Death's End (The Three-Body Problem, #3)

by Cixin Liu

The Earth gave birth to life, but life also changed the Earth. The current environment on our planet is the result of interactions between the two.”

plants, animals, and bacteria all have had important roles in the present composition of our atmosphere. Without life, the atmosphere would be very different. It’s possible that such an atmosphere would not be able to shield the surface of the Earth against solar winds and ultraviolet rays, and the oceans would evaporate.

“Thus, the Earth that we live on now is a home constructed by life for itself. It has nothing to do with God.”

Humanity had to struggle to adjust to this kind of warfare, in which they were completely transparent to the enemy.

if one examined it through the lens of sociology, one could see that it would completely change the face of human civilization. All this was based on a single idea: Tomorrow will be better.

Medieval Europe was materially impoverished compared to the Classical Rome of a thousand years earlier, and was more intellectually repressed. In China, the lives of the people were worse during the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties compared to the earlier Han Dynasty, and the Yuan and Ming Dynasties were much worse than the earlier Tang and Song Dynasties. But after the Industrial Revolution, progress became a constant feature of society, and humanity’s faith in the future grew stronger.

Once the technology was successfully commercialized, those who could afford it would use it to skip to paradise, while the rest of humanity would have to stay behind in the comparatively depressing present to construct that paradise for them.

But even more worrisome was the greatest lure provided by the future: the end of death. As modern biology advanced apace, people began to believe that death’s end would be achievable in one or two more centuries. If so, those who chose hibernation were taking the first steps on the staircase to life everlasting. For the first time in history, Death itself was no longer fair.

Thus, even pre-Crisis, governments around the world suppressed hibernation technology more zealously than cloning technology. But the Trisolar Crisis changed everything.

Even for terminal patients, the future no longer appealed:

But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social-pressure personality disorder. You should seek treatment.”

A thought popped into her mind. A world dedicated to femininity... but what does that mean for deterrence?

But people soon discovered a discouraging fact: If the authority to carry out the threat in dark forest deterrence is held by humanity as a whole, then the degree of deterrence is close to zero.

The mutual assured destruction practiced by NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War was an example of ultimate deterrence. In 1974, The Soviet Union initiated the Perimeter System (Russian Система «Периметр»), or “Dead Hand.” This was intended to guarantee that the Soviet Union possessed a viable second-strike capability in the event that an American-led first strike eliminated the Soviet government and high-level military command centers.

Experts believed that although science and technology usually contributed to the elimination of totalitarianism, when crises threatened the existence of civilization, science and technology could also give birth to new totalitarianism.

They had achieved wa kei sei jaku—harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility, the four principles of the Way of Tea.

“Desubstantiation effect” was a concept from astronautic psychology.

To the senses and the mind, the world lost its materiality, and empty space dominated. A space voyager’s subconscious image of the world thus became desubstantiated. This mental model was the baseline in astronautic psychology. Mentally, the ship became the only material entity in the universe. At sub-light speeds, the motion of the ship was undetectable, and the universe turned into one boundless, empty exhibition hall.

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.”

the fatal blows of Japanese kenjutsu. Real Japanese sword fights often ended after a very brief struggle lasting no more than half a second to two seconds. By the time the swords had clashed but once, one side had already fallen in a pool of blood. But before this moment, the opponents stared at each other like statues, sometimes for as long as ten minutes. During this contest, the swordsman’s weapon wasn’t held by the hands, but by his heart. The heart-sword, transformed through the eyes into the gaze, stabbed into the depths of the enemy’s soul. The real winner was determined during this process: In the silence suspended between the two swordsmen, the blades of their spirits parried and stabbed as soundless claps of thunder. Before a single blow was struck, victory, defeat, life, and death had already been decided.

Trisolaran society broke down the barriers to scientific progress imposed by the extreme totalitarian political system that had been adopted as a reaction to the chaotic eras, encouraged freedom of thought, and began to respect the individual.

Humans understood early on that only strong-interaction materials (SIM) could be used to defend against droplets.

Thus began the Great Resettlement of all of humanity to Australia.

Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell. Sophon’s words after she killed those people at the food distribution center—“The era for humanity’s degenerate freedom is over”—became a common slogan, and discarded dregs from the history of ideas, including fascism, crawled out of their tombs to the surface and became mainstream. The power of religions also recovered, and people gathered into different faiths and churches. Thus, theocracy, a zombie even more ancient than totalitarianism, reanimated itself.

Even after the Great Resettlement, the population density in Australia was only fifty people per square kilometer, lower than the population density of pre-Resettlement Japan.

“Mere existence is already the result of incredible luck. Such was the case on Earth in the past, and such has always been the case in this cruel universe. But at some point, humanity began to develop the illusion that they’re entitled to life, that life can be taken for granted. This is the fundamental reason for your defeat. 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.”

the “universe’s three and three hundred thousand syndrome.”

A safety notice was in reality a universal broadcast as well, and it had to ensure that all listeners would trust its message.

Faced with the omnipresent threat of death and the lure of a different state of existence, religion once again took center stage in social life.

Historically, the discovery of the dark forest state of the universe was a giant blow to most major religions, especially Christianity. In fact, the damage to religion was evident even early on during the Crisis Era. When Trisolaran civilization was discovered, Christians had to wrestle with the fact that the aliens were not in the Garden of Eden, and God never mentioned them in Genesis.

At the beginning of the Crisis Era, they were powerful, evil alien invaders, but were also deified by the ETO. Later, Trisolaris gradually changed from devils and gods to people. With the creation of dark forest deterrence, Trisolaris’s position in the eyes of humanity reached its nadir, and Trisolarans became uncivilized savages living at the pleasure of humankind. After deterrence failed, the Trisolarans revealed themselves to be genocidal conquerors. However, after the universal broadcast was initiated—and especially after the destruction of Trisolaris—Trisolarans turned into victims who deserved sympathy from humans, fellow refugees in the same boat.

This was the Lagrangian point.

All of these groups tried to interpret the stories according to their own political aims and self-interest, and treated the work of interpretation as just another opportunity to disseminate propaganda about their brand of politics.

The stories turned into empty baskets capable of carrying any goods.

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.

Poe wrote a story about Mosken—‘A Descent into the Maelstrom.’

Death is the only lighthouse that is always lit. No matter where you sail, ultimately, you must turn toward it. Everything fades in the world, but Death endures.”

If the speed of light through vacuum in the Solar System were reduced to below 16.7 kilometers per second, light would no longer be able to escape the gravity of the Sun, and the Solar System would become a black hole. This was an inescapable consequence of the derivation of the Schwarzschild radius of an object, even if the object was the Solar System. More precisely, the necessary speed limit would be even lower if a larger Schwarzschild radius were desired.

The false alarm was the result of the explosive amplifying effects of a hyper-information society when fed sensitive news.

As early as 2008 C.E., researchers had succeeded in lowering the speed of light through a medium to an incredible seventeen meters per second in a laboratory setting. But this was fundamentally different from lowering the speed of light through vacuum. The former only required causing the atoms in the medium to absorb and re-emit the photons—light continued to travel at its usual speed between atoms.

But the best way to influence light in vacuum was through a gravity field.

“And thus the life insurance company refused to pay out, although 高 Way had passed through the event horizon in his frame of reference, and should now be dead. But the insurance contract was made within the frame of reference of our world, and from this perspective, it is impossible to prove that 高 Way is dead.

He spoke slowly. “If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.”

They sat in silence, neither looking at the other. Time turned into a stagnant pool that drowned them.

Suppose an extraterrestrial scientist were given all data about the Earth several billion years ago. Do you think it could predict the existence of this desert solely through calculation?” Bai Aisi pondered this. “No. This desert wasn’t the result of the Earth’s natural evolution, but the result of man-made forces. The behavior of civilizations can’t be grasped through the laws of physics.” “Very good. Then why do we and our colleagues all want to try to explain the conditions of today’s cosmos, and to predict its future, solely through deductions based on the laws of physics?”

Do you think only sophons create illusions? Do you think the only illusions exist in the particle accelerator terminals? Do you think the rest of the universe is as pure as a virgin, waiting for us to explore? Too bad that she left with everything she knew.”

Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.

“Just as four-dimensional space collapses into three dimensions, three-dimensional space can collapse into two dimensions, with one dimension folding and curling into the quantum realm. The area of that slice of two-dimensional space—it only has area—will rapidly expand, causing more space to collapse....

Twice, she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love.

“A word of advice: In the future, no matter who you meet—human or otherwise—don’t ask for the location of their worlds. That’s a basic bit of manners in the cosmos—like how it’s impolite to ask a lady’s age....