3 Body Problem - Countdown to 3/21/24 - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > 3 Body Problem - Countdown to 3/21/24

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

No love for the minecraft adaptation, huh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14INFFQPrfo

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 06:45

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:26

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

The book is conceptually interesting but very dry, so yeah I would hope that they take some liberties. Otherwise it would be like 90% dudes sitting around in rooms talking.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 07:32

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

Steve Yun posted:

I�m seeing some complaints coming from Chinese social media that if they were gonna westernize the cast, they should have completely westernized it instead of having it partially Chinese. According to them, the effect of keeping Ye Wenjie and the Angry Commies is putting China in a bad light and making the westerners the heroes who have to fix the problems the Chinese caused

I�m seeing plenty of bad takes on twitter saying �See? Chinese bad!� despite the source author being Chinese, so I�m inclined to think the Chinese netizens maybe have a point

If a western adaptation were to change Ye Wenjie to another setting, what would work?

100% agreed. I had this exact same thought while watching the first episode. When I read the book, I thought it was an interesting insight into a place and era that I didn't know very much about, and what I did know came through the lens of American capitalist propaganda. Making the "good guys" all westerners completely changes the meaning of that, even if the suffering that Ye Wenjie experienced in the show was no better or worse than in the book.

If they wanted to "westernize" the cast while keeping the theme intact, they could have made her a black American woman who witnessed her father being lynched.

Enjoying it so far though.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2024 16:54

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

Caros posted:

So I know it is a lot to ask a sort of remedial math question on a tviv thread, but the whole 3 body problem thing keeps bugging me. Mostly because it feels like the show/book misunderstands it. But it might be me?

I understand the basic issue. One thing goes around sun? Primative people were able to work out things like eclipse schedules by factoring in orbital mechanics. Compatively easy, to the point that high schoolers can be given the equations and predict the position of the bodies millenia in advance.

But when you get to three bodies with overlapping orbits and fields of gravity it gets weird. Things get flung in and out so there is no one size fits all way to look at such a system and say 'if you have a system like this run it through this formula and you can predict out to ten thousand year.

But... You can still do it manually. No? Thry have telescopes, we know the speeds of the objects, the gravity that they exert. Primative trisolarans are absolutely hosed, no doubt since there is no reasonable way to compute the problem, but once you are at the point that you are building photonic supercomputing you have the ability to brute force the problem on the individual level. You can model where your planet will be in position to the suns tomorrow. Then run where it would be in position the day after, and the day after and the day after that until you have a accurate calendar stretching thousands or millions of years.

Time consuming. Resource intensive on modern computing, but absolutely doable when your super advanced civilization depends upon it.

They don't get into it in the show, but yeah, the San-ti do eventually get to the point where they can accurately predict chaotic and stable eras. But then they discover another problem, which is that their planet is eventually going to spiral into one of the suns.

There's another thing that they don't mention in the show that is also kind of important. The giant human computer actually worked - mainly because the San-ti have dozens of limbs and can do complex calculations in their heads quickly - but it failed to account for general relativity.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 07:33

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