3 Body Problem has an interesting take on this. Faster than light travel is not possible but communication is, meaning we’re anxiously preparing for an alien war that won’t happen for 400 years but they can see everything we do in real time thanks to quantum entanglement.
Good series, I always recommend the books but haven’t seen the show yet
I loved the Tencent version of the show
I managed to finish the first book, but it was so terrible that I wasn’t willing to read any more or watch the show.
The whole book sets up a big mystery, then solves that mystery with the biggest deux ex machina bullshit ever committed to paper.
macguffins are always just to drive the plot forward, their satisfaction as a solution is usually secondary.
In simpler terms, they paint the cover of the comic book first and sometimes overbid for the purpose of sensationalism, so sometimes Superman has to pretend to punch Lois Lane
It’s not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin isn’t important to the story, it’s just there to serve as motivation for the characters. In the Three Body Problem, the mystery of what happened to science is central to the plot of the entire book.
This isn’t “pretending to punch Lois Lane”. This is “why the hell did Superman just kill Lois Lane!?” The whole plot of the story is that science stops working. Scientists are killing themselves because of it. One of the characters is seeing a countdown when he closes his eyes. Aside from the Three-Body-Problem game parts, the whole rest of the book is structured as a mystery that they’re trying to solve. This mystery is the primary motivation for the characters in the book, and it’s presented as a mystery for the reader to speculate about.
Basically, the book is structured as if it were a murder on a train, and the whole structure of the story suggests that someone on the train is the murderer. But, it turns out that the murderer is Zeus, who descended from the heavens, killed the murder victim for his own reasons, and left. Ta-da, mystery solved! (And there’s the additional bullshit that scientists are committing suicide because their experiments are failing. That’s just so ridiculous. Actual scientists would be so excited by unexpected results. The way to upset a scientist wouldn’t be to have something appear to break the laws of physics. What would upset real scientists would be a replication crisis: either they can’t match someone else’s work, or people call into question their work because nobody can match the results they’re getting.)
And those are just the problems with the “A” plot. The “B” plot is the ultra-stupid simulation of life on a planet in a 3-body system. You know what life would be like in that kind of system: nonexistent. But no, you’re supposed to believe in people being flattened and rehydrated. I mean, come ON. And you’re also supposed to believe that people are playing this “game” and loving it. Has the author ever actually played a game? Has the author ever met any people?
The writing is bad, the characters are bad, the science is bad. It’s just a bad book. It’s a book that dumb people read and they think the author is smart, and if the author is smart the book must be good, it just went above their heads. But, the author isn’t smart, the book isn’t smart, the book isn’t good.
I haven’t read the books, but I did watch the show… I enjoyed the first half, but the second half had so much implausible bullshit that I couldn’t really recommend it. I mean, the first half also had crazy impossible tech - but I feel that’s ok because its part of the setup premise. The stuff I didn’t like in the second half was more implausible decision making and strategising (and also implausible uses for impossible tech).
In any case, I really feel like they wasted a strong setup. I was disappointed at the end, and I’m not intending to watch the next session.
You would hate the books. The author just pulls tech out of his ass constantly.
Good show, fantastic books. Recommend to anyone reading this comment and are remotely interested in sci-fi. A lot of facinatong ideas explored throughout the series.
FTL coms are a concession to the story, it would have been terrible without it
IRL quantum entanglement can’t ever provide causality breaking info. In very simple terms, you need correlation to know when the data stream began as just observing the resulting spins still seem just as random before and after the event.
In even more simple terms: Whatever message they can send even if pre-agreed on seems like random heat results until you know the exact moment the transmission began, as confirmed by a light lagged message.
In less simple terms, the misunderstanding comes from treating the metaphor of ‘flipping the spin north switch’ as a literal thing instead of a less-than ideal ‘lies to children’ of what is actually happening to particles that experience spin transition, and the meaning of ‘entangled’ is both less and more strange than people understand.
But again, 3 body problem would have been a terrible story without it,t hat’s why it’s science fiction
Which version of the series is better to watch? The American version or the Chinese version?
Aren’t they the same but just dubbed in english? I picked the english one as I didn’t want to read subtitles
Two different shows
From what I’ve heard the Chinese version is rather literal to the books to a fault.
Having read the books I enjoyed the Netflix series, but understand they made some changes to both adapt it to a series (fine) and made a lot of characters westen (a bit unnecessary maybe).
I am excited for season 2
Well the Chinese version on Prime doesn’t have any English subtitles so I guess it depends on if you can speak Mandarin
It does have English subtitles though…?
Once upon a time that was pretty much the novel I was going to write. Had a bunch of notes and shit. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Now I just hope that happens to Elon and his sperm ark. Wakes from cryo or some shit to find we survived his global winter idea and set his car on a pike in front of Fort Neveragain.
I’d hope he he’s woken by an alien species far in the future, who are about to dissect him, for science…
With some variations, used already a few times in games and series.
Back to the future that is less distant than the future you wanted to go. A Hollywood classic.
it’d still be cool as fuck, i wouldn’t even be mad
Yeah, what’s the new civilization’s tech like? Bound to be more advancements than just travel speed. Do they have sufficiently fast FTL communication with Earth to keep up with the tech advancements?
Oops we forgot something. Sends him back.
Also can someone check if I turned off the stove? Thx
Instant celebrity
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Where does it say the first ship is traveling near the speed of light?
Or worse, you meet the super intelligent giant spider your human ancestor left behind, and you accidentally start a war with them because no one realizes the computer on the ancient satellite is made to behave like the project founder is trying to make first contact.
Tap for spoiler
The project founder accidentally died, the computer AI fails to keep them alive and the spiders start to think the satellite is a god. Then they enslave the native ants.
The big problem is no one remembered to tell the humans on Earth about the experiment. Or the humans on the generation ship that knew died centuries ago.
Paul likes this and attempts to kill you whilst flirting heavily
The ant powered consciousness was pretty cool 😁
Or in a similar vein, the ship’s cat has evolved into a suave humanoid with impeccable taste in fashion.
I thought you were talking about the Adam Sander movie Spaceman
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FTL isn’t possible, ERBs would pastafy any matter passing through them and there is no way to control the other end, and take Kardashev scale 3 civ at least (and that’s even pretending the Kardashev scale isn’t the purest daydream fantasy)
Is HFY a community over here yet?
Hyper force yesterday?
Humanity Fuck Yeah! It is a science fiction writing community.
Hot Female Yetis.
Thats better tbh
.world has one
I love how Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga opens up with this. But also funny how the inventors of the tech were such douchebags that they casually used it to just be there when the first mission to Mars landed. But hey, at least they didn’t have to do the return trip.
You make it to earth and you forgot the historical reason why you avoid earth. It is a prison planet
