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

GABA ghoul: Oct 29, 2011

Not too excited about this being done by the GoT people. Still could be good though.

roomtone posted:

i think i read this book

it's mostly about a captive scientist lady who is recording a bunch of poo poo
and turns out, it comes from aliens
then the messages that come from the planet are this bizarre fantasy story with many eras
then i forget what happens

is that three body story

Yeah that sounds exactly like the books but when you try to recall them shortly after an electroconvulsive therapy session. You are in the right thread.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2024 14:54

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 9, 2024 21:16

GABA ghoul: Oct 29, 2011

It was doomed from the very beginning. It's a very challenging adaptation and you need someone talented like Villeneuve to pull this off, not Beavis and Butthead.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 12:20

GABA ghoul: Oct 29, 2011

Lampsacus posted:

I love this book series because the author clearly thought of some dumb and cool sci fi ideas and then proceeded to string them together into a novel series that blew up.

Yeah, this. It's the most characteristic thing about the books for me. With almost every single plot line you can very clearly see how it was lazily written backwards from an idea for a scene or an event or some concept.

For example, he had a cool idea about an alien ship the size of a proton that is secretly triggering detectors in particle accelerators to lead our science into the wrong direction. Then he just put some characters and filler around the idea and called it a day.

Cause, if you try to write organically around the concept you very quickly start to run into all kinds of plot problems. Like, fundamental physics research takes many different forms, so the aliens need a way that is not just a proton to lock down many other research areas too. But if they can get here physically with larger objects to do that, why would it take 400 years for the invasion fleet to arrive? And couldn't we actually fight those larger objects? Or, the books are full of batshit insane megaprojects, why wouldn't space faring humans 50 years down the line not try to build particle accelerators all around the solar system so sophons would have to take hours to travel between them? Clearly it's a lot easier for us to build a particle accelerator than for them to build a sophon, so they can't win that arms race. I'm not even sure if there is a way to manipulate detector results in such a way that we couldn't work around that if we knew what was happening. But that's going into hard sci-fi territory, which the books most definitely don't claim to be.

GABA ghoul fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Apr 2, 2024

# ¿ Apr 2, 2024 12:49

GABA ghoul: Oct 29, 2011

Hello? Is this the CGI mill? I would like to speak to a manager about the quality of your recent apes

# ¿ Apr 4, 2024 16:00

GABA ghoul: Oct 29, 2011

counterfeitsaint posted:

I wasn't planning on binging it, but it was really good so I kept watching it.

I don't really understand the alien's timeline or motivations though. Glancing through some of the spoilers in the thread, it sounds like a lot of them are just changes from the book, but the show is on my mind so I'm going to write a wall of text about it anyways.

1. So these guys need to get off their planet because the three suns requires everyone to go into stasis, hosed up their cultural progress, and will eventually destroy the planet. Okay, sure. But in that case why are they sitting on their thumbs waiting for the dumb apes nearby to send them a hello world message? Even with out paltry technology we've detected thousands of exoplanets and are on the verge of analyzing the atmospheres around some of them. Wouldn't it be way easier to just find a suitable uninhabited planet to go to? Gotta be cheaper than using up all the remaining resources of your civilization to build 11 dimensional supercomputers to keep the locals in check.

2. What about our message made them think this planet would be suitable for them to inhabit anyways? Does Earth have the right atmosphere? Temperature range? Solar radiation? Gravity? If they could detect this information before receiving our message, why hadn't they already learned that and already on their way?

3. Was the fleet built and ready to go? Building 1000 ships and having them just wait around in orbit until aliens contact you seems like a pretty insane thing to do, especially when they're even more at risk from the suns up there than everyone on the surface.

4. Was Project Staircase the same in the book? I don't see how detonating a nuke a few meters away from the probe isn't going to vaporize it. Based on the little animations, the detonation happens so close it's between the solar sheet and the probe itself, wouldn't that force the sheet forward and the probe backwards? Even if it didn't vaporize, the extreme stress of that kind of acceleration is obviously going to tear the whole thing apart, which it did.

5. Why did they call us bugs? Not why do they think we're bugs, that makes sense, but why reveal yourself and communicate in any way after cutting ties with the cult? If they never spoke to us again after learning about lying, we'd all go back to idly brutalizing each other and being lazy and complacent. Sure a few people know, and the hard drive exists, but it's gonna be a lot harder to get everyone to believe and work together with just that limited evidence. Instead they managed to galvanize the entire race into working against them.

I was gonna ask about the Pacifist keeping secrets, but that seems to have already been answered previously in spoilers. Same thing for why they spent all their resources building spies to come watch us before learning about/freaking out about the concept of lying.

There were a few other minor quibbles, but I enjoyed the show so much that they didn't bother me, and they feel really nitpicky; First, has life on this planet had the ability to go into stasis since the earliest, most primitive incarnations? And then that trait remained through the entire evolutionary process? I can see complex intelligent organisms doing that, but the first single celled (or equivalent) life feels like a stretch. The second one is, I'd have loved to see the other players in the game setting up their 'solution'. "Okay Great Khan, first we need 13 million soldiers, here where is where they all need to precisely stand. Don't worry I mapped all this out ahead of time. Now they each need a little sign, and then flip the signs back and forth..." They'd be boiled alive for sure. Finally, what was on Ser Davos' ID? It had to be some organization a Royal Naval Captain would be familiar with, so not some unknown secret group. Seems like the sort of thing you'd want to confirm rather than just glancing at a badge, but that would ruin the flow of the scene so that gets a pass.

1. The real reason is that the books were written two decades ago when our ability to detect exoplanets was pretty bad and the whole topic wasn't very publicized in pop science media. There is a later retconned in-universe reason revealed in the second book, but it's a major spoiler.

2. In context of the first book: IIRC they just didn't know about earth, but once they knew they deduced that it's in the habitable zone. They were also in communication with the ETO, so they could have just asked what the environmental conditions are. And the fleet can be turned around easily and quickly, if it needs to. It wasn't such a huge gamble. The second book reveals another reason, but that's spoiler again.

4. Yes, Staircase is based on a real idea and is plausible from an engineering point of view. The CGI scenes in the show are of course complete nonsense and would have destroyed the capsule. They probably just decided to go with clarity instead of scientific accuracy when designing these scenes.

5. IIRC they are trying to sow division and despair in the population. Doomerism/defeatism/escapism is a huge topic in the book. Turning everyone into a doomer is basically how they think they can win this. We were already running a huge international effort to prepare for the invasion before the "you're bugs" message, so I don't think it alarmed governments much more than they already were.

6. I think the hibernation/dessication idea comes from tartigrades? They were pretty popular in pop science around that time. Hibernation to survive extremely harsh conditions is something you can find through most parts of the animal/plant/fungi/prokaryotes/archae kingdom on earth. It's pretty common, including in microorganisms. Most parts of earth experience seasonal weather changes, so life had to develop strategies to survive harsh winters or summers from almost the very beginning.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2024 12:12

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 9, 2024 21:16

GABA ghoul: Oct 29, 2011

kanonvandekempen posted:

I've read the books a while ago but I don't seem to remember the spoilers you talk about, can you clarify?
EDIT: if it's against the rules of this thread to ask about the books, please ignore me, I don't want to get probated.

Book 2 spoilers:

Moving around in the dark forest is extremely dangerous. Every planet in a habitable zone is likely to be already occupied by a hostile civilization and it's totally random if they are technologically behind or ahead of you. If you get unlucky and stumble upon more advanced aliens, they will easily destroy your fleet and also the solar system it came from.

I may remember this wrong but I think the Trisolarans built that fleet to be ready when their planet finally decided to take a bath in one of the suns. It was supposed to be a measure of last resort. Then the over-sharing naked apes from the neighboring star discovered radio communication and changed everything.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2024 16:26

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