How The Three Body Problem Explores Out Of This World Topics

    Published in 2006, The Three Body Problem is a science fiction book originally written by Liu Cixin in Chinese and translated to English by Ken Liu. One thing I found interesting about this book is that the whole plot is almost fully explained on the back of the cover, which suggests to me that the author did not write the book for the story, but maybe for provoking thoughts or new ideas.

    The plot revolves around an advanced alien species called the Trisolarans, living on Trisolaris, a planet that is living in a Three-body Problem, which is a physics problem,

and these Trisolarians are looking for a new inhabitable planet. Their planet is extremely dangerous, because their planet has 3 suns, and they suffer from extreme heat, unpredictable weather, and eventually will be swallowed up by the sun, so they need to escape. When a scientist named Ye Wenjie on earth manages to broadcast radio waves across the universe using the sun, the Trisolarans receive it, and begin migrating to earth. Ye Winjie later starts organization, Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), that consists of people who are angry at society and think that the Trisolarans should take over the earth. They buy a giant ship, Judgement Day, which serves as a sort of mobile colony and a listening post for members of the ETO. This group eventually splits up into 3 factions, the Adventists, who want to humanity destroyed by the Trisolarans, the Redemptionists, who want to help the Trisolarans to find a solution to their three suns, and the Survivors, who want to help the Trisolarans so that their own descendants can survive. While this may seem like the beginning of the plot, the main plot being when the Trisolarans arrive, however, this is pretty much the entire basics of the story, the Trisolarans won't arrive for a few hundred years, and we as a reader don't even know very much about them yet. 

    The main character of the story, Wang, is a nanotechnology professor who works on developing nanotechnology. Wang is asked to work with Shi Qiang, a detective, to investigate the deaths of many scientists, including Ye Wenjie's daughter. A few days after this Wang starts experiencing "hallucinations" in the form of a countdown. During this period, Wang also finds out about a game called "Three Body". The game is a virtual reality game made by the ETO to recruit new members, and this game can also simulate real life senses like feeling pain or heat. This game portrays how the Trisolarans had to go extinct many times in order to progress far enough to survive the extreme weather of their planet, and the game Trisolaran history to represent it as human history. After completing this game, you get invited to join the ETO, and Wang joins, uncovering the deaths of the scientists. 

    After Wang uncovers the ETO, the government invades the ETO and their cargo ship that contains all the data sent from the Trisolarans. Using Wangs nanotechnology wire to cut through the ship, since even though some technology may be cut, it can be easily reassembled because the wire is so thin that it cuts cleanly without breaking anything. Now comes the hard part to explain. From the invasion they find out that the Trisolarans have picotechnology that allows them to create 11-dimensional supercomputers called sophons that have volume of a proton in 3 dimensions. The Trisolarans sent two of the sophons to Earth, and they have power to cause hallucinations, spy on anything that happens on Earth, transmit the information gathered back to Trisolaris using quantum entanglement, and also mess with Earth's particle accelerators. The Trisolarans wanted to mess with the particle accelerators because they thought that since it would take hundreds of years for Trisolarans to arrive at Earth, humanity would develop technology advanced enough defend the Trisolarans and figured that making the accelerators give random results will stop humanity from making further scientific achievements. At the end Shi the detective and Wang go to Bejing to prepare against the Trisolarans.

    While this story does have an interesting plot, and it does continue the story into 2 more books, I do not think that it was primarily meant to entertain. My theory is that the author, Liu Cixin wrote this book to provoke thoughts, and to make the reader really think about situations like this. The events in the book could be fitted in a fraction of the book, but the author included details that are not really necessary to the plot, but really make you think, like how Trisolarans used people communicating between each other to create a rudimentary computer to complete complex math problems, and how not allowing particle accelerators, a key steppingstone in science, to give proper results, could stop a civilization from progressing. I also thought about how when nanotechnology sliced through something, it would not damage it because the nanotechnology could just slice through without moving anything, how this could be useful, how you could fit a giant object into the size of a proton by using picotechnology and different dimensions, and also what this could be used for. For days after reading the book, my mind was full of ideas and thoughts about Trisolaris, the ETO, nanotechnology, picotechnology and more, and even while I wrote this blog, some new ideas popped into my head. I love the fact that the author included so many scientific hypothesizes and theories like picotechnology that I would never have learned about or cared to learn about. I feel like this is an amazing book to read for a new perspective on humanity, Earth, and the universe. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a book for fun, to learn, or to gather new ideas.

-Jason