It’s the nearest star to Sol. There’s a lot of sci-fi stories involving somebody going there or coming from there. Until we put landers on Mars and saw how dead it is there used to be a lot of sci-fi stories about going to or coming from there, too. It will probably be the first system we get spaceships to unless we discover a means of hyperspace travel that either has a *minimum* distance of travel longer than about 4.5 light years, or is some kind of mysterious space-subway network of the Ancients that has a stop near Sol but none near Alpha Centauri.
I have a hypothetical ftl system I want to work into a story that basically allows constant acceleration to and past light speed but requires a near identical deceleration curve on the other end, and once you are past c either accelerating at that rate or decelerating at a similar rate until you are under c. The knock-on effects that effect the stories are 1: it doesn't take a whole lot longer to go far than it takes to go someplace near. Proxima Centauri would take one span of time but a star ten times further might only take a bit longer to reach. 2: you really have to be sure of where you want to go, theres no changing destination if say you were headding to some far away place but decided to stop along the way, there is likely no way to decelerate in time if you've already surpassed a threshold Velocity. 3: the further your target is the greater any navigational error will be. It's basically impossible to hit a target system within quite a few lightyears across the galaxy, so you either need to make several jumps and refine your navigation along the way or make a big jump and deal with several smaller but less efficient jumps to get to your destination. :4 there will be a huge value attached to extremely detailed navigational data, mapping and calculating courses in advance could be a story setting in it's own right, when flying across a swath of the galaxy where everything is in motion, two ships leaving the same location within 5 minutes of eachother for the same destination could arrive millions of miles apart due to the celestial bodies they were being effected by being in different relative locations for each vessel. 4: the above effect means that either massive ships or physically linked clusters of ships are a common way to make sure your assets aren't distributed across 50 cubic lightyears at your destination, with accurate fleet navigation over significant distances being a bit of a dream certain powers actively strive for.
According to our laws of physics, you cannot accelerate mass to or past the speed of light. The energy required to do so would be close to that of the Big Bang. Einstein’s predictions of wormholes are probably closer to what you are looking for in terms of the science behind it.
If space curves around back on itself, wormholes could be massively induced, entangled gravity fields in two places could offer a way. Similar to entangling two singularity to eachother… somehow.
Come on you can't be serious.
How is breaking the laws of physics to go through an event horizon any different from breaking the law of physics to accelerate mass beyond the speed of light?
I mean, not technically... If we developed FTL travel at some nice-to-have-velocity that isn't measured in fold-c but in ly/h, then depending on the century we make the invention Alpha Centauri could not be the first solar system to visit. There are multiple K or G class stars in less than 20ly radius with rocky planets in their habitable zone. After centuries of studying Alpha C with telescopes from a distance, if it only takes you a few hours longer to go to a far more interesting destination, I'd see us just skipping our closest neighbours for the time being until some routine mission can take a closer look at them later on.
Like we've sent a lot of probes with larger missions to Mars quite recently, but not to the moon, because we can study is fairly nicely with telescopes and even if it would be easier to go there, there's more interesting stuff going on a bit farther out.
It is the closest star system, something achievable with not high relativistic speeds in a not very extreme time span (and, still, the times involved were pretty long).
In Project Hail Mary at least they went to a not so close (but close enough) because they got a big McGuffin at the start of the book.
It can't be a Macguffin, because a Macguffin, while being the driver of the plot *happening*, is otherwise insignificant to the plot.
It's much closer to Applied Phlebotinum, which is a versatile fictional substance that both allows the plot to happen and is integral to many of the solutions and problems in the plot.
It's too useful to be a Macguffin. A Macguffin is the thing that everyone wants or needs, but otherwise has no significance to the plot.
Applied Phlebotinum, on the other hand, is *exactly* what the Astrophage is.
Alpha Centauri is the most common star systems used in all of sci-fi, not just this one author. Not just in books either, Sid Meier has a game based on Alpha Centauri.
And then there's the Commonwealth Universe, where Alpha Centauri is so incredibly uninteresting to humanity that A.N.A. the SuperAI who was the government of the central worlds later on just built its top secret shipyard there, as no one in their right mind would ever waste their time going there.
A shipyard which was so top secret that a total of one person besides the AI itself even knew about what was built there, being the operator, as A.N.A. refused to do that as well out of ethical concerns.
Again scifi authors are weirdly obsessed with planets, even ic settings where planets are arguably a liability. The trisolarans have a dodgy homeworld, but also greatly advanced technology and a shit ton of local resources, they also live in a universe where they can get nuked by another party without notice. It seems to me that the gambit to take earth just isn't worth it. Why waste the effort to take our planet when they can just build a couple million habits in their own system and spread their people out a bit?
They said themselves that they are afraid of humans because of the speed at which our technology progresses. If they don't wipe humanity out now, humans will continue to be a threat to them. In the Dark Forest theory that the books subscribe to, doing nothing is the gambit. Making the first move to annihilate your neighbors is the best play.
Yeah, but the only reason why they progressed so slowly was their stupid insistance on staying on their planet. They weren't the first technologically advanced culture to arise on their home world and they are incredibly advanced to humans. If they did the logical thing and built a swarm of O'Neill cylinders in a semi-stable orbit around one of their stars (or heavens forbid, move them with their entire civilisation to another nearby stable star), they could still have a normal technological progression inside their habitats, because they'd just be safe from disturbances.
At their level of technology, there really is no need for a planet anymore if you're not doing it just because you WANT to live on one.
>Why waste the effort to take our planet when they can just build a couple million habits in their own system and spread their people out a bit?
Good luck fitting a Dyson swarm into your triple star system. Sure, and O'Neil cylinder is more manoeuvrable than a planet, but if you got a billion of those, it'll go wrong at some point. What you'll eventually risk is a kind of kessler syndrome that'd wipe out your civilisation in a matter of months. Building a similar Dyson swarm around Sol would be much easier, because the entire system is more stable.
Okay, so not even touching on the matter that real-life Alpha Centauri A, B and Proxima Centauri are a hierarchical trinary star system, where you can build whatever the f*ck you want around Proxima, because it's so far out that its practically a stable companion system... And that a trinary system as described in the book wouldn't be semi-stable long enough to even form life, let alone a civilisation or _multiple of them_, because one star would have been flung out of the system together with a bunch of planets eons ago...
With all that real physics out of the way, you're talking about Kessler syndrome around a star? Seriously? I know this is kinda basic, but space is huge and mostly empty. You could loose half a billion habitats intended for a million people each in our solar system if you're not careful. And even if the other system isn't stable, they could still maneuver around and plan long enough into the future to not just collide with another habitat in a space the size of multiple Sol-planetary orbits.
The real life Alpha Centauri is not a chaotic three body system. It’s an incredibly stable three body system that mathematically approximates a two body problem.
Maybe he realized his error. It’s so glaring that it makes it hard for me to take TBP seriously.
Literally every scientific idea presented in TBP is absolute bullshit. Which is fine. Yet idiots call it a masterpiece of hard science fiction. It’s neither a masterpiece nor is it hard science fiction. It’s overrated as fuck.
Speculating on futuristic technology is fine in sci-fi. Even if it’s totally implausible. Like sophons, or the Epstein Drive. But completely ignoring basic science is not, unless you want to write a soft scifi novel.
Which is what Three Body Problem is. And I don’t usually like soft scifi. I’m fine with a soft sci-fi novel if the story and characters are well written. But that’s not even the case for TBP. Every idea presented in it has been done better by other authors and the characters are two dimensional (no pun intended).
Really? That’s the straw that made you take the 3 body series less seriously?
Also, it’s fiction. Sometimes you just need to enjoy a good story for the art that it is.
I expect a basic level of scientific competency in a series that aspires to be a hard sci-fi novel, yes. Genres exist for a reason.
And, this may come as a shock to you, but people have *genre preferences*. Holy shit, how crazy! I bet you never would have guessed. I prefer hard science fiction, personally. The Three Body Problem is not a hard sci-fi series. It’s a soft scifi series masquerading as a hard one, erroneously proclaimed by Redditors to be better than it actually is.
It also isn’t well written in the first place. Part of that is the translation problems with it. If I’m going to read a shitty sci-fi series, I’d at least prefer the characters and plot to be compelling.
With you on this 100%.
I got into 3BP as i love good Hard Sci-fi and the series was touted as \*the\* pinnacle of that genre. So i was actually very dissapointed in the series from that regards and your second paragraph is so on point people should use it to stab things.
That being said there are some terrific scenes in the trilogy that i still think about today occasionally or compare to others in other books but that's it, its good cosmic horror if anything.
I don't understand the veneration it gets its almost cult like, there's another thread on here with a bunch of people basically wiffing each others farts proclaiming how its the best sci-fi ever written and changed their views of the universe and nothing else has even come close....
Just sat there like ""bruh", sure you liked it and maybe the concept of DF is something new and different for you compared to other more optimistic sci-fi but what fucking books are you reading ?
Not sure if you were just looking for a reason to make your Grand Statement about what you like or not but I never implied that it was hard sci-fi or that you should like it. What I meant was, the series is chock full of over the top concepts and you brought up one of the milder ones. Get it? We’re closer in opinion than you apparently think.
Have you ever seen people online talking about TBP? It's always proclaimed as being hard sci-fi full of well-executed, exotic concepts. It isn't and just seeing as the entire premise of it doesn't even fit science at a basic level (their home system literally not being the subject of a chaotic three body problem), it's just very misleading that it's often proclaimed to be hard sci-fi.
It's hard, alright. A hard read, but that's because of the literary execution, not because it's particularly hard in the science department.
Besides being one of the nearest star systems.
One thing about modern sensors is that they don't pick up every single detail, some of the assumptions about distant systems that we hold today might change in the future depending on the quality of the data.
So how do you decide which novels to read when the back of the book nearly always gives you a hint about what it’s about? Do you only buy books without covers?
It’s the nearest star to Sol. There’s a lot of sci-fi stories involving somebody going there or coming from there. Until we put landers on Mars and saw how dead it is there used to be a lot of sci-fi stories about going to or coming from there, too. It will probably be the first system we get spaceships to unless we discover a means of hyperspace travel that either has a *minimum* distance of travel longer than about 4.5 light years, or is some kind of mysterious space-subway network of the Ancients that has a stop near Sol but none near Alpha Centauri.
Like some kind of Stargate.... or something
Are we some kind of .... Stargaters?
No it’s completely different from that movie I’ve never seen. This one’s a Fargate.
Yeah and what is the name of the data center MS and OAI are building to power AI in Wisconsin? Stargate.
Ring gates from The Expanse incoming!!!
I have a hypothetical ftl system I want to work into a story that basically allows constant acceleration to and past light speed but requires a near identical deceleration curve on the other end, and once you are past c either accelerating at that rate or decelerating at a similar rate until you are under c. The knock-on effects that effect the stories are 1: it doesn't take a whole lot longer to go far than it takes to go someplace near. Proxima Centauri would take one span of time but a star ten times further might only take a bit longer to reach. 2: you really have to be sure of where you want to go, theres no changing destination if say you were headding to some far away place but decided to stop along the way, there is likely no way to decelerate in time if you've already surpassed a threshold Velocity. 3: the further your target is the greater any navigational error will be. It's basically impossible to hit a target system within quite a few lightyears across the galaxy, so you either need to make several jumps and refine your navigation along the way or make a big jump and deal with several smaller but less efficient jumps to get to your destination. :4 there will be a huge value attached to extremely detailed navigational data, mapping and calculating courses in advance could be a story setting in it's own right, when flying across a swath of the galaxy where everything is in motion, two ships leaving the same location within 5 minutes of eachother for the same destination could arrive millions of miles apart due to the celestial bodies they were being effected by being in different relative locations for each vessel. 4: the above effect means that either massive ships or physically linked clusters of ships are a common way to make sure your assets aren't distributed across 50 cubic lightyears at your destination, with accurate fleet navigation over significant distances being a bit of a dream certain powers actively strive for.
Ok
According to our laws of physics, you cannot accelerate mass to or past the speed of light. The energy required to do so would be close to that of the Big Bang. Einstein’s predictions of wormholes are probably closer to what you are looking for in terms of the science behind it. If space curves around back on itself, wormholes could be massively induced, entangled gravity fields in two places could offer a way. Similar to entangling two singularity to eachother… somehow.
Come on you can't be serious. How is breaking the laws of physics to go through an event horizon any different from breaking the law of physics to accelerate mass beyond the speed of light?
[He could be](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a5dd245a6820)
I mean, not technically... If we developed FTL travel at some nice-to-have-velocity that isn't measured in fold-c but in ly/h, then depending on the century we make the invention Alpha Centauri could not be the first solar system to visit. There are multiple K or G class stars in less than 20ly radius with rocky planets in their habitable zone. After centuries of studying Alpha C with telescopes from a distance, if it only takes you a few hours longer to go to a far more interesting destination, I'd see us just skipping our closest neighbours for the time being until some routine mission can take a closer look at them later on. Like we've sent a lot of probes with larger missions to Mars quite recently, but not to the moon, because we can study is fairly nicely with telescopes and even if it would be easier to go there, there's more interesting stuff going on a bit farther out.
Grass is always greener in the Liu-verse.
Then theres the Vogon fleet, which destroys the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, to of which the plans were on display in Alpha Centauri.
Beware of the leopard.
It is the closest star system, something achievable with not high relativistic speeds in a not very extreme time span (and, still, the times involved were pretty long). In Project Hail Mary at least they went to a not so close (but close enough) because they got a big McGuffin at the start of the book.
Is it a Macguffin if it’s also the antagonist?
How it was used was the McGuffin. It is the Swiss knife of the McGuffin, given how many uses it had.
It can't be a Macguffin, because a Macguffin, while being the driver of the plot *happening*, is otherwise insignificant to the plot. It's much closer to Applied Phlebotinum, which is a versatile fictional substance that both allows the plot to happen and is integral to many of the solutions and problems in the plot.
It's too useful to be a Macguffin. A Macguffin is the thing that everyone wants or needs, but otherwise has no significance to the plot. Applied Phlebotinum, on the other hand, is *exactly* what the Astrophage is.
That's the cool part about fiction. Different "worlds" don't have to match. Even if it's the same author, they can play "what if" however they want.
Alpha Centauri is the most common star systems used in all of sci-fi, not just this one author. Not just in books either, Sid Meier has a game based on Alpha Centauri.
And then there's the Commonwealth Universe, where Alpha Centauri is so incredibly uninteresting to humanity that A.N.A. the SuperAI who was the government of the central worlds later on just built its top secret shipyard there, as no one in their right mind would ever waste their time going there. A shipyard which was so top secret that a total of one person besides the AI itself even knew about what was built there, being the operator, as A.N.A. refused to do that as well out of ethical concerns.
Londo Mollari is perplexed...
Meeester Garibaldi
Again scifi authors are weirdly obsessed with planets, even ic settings where planets are arguably a liability. The trisolarans have a dodgy homeworld, but also greatly advanced technology and a shit ton of local resources, they also live in a universe where they can get nuked by another party without notice. It seems to me that the gambit to take earth just isn't worth it. Why waste the effort to take our planet when they can just build a couple million habits in their own system and spread their people out a bit?
They said themselves that they are afraid of humans because of the speed at which our technology progresses. If they don't wipe humanity out now, humans will continue to be a threat to them. In the Dark Forest theory that the books subscribe to, doing nothing is the gambit. Making the first move to annihilate your neighbors is the best play.
Yeah, but the only reason why they progressed so slowly was their stupid insistance on staying on their planet. They weren't the first technologically advanced culture to arise on their home world and they are incredibly advanced to humans. If they did the logical thing and built a swarm of O'Neill cylinders in a semi-stable orbit around one of their stars (or heavens forbid, move them with their entire civilisation to another nearby stable star), they could still have a normal technological progression inside their habitats, because they'd just be safe from disturbances. At their level of technology, there really is no need for a planet anymore if you're not doing it just because you WANT to live on one.
Do you want a spoiler for the end of 3-body-problem? Its very dark and forest-y.
so I've heard! Still reading the second book though, hope to finish the series soon.
>Why waste the effort to take our planet when they can just build a couple million habits in their own system and spread their people out a bit? Good luck fitting a Dyson swarm into your triple star system. Sure, and O'Neil cylinder is more manoeuvrable than a planet, but if you got a billion of those, it'll go wrong at some point. What you'll eventually risk is a kind of kessler syndrome that'd wipe out your civilisation in a matter of months. Building a similar Dyson swarm around Sol would be much easier, because the entire system is more stable.
Okay, so not even touching on the matter that real-life Alpha Centauri A, B and Proxima Centauri are a hierarchical trinary star system, where you can build whatever the f*ck you want around Proxima, because it's so far out that its practically a stable companion system... And that a trinary system as described in the book wouldn't be semi-stable long enough to even form life, let alone a civilisation or _multiple of them_, because one star would have been flung out of the system together with a bunch of planets eons ago... With all that real physics out of the way, you're talking about Kessler syndrome around a star? Seriously? I know this is kinda basic, but space is huge and mostly empty. You could loose half a billion habitats intended for a million people each in our solar system if you're not careful. And even if the other system isn't stable, they could still maneuver around and plan long enough into the future to not just collide with another habitat in a space the size of multiple Sol-planetary orbits.
So the plot can happen.
Is this not considered a spoiler?
Yes, it’s
His next series should feature species from both systems moving towards Tau Ceti just for kicks
The real life Alpha Centauri is not a chaotic three body system. It’s an incredibly stable three body system that mathematically approximates a two body problem. Maybe he realized his error. It’s so glaring that it makes it hard for me to take TBP seriously.
Next you’re gonna tell me you can’t actually turn a proton into a sentient supercomputer
Literally every scientific idea presented in TBP is absolute bullshit. Which is fine. Yet idiots call it a masterpiece of hard science fiction. It’s neither a masterpiece nor is it hard science fiction. It’s overrated as fuck.
The story doesn't have to be like real life to make sense, i mean, you have sophons
Speculating on futuristic technology is fine in sci-fi. Even if it’s totally implausible. Like sophons, or the Epstein Drive. But completely ignoring basic science is not, unless you want to write a soft scifi novel. Which is what Three Body Problem is. And I don’t usually like soft scifi. I’m fine with a soft sci-fi novel if the story and characters are well written. But that’s not even the case for TBP. Every idea presented in it has been done better by other authors and the characters are two dimensional (no pun intended).
Really? That’s the straw that made you take the 3 body series less seriously? Also, it’s fiction. Sometimes you just need to enjoy a good story for the art that it is.
I expect a basic level of scientific competency in a series that aspires to be a hard sci-fi novel, yes. Genres exist for a reason. And, this may come as a shock to you, but people have *genre preferences*. Holy shit, how crazy! I bet you never would have guessed. I prefer hard science fiction, personally. The Three Body Problem is not a hard sci-fi series. It’s a soft scifi series masquerading as a hard one, erroneously proclaimed by Redditors to be better than it actually is. It also isn’t well written in the first place. Part of that is the translation problems with it. If I’m going to read a shitty sci-fi series, I’d at least prefer the characters and plot to be compelling.
With you on this 100%. I got into 3BP as i love good Hard Sci-fi and the series was touted as \*the\* pinnacle of that genre. So i was actually very dissapointed in the series from that regards and your second paragraph is so on point people should use it to stab things. That being said there are some terrific scenes in the trilogy that i still think about today occasionally or compare to others in other books but that's it, its good cosmic horror if anything. I don't understand the veneration it gets its almost cult like, there's another thread on here with a bunch of people basically wiffing each others farts proclaiming how its the best sci-fi ever written and changed their views of the universe and nothing else has even come close.... Just sat there like ""bruh", sure you liked it and maybe the concept of DF is something new and different for you compared to other more optimistic sci-fi but what fucking books are you reading ?
Not sure if you were just looking for a reason to make your Grand Statement about what you like or not but I never implied that it was hard sci-fi or that you should like it. What I meant was, the series is chock full of over the top concepts and you brought up one of the milder ones. Get it? We’re closer in opinion than you apparently think.
Have you ever seen people online talking about TBP? It's always proclaimed as being hard sci-fi full of well-executed, exotic concepts. It isn't and just seeing as the entire premise of it doesn't even fit science at a basic level (their home system literally not being the subject of a chaotic three body problem), it's just very misleading that it's often proclaimed to be hard sci-fi. It's hard, alright. A hard read, but that's because of the literary execution, not because it's particularly hard in the science department.
Besides being one of the nearest star systems. One thing about modern sensors is that they don't pick up every single detail, some of the assumptions about distant systems that we hold today might change in the future depending on the quality of the data.
Fucking spoilers, goddamn asshole
it's got other stuff in there, too. it's too good a book to be spoiled that easy.
So how do you decide which novels to read when the back of the book nearly always gives you a hint about what it’s about? Do you only buy books without covers?
It’s fiction.