Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3)

by Liu Cixin

Other than the captain, you’re the only officer with the system authorization to prevent or terminate an attack. SCHNEIDER: Correct. JUDGE: And you didn’t. SCHNEIDER: I did not. JUDGE: What went through your mind at that time? SCHNEIDER: At that moment—not the moment of the attack, but the moment when I realized that Bronze Age would never return home, when the ship would be my entire world—I changed. There was no process; I was simply transformed from head to toe. It was like the legendary mental seal. JUDGE: Do you really think that’s a possibility? That your ship was equipped with mental seals? SCHNEIDER: Of course not. I was talking metaphorically. Space itself is a kind of mental seal.… In that moment, I gave up my individual self. My existence would be meaningful only if the collective survived.… I can’t explain it better than that. I don’t expect you to understand, Your Honor. Even if you boarded Bronze Age and sailed twenty thousand AU from the Solar System, or even farther, you still wouldn’t understand. JUDGE: Why? SCHNEIDER: Because you’d know that you could come back! Your soul would have remained on Earth. Only if the space behind the ship turned into a bottomless abyss—only if the Sun, the Earth, and everything else were swallowed by emptiness—would you have a chance of understanding the transformation that I went through.

That’s right. Five minutes into the all-hands meeting, the fundamental values of this totalitarian society had received the support of the vast majority of the crew. So, let me tell you, when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.

don’t have much to say except a warning. Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, please reconsider. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine. * * * In the end, Captain Neil Scott and six other senior officers were convicted of murder and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. Of the remaining 1,768 members of the crew, only 138 were declared innocent. The rest received sentences ranging from twenty to three hundred years.

deterrence game theory.

several pg explanation of deterrence

worlds rested in his hands.

end deterrence explanations

“Because of the speed of light. The known universe is about sixteen billion light-years across, and it’s still expanding. But the speed of light is only three hundred thousand kilometers per second, a snail’s pace. This means that light can never go from one end of the universe to the other. Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, it follows that no information and motive force can go from one end of the universe to the other. If the universe were a person, his neural signals couldn’t cover his entire body; his brain would not know of the existence of his limbs, and his limbs would not know of the existence of the brain. Isn’t that paraplegia? The image in my mind is even worse: The universe is but a corpse puffing up.” “Interesting, Dr. Guan, very interesting!” “Other than the speed of light, three hundred thousand kilometers per second, there’s another three-based symptom.” “What do you mean?” “The three dimensions. In string theory, excepting time, the universe has ten dimensions. But only three are accessible at the macroscopic scale, and those three form our world. All the others are folded up in the quantum realm.”

“I think string theory provides an explanation.” “Some think that it is only when two strings encounter each other and some qualities are canceled out that the dimensions are unfolded into the macroscopic, and dimensions above three will never have such chances for encountering each other.… I don’t think much of this explanation. It is not mathematically beautiful. Like I said, this is the universe’s three and three hundred thousand syndrome.”

No one knew where the other six droplets had gone. Trisolaris claimed that the six droplets had left the Solar System to rejoin the Trisolaran Fleet, but no one on Earth believed this. Trisolarans were no longer creatures of transparent thought. During the past two centuries, they had learned a great deal about strategic thinking—lies, ruses, and tricks. This was perhaps the greatest benefit they gained from studying human culture.

Note that strategic thinking involves deception

In contrast to this hellish but magnificent sight, the turbid water brewed a microscopic tale. Here, organic molecules were born from lightning flashes and cosmic rays, and they collided, fused, broke apart again—a long-lasting game played with building blocks for five hundred million years. Finally, a chain of organic molecules, trembling, split into two strands. The strands attracted other molecules around them until two identical copies of the original were made, and these split apart again and replicated themselves.… In this game of building blocks, the probability of producing such a self-replicating chain of organic molecules was so minuscule that it was as if a tornado had picked up a pile of metallic trash and deposited it as a fully-assembled Mercedes-Benz. But it happened, and so, a breathtaking history of 3.5 billion years had begun.

The Archean Eon was followed by the Proterozoic Eon, each billions of years; then the Paleozoic: the Cambrian’s seventy million years, the Ordovician’s sixty million years, the Silurian’s forty million years, the Devonian’s fifty million years, the Carboniferous’s sixty-five million years, and the Permian’s fifty-five million years; then the Mesozoic: the Triassic’s thirty-five million years, the Jurassic’s fifty-eight million years, and the Cretaceous’s seventy million years; then the Cenozoic: the Tertiary’s 64.5 million years and the Quaternary’s 2.5 million years. Then humanity appeared. Compared to the eons before, mankind’s history was but the blink of an eye. Dynasties and eras exploded like fireworks; the bone club tossed into the air by an ape turned into a spaceship. Finally, this 3.5-billion-year-long road full of trials and tribulations stopped in front of a tiny human individual, a single person out of the one hundred billion people who had ever lived on the Earth, holding a red switch.

But the deeper root cause could only be found in the minds of humankind. Never explicitly stated, and perhaps not even consciously understood, a gravitational wave ship was too powerful—so powerful that it terrified its creator. If something—a droplet attack or something else—forced such ships to depart for deep space, and they could never return to the Solar System due to the presence of enemy threats, they would turn into copies of Blue Space and Bronze Age, or something even more horrific. Each gravitational wave ship, with its no-longer-human crew, would also possess the power to broadcast to the universe (though limited by the half-life of the vibrating string), thus controlling the fate of humanity. A frightful instability would be permanently scattered among the stars. At its root, this fear was a fear of dark forest deterrence itself. This was characteristic of ultimate deterrence: The deterrer and the deteree shared the same terror of deterrence

“I’m leaving,” said Sophon. “Please convey to Dr. Luo Ji the deepest respect of all of Trisolaris. He was a powerful deterrer, a great warrior. Oh, and if you get the chance, also give Mr. Thomas Wade our regrets.” Cheng Xin looked up, surprised. “In our personality studies, your degree of deterrence hovered around ten percent, like a worm wriggling on the ground. Luo Ji’s degree of deterrence was always around ninety percent, like a fearsome cobra poised to strike. But Wade—” Sophon gazed at the setting sun behind the smoke, only a sliver of which now was above ground. Terror glinted from her eyes. She shook her head vigorously, as though trying to chase away a mirage in her mind. “He had no curve at all. No matter what the other environmental parameters were, his degree of deterrence stayed at one hundred percent! What a devil! If he had become the Swordholder, none of this would have been possible. This peace would have had to last. We’ve already waited sixty-two years, but we’d have had to keep on waiting, maybe for fifty more years, or even longer. And then Trisolaris would face an Earth equal to us in technology and power. We’d have to compromise.… However, we knew that humanity would choose you.” Sophon walked away, taking

but he countered that if his ancestors could live that way, then so could he. As early as the fourth ice age, his ancestors had crossed the Pacific from Asia in canoes. That had been forty thousand years ago, when Greece and Egypt didn’t even exist as ideas. Back in the twenty-first century, he had been a wealthy doctor, with his own clinic in Melbourne. After emerging from hibernation in the Deterrence Era, he had also lived the comfortable life of a modern man. But when the Great Resettlement began, something in his body seemed to awaken. He felt himself becoming a creature of the earth and the forest and realized that very few things were truly necessary for life. Sleeping in the open was fine—very comfortable, in fact. Fraisse said he didn’t know what kind of portent this was. Cheng Xin gazed at the resettlement zone in the distance. This late at night, the lights were sparse, and the endless rows of shelter-houses gave off a rarely-seen tranquility. A strange feeling seized her, as though she were seeing another age of immigration, the Australia of five centuries ago. The people sleeping in those houses were rough cowboys and ranchers, and she could even smell the fragrance of hay and the odor of horse excrement. Cheng Xin told Fraisse of the odd sensation.

Jungian archetypal representation in fraise

The flag of evolution will be raised once again on this world, and you will now fight for your survival. I hope everyone present will be among the fifty million survivors at the end. I hope that you will eat food, and not be eaten by food.”

“Then you’re just seeking revenge!” an officer from Gravity said. “Vengeance against Trisolaris is our right. They must pay for the crimes they’ve committed. In war, it is right and just to destroy one’s enemies. If my deduction is correct, humankind’s gravitational wave transmitters have all been destroyed, and the Earth is now under occupation. It’s very likely that the genocide of the human race is underway. “Activating the universal broadcast would give the Earth one last chance. If the location of the Solar System is revealed, it would no longer have any value to Trisolaris because it could be destroyed at any moment. This would force the Trisolarans to leave the Solar System, and their lightspeed fleet would have to turn away. We may be able to save the human race from immediate annihilation. To give them more time, our broadcast will include only the location of Trisolaris.” “That’s the same as revealing

Tomb, 4D, Sea amazing section

They both happened under the direction of a small number of individuals; their occurrence depended on a series of improbable coincidences (such as the fact that Gravity, Blue Space, and the droplets all entered the four-dimensional fragment simultaneously) … All these were clearly signs from some deity. At the time of both crises, the faithful had engaged in mass prayer sessions in public. It was precisely such fervent demonstrations of faith that finally led to divine salvation—though

At a deeper level, the public’s feeling for Cheng Xin was a reaction to her subconscious maternal love. In this family-less age, mother’s love was a rare thing. The welfare state that seemed like heaven satiated the children’s need for the love of a mother. But now, humanity was exposed to the cruel, cold universe, where Death’s scythe may fall at a moment’s notice. The baby that was human civilization had been abandoned in a sinister, terrifying dark forest; it cried, hoping for a mother’s touch.

Cheng Xin was taken aback by the chaotic arrangement of the pipes. It wasn’t the result of carelessness; on the contrary, to create this kind of utter chaos required great effort and design. The arrangement seemed to find even the hint of a pattern to be taboo.

Someone pointed out that the stone spheres at the rim of the canopy could symbolize the Jovian planets, but there were only four planets within the Solar System capable of acting as barriers. Tianming’s stories did not mention the number of ribs in the canopy, but, rationally, four ribs for an umbrella seemed rather low. Of course, not many people really believed this interpretation, but in some sense, Tianming’s stories had now acquired a status akin to the Bible. Without realizing it, people were no longer searching for real strategic intelligence, but reassurance that they were already on the right course.

Later, there was a more moderate and localized proposal for taking advantage of curved space for navigation. Supposing a spaceship could somehow iron flat the space behind it and decrease its curvature, the more curved space in front of it would pull it forward. This was the idea of curvature propulsion. Unlike folding space, curvature propulsion couldn’t get a spaceship to its destination instantaneously, but it would be possible to drive it asymptotically to the speed of light. Until Yun Tianming’s message had been correctly interpreted, curvature propulsion remained a dream, like hundreds of other proposals for lightspeed spaceflight. No one knew whether it was possible at either a theory or practice level.

Equally important was the fact that the interpretation provided the model for how Tianming had hidden his message in the three stories. He employed two basic methods: dual-layer metaphors and two-dimensional metaphors. The dual-layer metaphors in the stories did not directly point to the real meaning, but to something far simpler. The tenor of this first metaphor became the vehicle for a second metaphor, which pointed to the real intelligence. In the current example, the princess’s boat, the He’ershingenmosiken soap, and the Glutton’s Sea formed a metaphor for a paper boat driven by soap. The paper boat, in turn, pointed to curvature propulsion. Previous attempts at decipherment had failed largely due to people’s habitual belief that the stories only involved a single layer of metaphors to hide the real message. The two-dimensional metaphors were a technique used to resolve the ambiguities introduced by literary devices employed in conveying strategic intelligence. After a dual-layer metaphor, a single-layer supporting metaphor was added to confirm the meaning of the dual-layer metaphor. In the current example, the curved snow-wave paper and the ironing required to flatten it served as a metaphor for curved space, confirming the interpretation of the soap-driven boat. If one viewed the stories as a two-dimensional plane, the dual-layer metaphor only provided one coordinate; the supporting single-layer metaphor provided a second coordinate that fixed the interpretation on t...

Cheng Xin’s eyes moistened. She was thinking of Tianming, of the man who struggled alone in the long night of outer space and an eerie, sinister alien society. To convey his important message to the human race, he must have racked his brain until he had devised such a metaphorical system, and then spent ages in his lonely existence to create over a hundred fairy tales and carefully disguise the intelligence report in three of those stories. Three centuries ago, he had given Cheng Xin a star; now, he brought hope to the human race. Thereafter, steady progress was made in deciphering the message. Other than the discovery of the metaphorical system, the effort was also aided by another guess that was commonly accepted, though unconfirmed: While the first part of the message to be successfully deciphered involved escape from the Solar System, the rest of the message likely had to do with the safety notice. The interpreters soon realized that compared to the first bit of intelligence, the rest of the information hidden in the three stories was far more complex.

The faction opposed to researching lightspeed vessels felt this way for political reasons. They believed that human civilization had suffered many trials before reaching a nearly ideal democratic society, but once humanity headed for space, it would inevitably regress socially. Space was like a distorting mirror that magnified the dark side of humanity to the maximum. A line from one of the Bronze Age defendants, Sebastian Schneider, became their slogan: When humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism. For a democratic, civilized Earth to scatter innumerable seeds of totalitarianism among the Milky Way was a prospect that these people found intolerable.

“You don’t need to pity them. Really, let me tell you: don’t. The reality of the universe is not something to envy.” “Why?” Yifan lifted a hand and pointed at the stars of the galaxy. Then he let the 3G force pull his arm back to this chest. “Darkness. Only darkness.” “You mean the dark forest state?” Guan Yifan shook his head, a gesture that appeared to be a struggle in hypergravity. “For us, the dark forest state is all-important, but it’s just a detail of the cosmos. If you think of the cosmos as a great battlefield, dark forest strikes are nothing more than snipers shooting at the careless—messengers, mess men, etc. In the grand scheme of the battle, they are nothing. You have not seen what a true interstellar war is like.” “Have you?” “We’ve caught a few glimpses. But most things we know are just guesses.… Do you really want to know? The more you possess of this kind of knowledge, the less light remains in your heart.” “My heart is already completely dark. I want to know.” And so, more than six centuries after Luo Ji had fallen through ice into that lake, another dark veil hiding the truth about the universe was lifted before the gaze of one of the only survivors of Earth civilization. Yifan asked, “Why don’t you tell me what the most powerful weapon for a civilization possessing almost infinite technological prowess is? Don’t think of this as a technical question. Think philosophy.” Cheng Xin pondered for a while and then struggled to shake her head. “I don’t know.” ...

But more commonly, the technique is used to construct the equivalents of pits and city walls. Some reduced-lightspeed belts are large enough to traverse an entire arm of a galaxy. In places where the stars are dense, many reduced-lightspeed black holes can be connected together into chains that stretch for tens of millions of light-years. That’s a Great Wall at the scale of the universe. Even the most powerful fleets, once trapped, would not be able to escape. Those barriers are very difficult to cross.”

“Of course, I’ve only brought up two examples. Other universal laws of physics have been used as weapons as well, though we don’t know all of them. It’s very possible that every law of physics has been weaponized. It’s possible that in some parts of the universe, even … Forget it, I don’t even believe that.” “What were you going to say?” “The foundation of mathematics.” Cheng Xin tried to imagine it, but it was simply impossible. “That’s … madness.” Then she asked, “Will the universe turn into a war ruin? Or, maybe it’s more accurate to ask: Will the laws of physics turn into war ruins?” “Maybe they already are.… The physicists and cosmologists of the new world are focused on trying to recover the original appearance of the universe before the wars more than ten billion years ago. They’ve already constructed a fairly clear theoretical model describing the pre-war universe. That was a really lovely time, when the universe itself was a Garden of Eden. Of course, the beauty could only be described mathematically. We can’t picture it: Our brains don’t have enough dimensions.” Cheng Xin thought back to the conversation with the Ring again. Did you build this four-dimensional fragment? You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea? “You are saying that the universe of the Edenic Age was four-dimensional, and that the speed of light was much higher?” “No, not at all. The universe of the Edenic Age was ten-dimensional. The speed of light back then wasn’t only much ...

imho the best #sci-fi of the 21st century so far #cixinlui #deathsend

When they were about a hundred meters from the death lines, Yifan waved Cheng Xin to a stop. Each death line was about twenty or thirty meters in diameter, and from here, they resembled death columns. “These are probably the darkest things in the universe,” Cheng Xin said. The death lines showed no details except an exceptional blackness showing the boundaries of the zero-lightspeed region, with no real surface. Looking up, the lines showed up clearly even against the dark backdrop of space. “These are the deadest things in the universe as well,” said Guan Yifan. “Zero-lightspeed means absolute, one hundred percent death. Inside it, every fundamental particle, every quark is dead. There is no vibration. Even without a source of gravity inside, each death line is a black hole. A zero-gravity black hole. Anything that falls in cannot reemerge.” Yifan picked up a rock and tossed it toward one of the death lines. The rock disappeared inside the absolute darkness. “Can your lightspeed ships produce death lines?” Cheng Xin asked. “Far from it.” “So you’ve seen these before, then?” “Yes, but only rarely.”

Cheng Xin gazed up at the giant black columns reaching into space. They lifted up the domed sky and seemed to turn the universe into a Palace of Death. Is this the ultimate end for everything? In the sky, Cheng Xin could see the end of the columns. She pointed in that direction. “So the ships entered lightspeed at the end?” “That’s right. These are only about a hundred kilometers high. We’ve seen columns even shorter than these, presumably left by ships that entered lightspeed almost instantaneously.” “Are these the most advanced lightspeed ships?” “Maybe. But this is a rarely seen technique. Death lines are usually the products of Zero-Homers.” “Zero-Homers?” “They’re also called Resetters. Maybe they’re a group of intelligent individuals, or a civilization, or a group of civilizations. We don’t know exactly who they are, but we’ve confirmed their existence. The Zero-Homers want to reset the universe and return it to the Garden of Eden.” “How?” “By moving the hour hand of the clock past twelve. Take spatial dimensions as an example. It’s practically impossible to drag a universe in lower dimensions back into higher dimensions, so maybe it’s better to work forward in the other direction. If the universe can be lowered into zero dimensions and then beyond, the clock might be reset and everything returned to the beginning. The universe might possess ten macroscopic dimensions again.”

“Zero dimensions! Have you seen such a thing done?” “No. We’ve only witnessed two-dimensionalization. We’ve never even seen one-dimensionalization. But somewhere, some Zero-Homers must be trying. No one knows if they’ve ever succeeded. Comparatively, it’s easier to lower the speed of light to zero, so we’ve seen more evidence of such attempts to lower the speed of light past zero and return it to infinity.” “Is that even theoretically possible?” “We don’t know. Maybe the Zero-Homers have theories that say yes, but I don’t think so. Zero-lightspeed is an impassable wall. Zero-lightspeed is absolute death for all existence, the cessation of all motion. Under such conditions, the subjectiv...

Cheng Xin stared at the death lines, her terror mixed with awe. “If these are trails, why don’t they spread?” Guan Yifan clutched Cheng Xin’s arm. “I was just getting to that. We’ve got to get out of here. Leave not just Planet Gray, but the entire system. This is a very dangerous place. Death lines are not like regular trails. Without disturbance, they’ll stay like this, with a diameter equal to the effective surface of the curvature engine. But if they’re disturbed, they’ll spread very rapidly. A death line of this size can expand to cover a region the size of a solar system. Scientists call this phenomenon a death line rupture.” “Does a rupture make the speed of light zero in the entire region?” “No, no. After rupture, it turns into a regular trail. The speed of light inside goes up as the trail dissipates over a wider region, but it will never be much more than a dozen meters per second. After these death lines expand, this entire system might turn into a reduced-lightspeed black hole, or a black domain.… Let’s go.” Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan turned toward the shuttle and began to run and leap. “What kind of disturbance makes them spread?” Cheng Xin asked. She turned to give t...

After the shuttle took off, Cheng Xin continued to stare at the receding death lines. She said, “The Zero-Homers give me a bit of hope.” Yifan said, “The universe contains multitudes. You can find any kind of ‘people’ and world. There are idealists like the Zero-Homers, pacifists, philanthropists, and even civilizations dedicated only to art and beauty. But they’re not the mainstream; they cannot change the direction of the universe.” “It’s just like the world of humans.” “At least the Zero-Homers’ task will ultimately be completed by the cosmos itself.” “You mean the end of the universe?” “That’s right.” “But based on what I know, the universe will continue to expand, and become sparser and colder forever.” “That’s the old cosmology you know, but we’ve disproved it. The amount of dark matter had been underestimated. The universe will stop expanding and then collapse under gravity, finally forming a singularity and initiating an...

Wind? ‘Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.’” Yifan said, “The Solar System humans spilled their last drop of blood to stay with their land—well, save for two drops: you and AA. But what was the point? They didn’t last, and neither did their land. Hundreds of millions of years have passed in the great universe, and do you think anyone still remembers them? This obsession with home and land, this permanent adolescence where you’re no longer children but are afraid to leave home—this is the fundamental reason your race was annihilated. I am sorry if I’ve offended you, but it’s the truth.”

In each other’s eyes, they saw the dark future for the great universe. In perpetual expansion, all the galaxies would move farther away from each other until none were visible from any other. By then, standing at any point in the universe, all one would see was darkness in every direction. The stars would go out one by one, and all celestial bodies would turn into thin dust clouds. Coldness and darkness would reign over all, and the universe would become a vast, empty tomb. All civilizations and all memories would be buried in that endless tomb for eternity. Death would be eternal. The only way to prevent this future was to return the matter locked up in all the mini-universes constructed by all the civilizations. But such a decision meant that the mini-universes would not survive, and all the refugees in the mini-universes had to return to the great universe. That was the meaning of the name of the Returners’ movement.

Later, my responsibilities became more complicated: I wanted to endow humans with lightspeed wings, but I also had to thwart that goal to prevent a war. I don’t know how much those catastrophes and the final destruction of the Solar System had to do with me. Those are questions that could never be answered definitively. But I’m certain they had something to do with me, with my responsibilities. And now, I’ve climbed to the apex of responsibility: I am responsible for the fate of the universe. Of course this responsibility doesn’t belong only to me and Guan Yifan, but we own a share of the responsibility, a share of something that I never could have imagined. I want to tell all those who believe in God that I am not the Chosen One. I also want to tell all the atheists that I am not a history-maker. I am but an ordinary person. Unfortunately, I have not been able to walk the ordinary person’s path. My path is, in reality, the journey of a civilization. And now we know that this is the journey that must be made by every civilization: awakening inside a cramped cradle, toddling out of it, taking flight, flying faster and farther, and, finally, merging with the fate of the universe as one. The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.

“Of course,” said Guan Yifan. “The great universe isn’t going to fail to collapse because it misses five kilograms.” He had another thought that he did not voice: Perhaps the great universe really would fail to collapse because it lacked a single atom’s mass. The precision of Nature can sometimes exceed the imagination. For instance, life itself required the precise collaboration of various universal constants within a billion-billionth of a certain range.