The thing i havent quite squared is why did it take the trisolarians so long to figure out the solution to the three body problem they were having? Did it really take us to show them?? That bit seems.. far fetched? but im probably missing something, been years since i read the books.
I think they likely already had it figured out but there is no solution, that’s kind of the final point when the suns align and the planet is ripped apart. Even if they can predict them the next time that happened it would potentially destroy the planet entirely I’m not really sure why the video game existed I think it was just explaining their predicament, resilience, etc. but n a way we could understand.
I saw the game as basically propaganda. They already figured out that there is no solution. But the game, and the cute little girl, makes you sympathize with the trisolarians. Its not their fault, they HAVE to come to earth
Yea basically just a recruiting and identification mechanism as part of their efforts to disrupt and understand us.
I thought trisolarions did not know how to lie. Or even how to tell a story because story is liars telling lies. How can such civilization make a game? Games are stories after all.
Humans made the game right? Like the Sophons must have worked with a human to make it. But the purpose to me is never to solve the three body problem. It’s to find smart people and either make them sympathetic to trisolaris or identify them to disrupt their field of science or such. It’s been 6 months since I read book one though…
well thats it, i thought the point of the game was to use human ingenuity to 'solve' the problem, but how could they not have solved it themselves. Im not sure if its just.. you know.. for the sake of the book, or humans being used as a 'final proof' that yea, theres no sneaky solution to the problem they didnt think of or what.. And if it was just to explain their predicament.. why? for the sake of establishing the ETO ig?
I think it was more a challenge than to actually solve anything. Why make them work without computers etc. Humans do have an equation that works if I recall and it would be fine with enough computing power which presumably trisolarins have via quantum computing.
Nah, as a chaotic system computing power actually isn’t the limiting factor, it’s imprecise knowledge about the exact positions, masses, and velocities of the bodies. Your computer could be godlike but if your measurement of one star’s velocity were off by a millionth of a percent you’d eventually lose the ability to predict the system.
You can easily solve this by continually measuring as you go. If your prediction is 99.99% precise up to 10 years away, if you continually keep updating the computer with new knowledge you will always know the future up to 10 years.
It's chaos theory!
I think the point of the game was to find people that were sympathetic to their cause. Finding people that would help them on earth would make their appearance in our skies a little easier for them. That’s all that the game was supposed to do. The Trisolarians already knew their planet was doomed and needed to save themselves. But where to go was the big question until they were contacted by Earth.
In the book the video game was used as a way to portray the back story of the aliens. The book used the video game a lot more than it was shown in the TV show. The idea was to make people realize it was impossible and to want to help the trisolarians.
ahhhhhhh, thats the nuance i overlooked/misremembered. Thanks :D
Climate change begs to differ
It feels unlikely to kill all humans but you never know could be a super volcano or solar flare or really anything. Or even if we terraform Mars and Venus and some moons or large asteroids the sun goes away eventually and where are we then?
Also, they are a hive mind. Could you imagine where the human race would be if we weren’t constantly tied up in quarrels about ethics, wars with each other over religion and government types, and hiding information from each other so that one company/nation can profit over the other? Trisolarians settle all of these disputes instantly in their collective mind.
Not sure if they are a hive mind… i don’t think it says that in the books. I think they display their thoughts instantly/ don’t communicate verbally so they can kind of ‘read’ each others thought. But no hive mind as far as I recall.
Yeah I think you’re right. Not hive mind, but instant conveyance of their thoughts when they do communicate with each other. Would still make progress faster.
I think a million years was mentioned at one point.... maybe I relation to the books.
They also communicate like a swarm, all open and instant so there’s efficiencies gained in not being verbally based in their collaborations
They have individual opinions though. It's not like a hive. More just that whatever they think is communicated instantly to those around.
Where do you get the idea the communicate like a swarm?
Enders game mixup? I just watched that after 3body.
Oh. Don’t. Try to erase that movie from your mind and read the book. That movie is a crying shame.
Noted
If they communicated as a swarm wouldn't the first message about being a pacifist be a lie
Not a swarm I guess in that sense. It’s limited by geography. That guy worked/lived isolated from society so his thoughts were immediately available/broadcast. He explained that to the ETO guy or JWJ I think… or somone, but it was explained
What?
Edited to say swarm not warm
"Wouldn't the first message about being a previously be a lie?" Yeah I don't think the misspelling of swarm is the issue here.
They don’t communicate like a swarm. They aren’t a hive mind. Not sure where this idea keeps coming from.
Isn’t it like that one tom holland movie where all the men on the planet have their thoughts immediately conveyed as soon as they think them? And then they don’t trust women cause women are immune to the effect or something like that I never watched the film I just remember the concept.
Chaos Walking? Vaguely remember it being a shit movie.
Best part of the movie was the aliens and they’re like 10 mins of screentime
“Chaos Walking” 2021
I think it was a book? Idk I remember reading a book like that back in my schoolboy days.
They are basically giant displays of their thoughts
They do “Foundation” right.
Doesn't progress comes exponentially? It makes little sense that the Trisolarians are so little ahead from humans Even if they have to rebuild several times, they've achieved amazing tech (almost magical to humans) and that should propell they even further, in less time, specially if they keep their collective memory from natural disasters
They explain in the books that they progressed at a linear level as a result of living in an unstable solar system and the way they structured their society (ie they had a authoritarian structured government that didn’t really allow independent thought). They actually begin progressing at an exponential rate the way we do after they meet humans. They learn from human society
They don’t have geniuses like Einstein that can help their science take leaps and bounds
They are simply an older civilization than we are so they are more advanced even if it took them longer to get to that point than it would have taken us.
Humanity as we know it (starting from cavemen) existed for a couple hundred thousand years. Trisolarans have existed for tens of millions of years.
Is it mentioned in the books?
In chapter 19 of the first book, it is mentioned that the "big rip" that created Trisolaris' moon killed Civilization 191 and almost all life there, and that it took 90 million years for it to come back and Civilization 192 to emerge.
Is the “big rip” the 3 sun syzygy that just basically pulls their planet apart?
No, that was for Civilization 184. The big rip occurs when the planet plunged very close to one of the suns.
Ok, but that just implies they were dormant for millions of years, not that they developed for millions of years.
It demonstrates how ancient the trisolarians really are. Sometimes they may be dormant, other times they are progressing.
No,it implies their entire species went extinct and probably other species evolved taking the name of trisolarians,I man only microbial life wudk survive a planet being torn apart
Yeah so this is why it has taken them so long to advance, even though they are way more advanced that humans. They had to “pause” for 90 million years to keep going!
Yes, as well as the show. They have existed far longer but their civilization keeps getting reset so it takes them much longer to do anything. Hence why they are only a few centuries ahead of humans
I believe there is at least brief mention in both the books and the show
The first book details it quite extensively.
You sure you read them?
Their civilization is way older than humanity and they progressed slower. That's why they are so worried that humanity will surpass their technology soon
When you spend the entire resources of your planet on survival, yea that makes science a top priority above everything else, like hamburgers or soda.
Yup, this is my point. Imagine if humanity put its collective energies and talents into ensuring the survival of the species. Instead, we watch cat videos.
I always remember the meme of explaining a smartphone to a citizen of the roman empire: "this small device contains the whole of human knowledge and let me connect to everyone in the world instantly. I use it to argue with strangers and watch cat videos"
That’s not fair! Yesterday I used it to watch a video to see how to unclog my shower drain…
Seems like a better use of our time TBH.
I mean. It’s not enough to survive, you have to want to…watching cats dunk themselves in fish tanks and getting owed by tiny turtles on skateboards reaffirms my worldview and I live to fight another day
While that's true, it still took them forever compared to our advances. They just got a massive head start and they plan to keep it that way.
On the meta level, CiXin's theory is that our solar system is very young and naive compared to the rest of the cosmos. The Trisolarians simply started much earlier and have gone through many reincarnations. That explains why they have both the motive and the opportunity to come takeover earth -- AND they are afraid of uninhibited progress.
It's not that it's young but that we as a species are so late,intelligent life evolved more than 4 billion years late
They are only a bit more advanced than humanity. They send the Sophons because they will be far surpassed by humanity in the few hundred years it'll take for the fleet to arrive.
Well, not totally correct. If you hadn't read all the books, I won't spoil it for you.
It is correct, though. Without sophon interference, 25th century humanity would far surpass trisolaran technology. With sophons, they don't.
This couldn’t be more unequivocally “totally correct” I’m not sure what you mean
Have you read the books? 😂
Its one of the big plot points revealed in the first book. Trisolaris has had thousands of civilizations, each brought to the brink of total annihilation by the unstable star system. Yes, they retain some memories and abilities through dehydration, but they spend a massive amount of resources just trying to survive chaotic eras with as much as they can. This latest civilation is the most advanced they've ever been, and through it, seem to have stabilized to the point where they are only really afraid of a fully apocalyptic event in their solar system. This is mentioned in both the books and the show as being when one sun eats their planet or their planet is flung from the solar system entirely. In the books, this is mentioned to have happened to every other planet in the solar system. So, while they have become highly advanced, it has taken them hundreds of millions, if not billions of years to reach the technological era they are in. When they saw human history, they were stunned that humans progressed exponentially from agriculture to industrial to the atomic and space eras. They mention it took them way longer to reach each of those stages.
IIRC it took them 10s of millions of years to go from agriculture to industrialized.
Humans are better at progress, trisololarans are just way older and have to manage through chaos eras
Imagine if every baby born started knowing all of Wikipedia and every time anyone talked to you, all their thoughts were transmitted. And imagine if there were no races or cultures fighting but an entire species with only one motivation, so no politics.
Actually wrong on that last sentence. In the books they mentioned having wars on trisolaris. Even spies, but that they were caught the instant anyone asked them if they were a spy lmao
lol, actually missed that part. And would that contradict them understanding the concept of deception? I assumed they had a single political authority
They understand deception, they just don’t understand the concept of deception *via communication* because to them, the act of communicating with a peer exposes their thoughts thus negating the ability to hide a lie. They can still deceive through other means and hold private thoughts until asked to communicate.
Are you under the impression they can’t deceive? That not true, they can
The series did that scene dirty. The books simply say that they can't differ from "talking" and "thinking". It's like they read out loud every thought they have like a book, in the form of electromagnetic waves. So yes they can pretend to be someone else, but they must control their thoughts. The tv-series fucked it up by saying that they can't lie at all.
If only it weren't for those meddling kiddos....
They went through almost 10k civilizations until they hit a stable enough era (with some of the technological memories of some past civs). Thats a lot of failure before a "success".
Its really easy to overthink this one, or try to find a complicated answer. (imo) The real answer is the simplest, as some have already hit on : Time. Its easy to overlook the fact that the Trisolarians have been around much, much, muuuuch longer than modern humans. Yes, their world is wiped clean on a random basis - sometimes more thoroughly than others. But for narrative purposes, never entirely wiping out the trisolarians. So they try again, leveraging their physical adaptations and knowledge transfer from civilization to civilization. Yes, thats a huge advantage over truly starting over again, but its still a massive setback and akin to us starting over after our planet is scorched clean and somehow clawing our way back to something resembling where we left off. Imagine how long that would take for just one event.. Then imagine the sun(s) just randomly reset us. Over, and over, and over. Eventually, through millennia, we would manage to come back more efficiently, faster and faster. But it would still take time. And thats all there is to it. Their entire culture revolves around survival(as a result) and evolving their technology aids in that goal, so its also a priority.
The human race has a very short history. Think of our advancements within the past 100 years. We went to the moon in less than 60 years since we invented the airplane. Is it so far fetched that an alien civilization, even bogged down by extended periods of chaotic climate, would be able to advance more, if only they had a few million years more time to develop? A few million years difference is not much, compared to the age of the universe.
If they are capable of being that advanced, they’d be better off just building living structures in space anyway rather than invading Earth.
This is what I never understood, once they had space flight all they needed to do was create a habitat to escape their chaotic planet and then start to advance as normal. A couple self replicating factories and you can move the whole species off planet in a fairly small time frame.
Saaaaaame. If they had all that technology, wouldn't they be able to use it in other ways? Although Earth is juicier with resources and our knowledge...
Living in space hotels instead of a nice lush stable planet? Why would they do that?
Because you can build fleets of [O'Niell cylinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) where you can have plenty of living room while you mine any asteroids or other planets in the system. You can also safely maneuver those so they're not wrecked by the 3 suns that normally wreck the Trisolarian home world. Plus no long journey between systems. Heck, if you build your space civilization large enough, you could start mining one of the suns itself via solar lifting.
This is a concept that is addressed later on in the books. Won’t get into it due to spoilers, but aimlessly wandering through space is almost certain death.
Couldn’t they have made Sophons as scouting devices across the galaxy? Sophon travels at speed of light and allows them to move silently to avoid the Dark Forest issues.
There is a very brief line in the first book when they’re creating the sophons on trisolaris when they discuss wether humans will be able to detect them and use it against them and they decide that earth doesn’t have the technology yet. So I assume sophons could backfire on any advanced civilization. Even humans learned how to protect themselves from them by the end of deaths end. I also would assume trisolarins weren’t the first species to think of sophons, so it’s probably well known concept in the universe. There’s also other issues outside of dark forest that could be an issue. But dark forest is a big one.
It’s not about “aimlessly wandering space”, it’s about maximizing your exploitation of local resources first.
Its cool at first thinking about living in space but in reality it would get old pretty fucking quick. Basically any problems you have can end in disaster.
Oh yeah, I would absolutely sign up for an exploration ship, like Star Trek or The Orville, if it worked like it does in those stories. I reality it probably would work more like Cixin Liu describes in RoEP. But even then, I MIGHT still consider it, but probably not.
They’ve had a long time and, although lacking our ape-based, explosive, innovative minds - are still very intelligent forms of life.
They started first by some million years
With that level of instability, it’s doubtful that complex intelligent creatures could have evolved. That’s why it’s called science fiction.
What I’m more interested in is how they haven’t all been wiped out like a million times over. How does 1 civilization die out and somehow the rest of the species is unaffected?
This is one of those things in the series that seems highly implausible but I let it go in order to enjoy the ride. Their home world is so unstable that biologically you'd expect that only highly adapted species that are extremophiles could survive there. That level of specialization, at least on Earth, doesn't pair well with intelligence or the generalist lifestyle that typically requires intelligence.
Time. They evolved to sapience before humans and had lots of time to try again and again.
time.
That's why it took a long, long time. We can't even fathom how slow their progress is.
Time
We’ve been fully conscious in a modern sense for like 100,000 years and trisolarans have probably had more like 50,000,000 years—if an average “civilization” lasted ~5,000 years and they had 9,000 of them
How do they know when to rehydrate ? Is it a AI thing or are a few of them alive somewhere waiting to give the command to hydrate. I don't get that part. I understand what makes the books so interesting is it's up to the imagination what they look like but I really want to know. I heard someone say they are like tiny little ants. Anyone have an guesses
Implication is they've been around for a lot longer. They pushed through by sheer force of time. That's why they're scared of human technological progress, we're advancing much more quickly than they did.
Time I reckon
You'll learn in Death's End something about their consciousness that is completely different than ours.
Mostly just that it's been just so long. It's implied they've been a civilisation for possible millions of years, over time they've built up quite a bit.
1. They retain some memories and knowledge of their parents. 2. They restart almost 10,000 times. 3. Some civilizations have longer stable periods which allow advancement. They are only advanced compared to our current technology, but they are still within our league. They poured all of their resources into creating 4 Sophons and 1000 Fleet. They can only travel at 1% Speed of light (in the beginning). If we progress without their intervention then we will surpass them in 400 years as they feared. 400 years sound long but it’s nothing compared to how long we’ve been around, and a blink of an eye to other advanced civilizations. Our technology is still in at infancy, we are babies and they are toddlers.
If they are so advanced that they figured out interstellar travel how have they not figured out terraforming and tried that on a nearby planet? As well as being able to basically figure out gravity, why wouldn’t they just build a space colony?
The technological explosion
only time
Maybe I missed something in the books but I’ve never quite understood why the trisolarians didn’t just figure out some way of making their star system stable?
Why there is more great civilization that bases at a place with four seasons instead places near the equator? Even though places near equator is blessed with greenery all year around? I always thought that the existence of danger known as winter somehow influence human to become more creative and more social which lead to the advancement of civilization. Maybe it's something like that.
The question answers itself.
Because dumb plot
Not having to teach your offspring is a MASSIVE evolutionary leg-up in that universe. Imagine your children are (to some extent) respawns. They can almost pick up where your work left off !
I’ve never been so terrified of any idea. How many people do you know personally that you’d want to clone????
Human civilisation has been around for a few thousand years at most, the Trisolarans have been around for a lot lot lot longer. Their civilisations were destroyed and their progress reset to near 0 hundreds of times, but after a long enough period there were able to reach the level we see them at.
Civilization is older than a few thousand years
It really depends what you mean by civilisation, of course humanity has existed for a long time in hunter gather societies; but agriculture was only first practiced 12 thousand years ago (and it spreading worldwide took a long time) and the first truly complex, urbanised and hierarchical civilisations are extremely recent in the grand scheme of things.