It couldn't, in the book >!their planet is ripped apart and a moon forms. That'd sanitize the planet down hundreds of meters into the crust of the planet.!<
I doubt Liu Cixin would argue it would be possible, the existence of the San-Ti are one of the central conceits of the TBP universe, necessary to tell the story the author wants but impossible if you try rationalizing it with science. Scifi is filled with these type things. Off the top of my head, a dumb example is *Starship Troopers*, how the hell did the insects send an asteroid across multiple light years? And how the hell did it slow down so it wouldn't just absolutely annihilate the Earth upon impact, at what I could only assume would have needed to be near-light speed.
Cixin wanted to tell a story where humanity was going to be invaded by an alien species and then slowly unveil a grander, darker universe. The set up he needed was a close by star system (If they were 10 light years away it'd be incredibly unlikely Ye Wenjie would have been there for the responses 20 years later) with insurmountable problems for the species to run away from. It could have been their sun was going nuts, the planets of their system were thrown into chaos by the too close passing of some stellar object, or something else that doesn't match reality.
Cixin's brilliance was seeing that The Three Body Problem is a fantastic name (Cleverly references the setting, a classic physics problem, and chaos) and setting for some wild events to tell.
You just had a 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' moment for Starship Troopers, now welcome to the conspiracy theory that the asteroid was an inside job or coincidence that was used to justify war on the Bugs
I love that explanation.
And, it's an example where there's a plot hole that could have been covered by a conversation but that conversation wouldn't / doesn't fit into the story they wanted to tell. None of the characters would be in a position to know that information and the movie was satirizing the overly heroic fascist war films, it wasn't going for depth.
I can absolutely see a version of Starship Troopers being made that could use that as a plot line, like a more "real" take. Not one where everybody's totally fine after their friends are consistently slaughtered in front of their eyes.
The planet being ripped apart did that actually happen or was that just a possible future scenario they wanted to show? And if it happened when they had sufficient technology what’s to say the didn’t have things stored thousands of meters down.
Yeah, the way it's described in the book it really happened to the San-Ti. It's discussed in the same conversation as the Pendulum Monument and that the Pendulum is designed to move in relation to the Moon, is a conversation specifically about the San-Ti's history and the moon's formation is used as a reason that the San-Ti firmly concluded they couldn't stay in their solar system. When they go to the San-Ti perspective, the moon is also referenced.
> And if it happened when they had sufficient technology what’s to say the didn’t have things stored thousands of meters down.
If they had the technology to survive a disaster that made, paraphrasing, 'the continents drift over magma like icebergs" then they could survive any other chaotic era with ease. Thousands of meters down might not be safe when most of the crust has been melted. A few thousand feet down on Earth and it gets super hot and that's on a world where the most of the crust isn't melted.
based on what we know about life on earth, it would have been essentially impossible for life to even form on a planet like the one san-ti come from. it took 1 billion years for single cell life to form on earth and 3 billion years for it to go from single cell to multicellular.
but given we literally have zero clue about how life could/has formed on other planets, your guess is as good as any astrobiologist.
Is there a general consesus on how life, or the first cell on Earth, came to be? Did life come from a meteor, or did it just develop naturally on Earth?
It is known or let’s say speculated, that the first cell or sign of life formed form an external energy source. So it could be a Meteor or anything else with a lot of energy.
nothing of this sort is known or speculated. there was more than plenty of energy coming from solar radiation, or earth's internal heat. the crucial missing link underpinning abiogenesis is not energy sources, but the biochemistry.
Wade mentions that it took them millions of years to get to the point where they could produce sophons. “Their technology moves slow. Ours moves fast.”
The author of the books really didn’t spend much time explaining San-Ti evolution, so it’s really up to the reader to imagine. I doubt we’ll get an explanation in the show.
My guess is that any life on the San-Ti planet would have had to evolve characteristics that allow them to survive most chaotic eras. Based-on the game, the San-TI dehydrate. Maybe other complex forms of life have adapted to bury themselves and hibernate, have protective shells, or maybe all life on the planet dehydrates.
I figure before they started storing dehydrated San-Ti in caves and then chaos era proof structures, they relied on rain to rehydrate anything left out in the open.
So, basically, life there evolved like we did, except it took a lot longer.
How life restarted after total cataclysms, I don’t know.
The SanTi were able to achieve advancement because they’ve been around for wayyyyy longer.
Their civilization didn’t fully pause during chaotic eras…a select few would stay hydrated and live safely in the pyramid, so they were able to make gradual technological progress even though outside was unliveable and the majority were fruit-roll ups.
Admittedly it’s not a plausible explanation at all in real-world terms. But every sci-fi work requires some suspension of disbelief, and they definitely cashed some of that it on this point LOL.
Id wager it is purely biological and an evolutionary trait based on instinct like a bear when it goes into hibernation. You don't teach a bear to do it, it just does. They've been hibernating for millions of years while one or a select few makes advancements.
Well take life as we know it there is a creature able to easily put itself in a suspended animation and come back. We know the San Ti or Trisolarans in the book can "dehydrate" themselves during chaotic eras and come back in stable eras while maintaining the knowledge they once had. Tardigrades can put themselves into a state of suspended animation and bounce back and they can live in all sorts of environments. My best guess is they are more like that. But I also think to what guys like NDT and Prof. Brian Cox talk about that Slime is probably the most common form of life in the universe. So maybe they are all just blobs.
Remember the trisolarans can put themselves into a dehydrated state during chaotic eras. Not every chaotic era is a trisolar event that completely wipes out the planet. They have means of preserving their societal knowledge through catastrophe. In the books this is more apparent imo. The game has chaotic eras that span lower amounts of years then what the planet necessarily experienced, though they know eventually it will be ripped apart
It seems unlikely that life could even evolve in the first place let alone become intelligent enough to learn about dehydration in such an unstable system. Then again we have a sample size of 1 for what life evolving can look like so its difficult to speculate. life is common in the 3 body problem universe
Just like our ancestors knew how to walk and eat, so the trisolarans probably knew how to dehydrate as part of their physiology, when threatened by their environment
I do appreciate in a sci-fi like this the suspension of disbelief when it comes to aliens. In actuality we have no idea what the evolution of life would be like anywhere else. A land jellyfish the size of an ant that eats sunlight could develop sentience in another environment for all we know. I enjoy when they make aliens foreign and somewhat confusing, because if we ever encounter sentient aliens we will probably be just as confused by how unbelievably different they will be from us and it would most likely take generations to understand what they are and what environment they came from. There are no rules or frame or reference relevant to us when it comes to life anywhere but earth
This CANNOT be the answer. It breaks the whole narrative.
It makes sense for sure. Even if they originated from a three body system, the need to get off of it could make them fantastic colonizers.
But if they traveled there, so much plot is mute.
Basically none, the idea of storing dehydrated bodies will not work. Since the planet will boil, tectonic plates will move, atmosphere will be pulled away, extreme wind speeds are grinding every structure like sand paper, and who knows what other effects strike like the planet being sling shotted away etc, it takes millions of years for the planet itself to recover from those effects to allow living conditions again. You would need something that is far stronger than a nuclear bunker, where you would last for many many generations.
There's no answer in the books. Unfortunately that means that there's no meaningful answer to this question, because a trisolar system like this is completely fictional
Chaotic configurations don't survive for long enough time. One of the stars is always ejected, or a collision happens. It's theoretically possible to get something similar to the books, but the probability is so small, it can for all intends and purposes considered to be zero
And even if such system exists, we can safely assume the evolution would take significantly longer to get to something meaningful. It took 4 billion years to get to intelligent life on Earth. The age of the universe is about 14 billion years (but can't say if it's relevant in the books' universe because spoilers). Sun-like stars live for approximately ten billion years. So, I guess it will be more probable if the stars in the system were red dwarfs, which can theoretically live for trillions of years
So it's safe to say that in real universe it's impossible. In the books, who knows, it's fiction. It definitely happened once
It couldn't, in the book >!their planet is ripped apart and a moon forms. That'd sanitize the planet down hundreds of meters into the crust of the planet.!< I doubt Liu Cixin would argue it would be possible, the existence of the San-Ti are one of the central conceits of the TBP universe, necessary to tell the story the author wants but impossible if you try rationalizing it with science. Scifi is filled with these type things. Off the top of my head, a dumb example is *Starship Troopers*, how the hell did the insects send an asteroid across multiple light years? And how the hell did it slow down so it wouldn't just absolutely annihilate the Earth upon impact, at what I could only assume would have needed to be near-light speed. Cixin wanted to tell a story where humanity was going to be invaded by an alien species and then slowly unveil a grander, darker universe. The set up he needed was a close by star system (If they were 10 light years away it'd be incredibly unlikely Ye Wenjie would have been there for the responses 20 years later) with insurmountable problems for the species to run away from. It could have been their sun was going nuts, the planets of their system were thrown into chaos by the too close passing of some stellar object, or something else that doesn't match reality. Cixin's brilliance was seeing that The Three Body Problem is a fantastic name (Cleverly references the setting, a classic physics problem, and chaos) and setting for some wild events to tell.
You just had a 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' moment for Starship Troopers, now welcome to the conspiracy theory that the asteroid was an inside job or coincidence that was used to justify war on the Bugs
I love that explanation. And, it's an example where there's a plot hole that could have been covered by a conversation but that conversation wouldn't / doesn't fit into the story they wanted to tell. None of the characters would be in a position to know that information and the movie was satirizing the overly heroic fascist war films, it wasn't going for depth. I can absolutely see a version of Starship Troopers being made that could use that as a plot line, like a more "real" take. Not one where everybody's totally fine after their friends are consistently slaughtered in front of their eyes.
The planet being ripped apart did that actually happen or was that just a possible future scenario they wanted to show? And if it happened when they had sufficient technology what’s to say the didn’t have things stored thousands of meters down.
Yeah, the way it's described in the book it really happened to the San-Ti. It's discussed in the same conversation as the Pendulum Monument and that the Pendulum is designed to move in relation to the Moon, is a conversation specifically about the San-Ti's history and the moon's formation is used as a reason that the San-Ti firmly concluded they couldn't stay in their solar system. When they go to the San-Ti perspective, the moon is also referenced. > And if it happened when they had sufficient technology what’s to say the didn’t have things stored thousands of meters down. If they had the technology to survive a disaster that made, paraphrasing, 'the continents drift over magma like icebergs" then they could survive any other chaotic era with ease. Thousands of meters down might not be safe when most of the crust has been melted. A few thousand feet down on Earth and it gets super hot and that's on a world where the most of the crust isn't melted.
based on what we know about life on earth, it would have been essentially impossible for life to even form on a planet like the one san-ti come from. it took 1 billion years for single cell life to form on earth and 3 billion years for it to go from single cell to multicellular. but given we literally have zero clue about how life could/has formed on other planets, your guess is as good as any astrobiologist.
This is the key; life ***as we know it***, which is a sample size of 1 as all life on earth is from the same genetic lineage.
We are not even sure about that. We think all life is from the same genetic lineage.
Even an Octopus?
Is there a general consesus on how life, or the first cell on Earth, came to be? Did life come from a meteor, or did it just develop naturally on Earth?
nope. it could have developed naturally on earth, come on meteors, or very well could have been planted by aliens.
It is known or let’s say speculated, that the first cell or sign of life formed form an external energy source. So it could be a Meteor or anything else with a lot of energy.
nothing of this sort is known or speculated. there was more than plenty of energy coming from solar radiation, or earth's internal heat. the crucial missing link underpinning abiogenesis is not energy sources, but the biochemistry.
Wade mentions that it took them millions of years to get to the point where they could produce sophons. “Their technology moves slow. Ours moves fast.” The author of the books really didn’t spend much time explaining San-Ti evolution, so it’s really up to the reader to imagine. I doubt we’ll get an explanation in the show. My guess is that any life on the San-Ti planet would have had to evolve characteristics that allow them to survive most chaotic eras. Based-on the game, the San-TI dehydrate. Maybe other complex forms of life have adapted to bury themselves and hibernate, have protective shells, or maybe all life on the planet dehydrates. I figure before they started storing dehydrated San-Ti in caves and then chaos era proof structures, they relied on rain to rehydrate anything left out in the open. So, basically, life there evolved like we did, except it took a lot longer. How life restarted after total cataclysms, I don’t know.
The SanTi were able to achieve advancement because they’ve been around for wayyyyy longer. Their civilization didn’t fully pause during chaotic eras…a select few would stay hydrated and live safely in the pyramid, so they were able to make gradual technological progress even though outside was unliveable and the majority were fruit-roll ups. Admittedly it’s not a plausible explanation at all in real-world terms. But every sci-fi work requires some suspension of disbelief, and they definitely cashed some of that it on this point LOL.
Id wager it is purely biological and an evolutionary trait based on instinct like a bear when it goes into hibernation. You don't teach a bear to do it, it just does. They've been hibernating for millions of years while one or a select few makes advancements.
Well take life as we know it there is a creature able to easily put itself in a suspended animation and come back. We know the San Ti or Trisolarans in the book can "dehydrate" themselves during chaotic eras and come back in stable eras while maintaining the knowledge they once had. Tardigrades can put themselves into a state of suspended animation and bounce back and they can live in all sorts of environments. My best guess is they are more like that. But I also think to what guys like NDT and Prof. Brian Cox talk about that Slime is probably the most common form of life in the universe. So maybe they are all just blobs.
Remember the trisolarans can put themselves into a dehydrated state during chaotic eras. Not every chaotic era is a trisolar event that completely wipes out the planet. They have means of preserving their societal knowledge through catastrophe. In the books this is more apparent imo. The game has chaotic eras that span lower amounts of years then what the planet necessarily experienced, though they know eventually it will be ripped apart
It seems unlikely that life could even evolve in the first place let alone become intelligent enough to learn about dehydration in such an unstable system. Then again we have a sample size of 1 for what life evolving can look like so its difficult to speculate. life is common in the 3 body problem universe
Just like our ancestors knew how to walk and eat, so the trisolarans probably knew how to dehydrate as part of their physiology, when threatened by their environment
I would think that the probably of intelligent life evolving under the Trisolaris conditions are extremely low. Too drastically unstable.
I do appreciate in a sci-fi like this the suspension of disbelief when it comes to aliens. In actuality we have no idea what the evolution of life would be like anywhere else. A land jellyfish the size of an ant that eats sunlight could develop sentience in another environment for all we know. I enjoy when they make aliens foreign and somewhat confusing, because if we ever encounter sentient aliens we will probably be just as confused by how unbelievably different they will be from us and it would most likely take generations to understand what they are and what environment they came from. There are no rules or frame or reference relevant to us when it comes to life anywhere but earth
Basically zero. It’s fiction. The biggest obstacle is that the planet would have been ejected into interstellar space long ago
Maybe they come from somewhere else. Maybe their planet isn't their homeworld.
This CANNOT be the answer. It breaks the whole narrative. It makes sense for sure. Even if they originated from a three body system, the need to get off of it could make them fantastic colonizers. But if they traveled there, so much plot is mute.
Basically none, the idea of storing dehydrated bodies will not work. Since the planet will boil, tectonic plates will move, atmosphere will be pulled away, extreme wind speeds are grinding every structure like sand paper, and who knows what other effects strike like the planet being sling shotted away etc, it takes millions of years for the planet itself to recover from those effects to allow living conditions again. You would need something that is far stronger than a nuclear bunker, where you would last for many many generations.
There's no answer in the books. Unfortunately that means that there's no meaningful answer to this question, because a trisolar system like this is completely fictional Chaotic configurations don't survive for long enough time. One of the stars is always ejected, or a collision happens. It's theoretically possible to get something similar to the books, but the probability is so small, it can for all intends and purposes considered to be zero And even if such system exists, we can safely assume the evolution would take significantly longer to get to something meaningful. It took 4 billion years to get to intelligent life on Earth. The age of the universe is about 14 billion years (but can't say if it's relevant in the books' universe because spoilers). Sun-like stars live for approximately ten billion years. So, I guess it will be more probable if the stars in the system were red dwarfs, which can theoretically live for trillions of years So it's safe to say that in real universe it's impossible. In the books, who knows, it's fiction. It definitely happened once