The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

by Liu Cixin

But for this mass struggle session, the victims were the reactionary bourgeois academic authorities. These were the enemies of every faction, and they had no choice but to endure cruel attacks from every side.

Sounds like what’s happening in the USA today. Knowledge has become a defect in Trumpland.

For the Red Guards, heaping abuse upon victims in those two latter mental stages was utterly boring. Only those Monsters and Demons who were still in the initial stage could give their overstimulated brains the thrill they craved, like the red cape of the matador.

In Trumpland, they aren’t called the Red Guard. They’re called ICE.

calm and

calm, and

Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?

My Goddess, I hope not. I am an artist by occupation, but I have Ph.Ds in Mathematics and Physics. Quantum Mechanics physics. My mind would shoot off my neck and slam into the ceiling, if I learned that this was really true.

He lifted his head and saw a sky glowing with a faint red light. Just like that, he was seeing the cosmic microwave background. The red light had come from more than ten billion years ago. It was the remnants of the big bang, the still-warm embers of Creation. He could not see any stars. Normally, since visible light would be compressed to invisible by the glasses, each star should appear as a black dot. But the diffraction of centimeter-wave radiation overwhelmed all other shapes and details. Once his eyes had grown used to the sight, Wang could see that the faint red background was indeed pulsing. The entire sky flickered, as if the universe was but a quivering lamp in the wind. Standing under the flashing dome of the night sky, Wang suddenly felt the universe shrink until it was so small that only he was imprisoned in it. The universe was a cramped heart, and the red light that suffused everything was the translucent blood that filled the organ. Suspended in the blood, he saw that the flickering of the red light was not periodic—the pulsing was irregular. He felt a strange, perverse, immense presence that could never be understood by human intellect.

Or maybe it signals the end of the whole world. In this perverse world, that would be a relief.

“Everything that’s happening is coordinated by someone behind the scenes with one goal: to completely ruin scientific research.” “Who?” “I have no idea. But I can sense the plan, a very comprehensive, intricate plan: damage scientific research installations, kill scientists, drive scientists like you crazy and make you commit suicide—but the main goal is to misdirect your thoughts until you’re even more foolish than ordinary people.” “Your last statement is really perceptive.” “At the same time, they want to ruin science’s reputation in society. Of course some people have always engaged in anti-science activities, but now it’s coordinated.” “I believe it.”

Happening in America right now.

Well, I guess I’m really getting old. These days, I’m always thinking about the past.”

the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”

I felt like a libertine who has always fluttered carelessly from one woman to another suddenly finding himself in love.

I was like this until I met my husband.

“I would be happy.” The young reporter was the first to break the silence. “I’ve lost hope in the human race after what I’ve seen in recent years. Human society is incapable of self-improvement, and we need the intervention of an outside force.”

Ye’s rational consideration of humanity’s evil side began the day she read Silent Spring. As she grew closer to Yang Weining, he was able to get her many classics of foreign-language philosophy and history under the guise of gathering technical research materials. The bloody history of humanity shocked her, and the extraordinary insights of the philosophers also led her to understand the most fundamental and secret aspects of human nature.

The insanity of the human race had reached its historical zenith. The Cold War was at its height. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Earth ten times over could be launched at a moment’s notice, spread out among the countless missile silos dotting two continents and hidden within ghostlike nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep under the sea. A single Lafayette- or Yankee-class submarine held enough warheads to destroy hundreds of cities and kill hundreds of millions, but most people continued their lives as if nothing was wrong.

I believe that the insanity of the human race has now peaked higher than this period of time. America electing Trump (the Anti-Christ) is even worse.

In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.

As she pondered human nature, Ye was faced with an ultimate loss of purpose and sank into another spiritual crisis. She had once been an idealist who needed to give all her talent to a great goal, but now she realized that all that she had done was meaningless, and the future could not have any meaningful pursuits, either. As this mental state persisted, she gradually felt more and more alienated from the world. She didn’t belong. The sense of wandering in the spiritual wilderness tormented her.

As an American, I can completely relate to this. The USA has demonstrated to me that homo (so-called) sapiens are a sickening species.

“May we ask what you’re really doing here?” one of Ye’s colleagues asked. “I want to save lives.” “Save … save the locals? It’s true that the ecological conditions here—” “Why are you all like this?” Evans suddenly became furious. “Why does one have to save people to be considered a hero? Why is saving other species considered insignificant? Who gave humans such high honors? No, humans do not need saving. They’re already living much better than they deserve.”

True.

These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.’

Because people believe this … because they think they are in some way entitled to everything … the Earth is dying. Gaia’s only hope is for the human race to cease to exist.

“Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations. You probably know that the American government just refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.… The entire human race is the same. As long as civilization continues to develop, the swallows I want to save and all the other swallows will go extinct. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Yes. The focus of Christianity is Man. Even though all the species were placed into Noah’s Ark, other species were never given the same status as humans. But Buddhism is focused on saving all life. That was why I came to the East. But … it’s obvious now that everywhere is the same.”

“What can I do now? What is the purpose of my life? I have four point five billion dollars and an international oil company. But what good is all that? Humans have surely invested more than forty-five billion dollars in saving species near extinction. And probably more than four hundred and fifty billion has already been spent on saving the environment from degradation. But what’s the use? Civilization continues to follow its path of destruction of all life on Earth except humans. Four point five billion is enough to build an aircraft carrier, but even if we build a thousand aircraft carriers, it would be impossible to stop the madness of humanity.”

The most surprising aspect of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement was that so many people had abandoned all hope in human civilization, hated and were willing to betray their own species, and even cherished as their highest ideal the elimination of the entire human race, including themselves and their children.

It wouldn’t surprise me. I’d join this movement, if it was real.

But intellectual elites were different: Most of them had already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race. Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.

Mike Evans gave the Adventists their motto: We don’t know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.

Because God was stingy, during the big bang He only provided the macroscopic world with three spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time. But this doesn’t mean that higher dimensions don’t exist. Up to seven additional dimensions are locked within the micro scale, or, more precisely, within the quantum realm. And added to the four dimensions at the macro scale, fundamental particles exist within an eleven-dimensional space-time.”

“Given a time gap of forty thousand hours, the strategic value of any traditional tactics of war or terror is insignificant, and they can recover from them. To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.”

So the Project 2025 people are actually Trisolarans? That’s why they’re rolling everything back to the Dark Ages?

The science consul said, “The plan focuses on emphasizing the negative environmental effects of scientific development and showing signs of supernatural power to the population of Earth. In addition to highlighting the negative effects of progress, we’ll also attempt to use a series of ‘miracles’ to construct an illusory universe that cannot be explained by the logic of science. After these illusions have been maintained for some time, it’s possible that Trisolaran civilization may become a target of religious worship there. Then, unscientific ways of thinking will dominate scientific thinking among human intellectuals, and lead to the collapse of the entire scientific system of thought.”

Damn, they really must be.

“In the long history of scientific progress, how many protons have been smashed apart in accelerators by physicists? How many neutrons and electrons? Probably no fewer than a hundred million. Every collision was probably the end of the civilizations and intelligences in a microcosmos. In fact, even in nature, the destruction of universes must be happening at every second—for example, through the decay of neutrons. Also, a high-energy cosmic ray entering the atmosphere may destroy thousands of such miniature universes.… You’re not feeling sentimental because of this, are you?”

Interesting.

The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe.

There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.