Reflections on "The 3-Body Problem"

 Marcus Alden Meredith

May 1, 2024

Reflections on “The 3-Body Problem”

I rarely start essays or opinions pieces by writing them longhand, but when I need to reflect a bit more on a topic I take the time to put my thoughts and impressions on paper. While recovering from some ink work on my back, I thought, “Let’s see what’s on Netflix I haven’t seen yet.” A few clicks later I settle on The 3-Body Problem. The book I’m only partly familiar with but the physics it references I am totally familiar with having studied astronomy since I was 5 years old and physics in University. “Let’s see how they tackle the ideas they reference,” is my first thought… and then I begin my journey… like Alice down the rabbit hole.

As a way of setting up the effects of the story on me, I feel it’s necessary to explain the physics problem in the title. To get there, let me try to put things as straight forward as possible can. A 2-body problem with orbits and gravity would be like the Earth and the Moon. The gravity and so the orbits of such a system can be calculated with considerable accuracy using Newton’s ideas of gravity and classic physics. Even making the system be 2 stars in a binary star system is fairly straightforward.  But add a third body (another star or a super-Jupiter like planet) and the system goes “Chaotic,” meaning  it becomes so complicated that the ability to predict orbits becomes almost impossible and any planet in this system is not going to have a stable orbit like we have with the Earth and the Sun. Change anything about this “chaotic” system even a little bit and the effects can be dramatic (stars and planets collide, a star or planet could be flung away in to galactic space… yes, when worlds collide).

In the series, this 3-Body Problem is part of the impetus for an alien race to journey to Earth (since theirs is unstable). But there’s more! The first human to contact the alien race is working in communist China in the 1960’s/70’s. She’s a scientist whose been traumatized by Mao’s Cultural Revolution causing the death of her scientist father and her “re-education” at the hands of The Red Guard. It’s brutal… and it influences her decisions when it comes to the alien contact; aliens who have a “human sympathizer” telling her not to answer. But she doesn’t have much hope left in humanity and it’s future, so tells the alien race to come and essentially save humanity from itself. The consequences of this one set of actions are dire and help to drive the rest of the story. 

So, first impression: singular actions driven by pained emotions can have great import beyond what might even been envisioned - a butterfly flaps it’s wings in the Congo and it causes hurricanes in New York. Life, human actions, and their consequences contribute to a “chaotic” system (“chaotic” meaning a hyper-complex system where small changes in initial conditions can produce drastic effects - a man burns himself in Tunis in protest of his corrupt government and his actions usher in an ‘Arab Spring’ which erupts in the Arab world as a result).  Second impression: should we really be trying to contact an alien intelligence? Is it naive to think that an advanced civilization would just naturally be benign? There seems to be two lanes of thought. Let me label them the Saganists and the Hawkingists.

Let’s start with the Saganists who I named thus after Carl Sagan who was the author of the book Contact  all about alien contact and it’s consequences (a great adaptation of  the book is as a film of the same title with Jody Foster and Matthew Mcconnagh). The Saganists see contact as nothing to fear since the aliens would be so far advanced in comparison to us that we would have nothing to fear. They would contact us slowly, methodically acting more as friends and teachers sending us lessons and allowing us to mature as a species as they watch, listen, and sometimes send advice. The second group is the Hawkingists named after observations by Steven Hawkings on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence usually termed SETI. The Hawkingists warm us that, at least on Earth, the more intelligent species tend to be predators and that fact may not work in favor of the “primitives” who make contact. Less advanced “civilizations” have almost always been subjugated or destroyed when they come into contact with the more advanced civilization (at least in human history).  Sending a big “HELLO!” out into The Expanse could be our undoing. The author of The 3-Body Problem was obviously in the later camp in his thinking.

The third impression came to me about half way through the series when the aliens use quantum entanglement to communicate with members of a 5th column of humans. They want to “know us” better and so the leader has chosen to read myths and fairy tales to them… and boy do they have lots of questions. As the questions progress, they discover a mental capacity we possess that disturbs them greatly: our capacity for deceit, duplicity, and lying. The aliens then make an ominous confession to the 5th column leader - “We are afraid of you.” I know how they feel… I am too. It comes out later through an AI they have sent to Earth to screw with us and destroy our science that their planet is not in a stable orbit and regularly gets destroyed so that they must start over. Though they are more advanced, it has taken them millions of years of up and down progress to achieve the technical level they now possess. But we are on a planet in a stable system and are advancing so quickly that they fear we will outpace then outperform them before they can get here and conquer us. They show us our leaps in progress after the last 100 thousand years: 90 thousand then we get agriculture, 8000 years and we get industrial revolutions, 200 years space flight, 20 years advanced computing… we’re advancing by leaps and bounds in a way that their planet never would allow them to. So, they fear us and our progress… and so do I. Our technical advancements have been getting close to exponentiating and I’m not sure that we are mentally, emotionally, morally, or philosophically ready for the advancements in our tech at such a rapid rate. We are such a mentally fragile species, so easily influenced to believe in almost anything.  The view advanced by the chinese scientists actions in the story are understandable but guided by emotions leading to dire consequences. It makes me wonder: are we really ready to yet to be part of a galactic community when the greatest threat to ourselves is ourselves?

While writing this essay in my favorite place in downtown, I thought about the comic strip Pogo and his famous saying: “We have met the enemy… and they is us.” But while deep in contemplation, my waitress and I started a conversation about how to see the future. I mentioned that religious prophets, all of them, are bogus. If you want to know and read “real” prophets, read science fiction. H.G. Wells is a case in point. In 1914, the year WW I began, he is the first writer to mention atomic weaponry in his book The World Set Free, a full 31 years before the Trinity Test in New Mexico. Wells died in 1945 but shortly before he did, he was asked by a reporter to describe what his epitaph would be if he had one. His reply (paraphrased), “You fools, I told you so.” I think The 3-Body Problem represents another in a long line of prophets of science… and we need to listen.