The Three-Body Problem

The purpose of the Red Coast Base is explained via a series of documents that provide “background information,” collected together as a redacted report and published in the 1960s. The first document explains the difference between "gradualistic" science (in which theories are slowly implemented in the real world) and saltatory science (in which a theory is immediately implemented). Because of the speed of implementation, saltatory science (such as the development of the atomic bomb) often seems to provide technological leaps forward. The Americans and Russians both strive toward these massive leaps, the report notes, and the Chinese should do the same. Progress could be achieved in physics, biology, computer science, and the search for alien life. Since the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the least researched field, the report recommends that the Chinese pursue this most stridently. The report lists countries involved in SETI and discusses the potential political ramifications of discovering sentient alien life. The Chinese leadership is concerned that other countries may be sending out their message into space; they don’t want extraterrestrials “only listening to one side” (180).

The goal of the Red Coast Base, the report explains, is to find and potentially contact extraterrestrial life. Part of this process is developing an “elemental linguistic code” (182), a form of language based on math that aliens could understand. A document outlines various drafts for a message that the Chinese might send out into space. Early versions criticize other countries, but the propagandistic elements are slowly whittled away. The final draft praises the accomplishments of humanity while criticizing the “poverty and misery” (184) that humanity has also allowed to become commonplace. The message expresses China’s hope that they can collaborate with any extraterrestrials to “build a better life in this vast universe” (185). The report ends with the admission that immediate results are unlikely but notes that the objective distance of any potential alien life would allow the aliens to provide a unique perspective on the morality of human history.

Wang can’t understand why the work of the Red Coast Base required “such a high security rating” (186). In recent times, he notes, many scientists have come to the conclusion that contacting alien life is inadvisable, particularly after Bill Mathers published a theory via the RAND Corporation that any country contacting alien life would receive such an “overwhelming advantage” to military and economic power that all global conflicts and divisions would intensify, with disastrous results. Ye discusses a theory positing that three types of civilization exist. Type I civilizations can produce and control Earth’s energy output; Type II civilizations can produce and control the sun’s energy output; and Type III civilizations can produce and control the galaxy’s energy output. Since no civilization on Earth has moved beyond a Type I civilization, Ye explains, she gave up hope of ever having enough power to contact extraterrestrial life.

The purpose of the Red Coast Base changed over time. Ye and Yang Weining fell in love and got married. When Ye was pregnant with Yang Dong, Yang Weining and Lei were both killed in the same tragic “accident” on the base. A few years after Yang Dong’s birth, the Red Coast Base was officially abandoned. For Ye, the search for extraterrestrial life has been personal and costly. The feeling that there was no other life in the universe made her feel like an abandoned child, she explains. As Wang is about to leave, Ye reveals that she now lives from “day to day” (191). Wang pities her for her loss.

Wang goes home, thinking about what he learned. He logs into Three Body and—feeling like a “different person”—makes a new profile named Copernicus. This time, he enters a world with a western aesthetic. Inside a palace, he finds a table at which Galileo, Aristotle, and Pope Gregory sit. Wang talks to the three men, who disparage ideas like meditation, preferring “observation and experiment” (194). When Wang compares their ideas to Mozi’s, they dismiss him. Wang explains that he has been working on a model of the universe that allows him to predict the sun’s movement. Wang apprehensively describes his radical theory: The game world actually has three suns. Because their gravity attracts one another, their movements are unpredictable. This, he says, is the “three-body problem” (195). In the game, Stable Eras are possible only when one sun is orbiting in a predictable manner. When the other suns’ gravity drags it out of its rhythm, however, the world descends into a Chaotic Era. Wang compares the three-body problem to a “football game” played on a universal scale, in which the suns are players and the planet is the ball.

Pope Gregory, Aristotle, and Galileo laugh at Wang. Gregory tells his servants to “burn him,” while Galileo asks why no one has seen these three suns. The distant flying stars, Wang explains, are the suns. Aristotle still isn’t convinced, citing the fact that no one has ever seen all three suns at once. Leonardo da Vinci enters the conversation, pointing out that a civilization that did see all three suns may not have survived. Wang agrees, suggesting that a day when all three suns are visible—a tri-solar day—is catastrophic. Still unconvinced, Gregory repeats his order for Wang to be killed. As they move to burn Wang, Leonardo mentions that the death of Wang’s avatar means he’ll “disappear forever” from the game. Just as Wang is about to be killed, the three suns appear. The world is destroyed. An in-game message announces that Civilization 183 has been wiped out by a tri-solar day. Wang’s understanding of the game’s universe means that he’s now allowed to progress to “the second level” (201) of the game.

When Wang is out of the game, Shi calls him with an “urgent” issue. Wang agrees to go to Shi’s office, where Shen Yufei’s husband, Wei Cheng, are waiting for him with a computer scientist named Xu Bingbing. Wei announces that his life is in danger. He tells the group how he has been a lazy, spaced-out person for most of his life. He has always been “too lazy to study” (203) Since childhood, he has had a “natural talent for math” (204) but has never applied this talent. He graduated with numerous degrees but couldn’t apply himself to teaching or academia. Feeling “sick of everything” (205), he joined a Buddhist monastery. There, the abbot urged him to embrace the sense of “emptiness” that he’d always felt inside himself. In his dreams, Wei began to imagine his emptiness taking the form of a sphere. Worried that this sphere had morbid implications, he imagined a second sphere. The spheres’ gravity pulled them into rotation around each other, which reminded Wei of death. Only by introducing a third sphere moving in a “patternless, never-repeating dance” (207) could he introduce a sense of unpredictability that allowed him to forget about his emptiness. In this way, Wei essentially dreamed up the three-body problem without realizing it. The three-body problem was, according to mathematician Henri Poincare, unsolvable. Wei looked into the matter and tried to use an “evolutionary algorithm” to solve the problem. Such an algorithm requires vast computing resources, but Wei used just the paper available to him at the monastery. A few days later, he met Shen Yufei, who’d found one of his discarded pages and declared his work “brilliant.” She offered to find him access to a computer, and he began to fall in love.

Later, he overheard Shen praying to Buddha to help her Lord escape “the sea of misery” (211). Wei asked Shen about her religion, and she seemed reluctant to talk about it. Wei left the monastery with Shen, much to the monks’ disapproval. They married, but their marriage didn’t have much “love of passion, just mutual convenience” (213). Shen was more invested in the three-body problem than she was in Wei. She worked with the Frontiers of Science while Wei refined his algorithm. This arrangement was peaceful, Wei says, until yesterday, when an unknown person threatened to kill him unless he stopped his work on the algorithm. Afterward, Shen pulled out a gun and threatened to kill herself if he stopped. She claimed that stopping would be a “sin” of massive proportions.

Wang agrees to continue Wei’s research. He leaves with Wei, Shi, and Xu. Xu talks to him about the Three Body game. She’s responsible, she claims, for monitoring the game even though she has no idea where it originated. She reiterates Shi’s slogan, reminding Wei that “all this must be the work of people” (218). Wang trusts neither Shi nor Xu. When they reach Shen’s house, they find that she has been killed. Shi examines the “bullet holes in the walls” (219) as Wei confesses that he left out some information. He saw Pan Han fight with Shen the previous day. They seemed to be arguing about a religious conflict, chiefly one in which two groups disagreed over what would happen if the Lord were to return to the world. Pan believed that the Lord would punish humanity. Shen rejected this. Thinking, Wei can’t confirm whether the threatening phone call came from Pan Han. Wei hands all his three-body research to Wang, telling Wang to “publish it under [his] own name” (221). He believes that Wang is a good, responsible man. Wei is frightened. Feeling an encroaching doom, he senses that even Shen’s Lord can no longer protect himself.

At home, Wang opens the “second level” of Three Body. This new iteration seems to combine elements of eastern and western cultures. He sees Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz engaged in a duel over who “invented calculus.” A third person, named Von Neumann, disagrees with Newton’s assertion that calculus will solve the three-body problem. Von Neumann suggests that they construct a form of computer “using people.” Wang realizes that Von Neumann, like himself, is a “real person” rather than an in-game character. Wang, Von Neumann, and Newton visit Emperor Qin Shi Huang to present their theory. Von Neumann assures the emperor that solving the three-body problem is more important than his wars between East and West. He performs a public illustration of the three-body problem using three soldiers, each of them holding a white-and-black flag. The soldiers move like “order-obeying machines” (228) and, by holding up their flags in certain patterns, can perform basic computational tasks. The in-game time speeds up and the three soldiers become 30 million, condensed into a small space. These soldiers then replicate the human computer on a larger scale. Von Neumann and Wang discuss this human operating system, which they name “Qin 1.0.” They try to perform a computational task, but the soldiers with the flags become confused. To the players’ horror, Qin calls for the execution of any soldiers who made a mistake.

The human computer successfully performs a task. Next, Newton tries to enter the three-body problem. As the flags raise and lower, Qin talks about Europeans’ biased views of the East’s creativity. Qin warns the men that they’ll be in trouble if their experiment is a failure. Time speeds up again. The human computer eventually produces a prediction: A Stable Era lasting one year will soon begin. Since every person has been rehydrated to create the computer and since the civilization has dedicated all its resources to this experiment, there’s little room for progress. However, Qin is pleased that the prediction seems true. Unfortunately, the prediction is short-lived. A minister announces the beginning of a tri-solar syzygy, an extremely rare event in which the three suns are arranged in a straight line. The gravity in the game changes, and everything drifts apart. The game ends in the destruction of Civilization Number 184. After logging off, Wang answers his ringing telephone. The person on the call claims to be the game’s administrator. He demands information about Wang’s “age, education, employer, and position” (243), threatening to ban him from the game if he doesn’t provide this information. Wang asks questions, but the man refuses to answer. Instead, he invites Wang to join a players’ meeting the following evening.

Wang goes to the “players’ meet-up” (244). The meeting is at a coffee shop, and six people are present. Wang is surprised to see so few people—and that they range widely in age. Wang recognizes a famous novelist and an academic renowned for blending science with philosophy. Speaking to the others, Wang meets the vice president of a large software corporation, an executive from the State Power Corporation, a journalist, and a scientist. All six are reserved but intrigued by the strange, fascinating nature of the Three Body game. Wang is again surprised when Pan Han arrives and introduces himself as the event’s organizer. Quietly, Wang sends a message to Shi, who encourages him to play up his excitement for the game. The players talk about their fascination with it. When a player discusses reaching Civilization 203, Wang understands that each player experiences the game differently. The most important question, the players surmise, is whether the game is real. Pan says that the world of the game—which he names Trisolaris—“really does exist” (246), but the beings from that world don’t resemble humans. The Trisolarans can dehydrate and rehydrate themselves, as in the game, and they actually built a human computer, though their physical shapes allow them to perform computational tasks far quicker than humans.

Pan dismisses the idea that the game is expensive to develop. He insists that the game has a purity and a simplicity in that it gathers together people with “common ideals.” He asks how the players would feel if the Trisolarans were to visit Earth. The novelist and the journalist are excited by the idea, because they believe that humanity can’t improve without the influence of an external force. The philosopher and the scientist compare the arrival of the Trisolarans to the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas, though they disagree about whether this is good or bad. The two executives don’t like the idea, building on the argument by reminding the group that the Spanish completely destroyed the Aztec civilization. Pan turns to Wang, who agrees with the players intrigued by the arrival of the Trisolarans. Pan sends away those who dislike the idea. Those who remain, he says, are “comrades.”

When Wang next enters the game, the entire world is “unrecognizable.” He finds that the palaces have been replaced by a utilitarian building, and a large, burning sun is clearly visible overhead. None of the characters seem panicked. Wang examines the sun closely and realizes that it’s more like a “giant moon”; the real suns’ light reflects from its surface. Wang watches an old man play a violin. The old man, he realizes, is Albert Einstein. They talk, and Einstein refers to an event in which the moon was created. The name of this event was the great rip, but he finds the memories too painful to go into further detail. Einstein believes that his research could have helped solve the three-body problem, but he was ignored, so instead he plays Mozart on his violin.

When Wang tries to enter the building, Einstein says that there’s “no one in there” (254). The people are assembled behind the building, where they’re watching one of the giant pendulums from the earlier civilizations. The people greet Wang as Copernicus—someone who has crossed many eras. They tell Wang that the pendulums are a “tombstone” in honor of Trisolaris. Wang is horrified by the hopelessness of the civilization. He tells the people about his new algorithm, but they laugh at him. Others have made even more sophisticated attempts to predict the suns’ movements, he’s told. The three-body problem has “no solution.” Wang feels like he has come full circle, back to the point where he started. He wonders why this technologically advanced solution can’t protect itself from the dangers of the Chaotic Eras. The moon, he’s told, is the issue. In Civilization 191, the people saw a frozen star in the sky. This frozen star indicated that the suns would crash into Trisolaris. The suns smashed the planet into two distinct parts, one of which is now the moon. The civilizations needed 90 million years to recover to the point Wang now observes. Research indicates that the solar system in which Trisolaris is located was once home to 12 planets. Now, the suns have obliterated 11 of these planets. The scientists predict that the same thing will happen to Trisolaris within 1,000 years. The giant pendulum doesn’t move like a regular pendulum. Instead, it operates according to the moon’s gravity. To Wang, the pendulum symbolizes either civilizations yearning for order or their “surrender to chaos” (262). Wang is told that the objective of the game has changed. Now, he should explore the galaxy in search of a “new home.” Wang logs out and then logs in again. Now, the game tells him that the objective is urgent. The game is about to finish forever. The game, Wang is told, will proceed to the final scene.

Wang logs into the game again. Now, the world is completely barren. All he finds is a “densely packed crowd” (264), staring up at the sky. Wang realizes that they’re staring at the Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet. The nearest person explains to Wang that the ships are traveling four light-years. They won’t reach their destination anytime soon, so the people watching will never know whether the fleet achieved its mission. An in-game message tells Wang that the game is “over.” When Wang returns to the real world, the game’s message says, he must remain true to the promise that he made. He’s told to attend the Earth-Trisolaris Organization meeting, the address of which he’ll receive in an email.