The Three-Body Problem
Metadata
- Author: Cixin Liu
Highlights
“More than three hundred years! A dozen generations. When this tree was but a shrub, it was still the Ming Dynasty. During all these years, can you imagine how many storms it had weathered, how many events it had witnessed? But in a few minutes you cut it down. You really felt nothing?”
One day evetythibg may be new, and nothing of an old world will remain - not even its memory.
The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper—or, at least, neutral—act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?
How many thibgs do we do today that seem normal, even good, but are in fact inherently evil? How much do we do simply inthe nme of progress?
Wang thought that if the architect had intended to express a feeling about the universe, the design was a success: The more transparent something was, the more mysterious it seemed. The universe itself was transparent; as long as you were sufficiently sharp-eyed, you could see as far as you liked. But the farther you looked, the more mysterious it became.
“But the countdown … there’s only 1,091 hours left.” “Fuck the countdown. Your first priority right now is to make sure you can stand straight and not collapse into a heap. Then we can talk about other things.”
Saltatory mode: theoretical, fundamental results rapidly become applied technology, leading to a technological leap. Recent examples include the appearance of atomic weapons. Until the forties, some of the foremost physicists still thought it would never be possible to release the energy of the atom. But atomic weapons then appeared within a very short period. We define a technology leap to occur when fundamental science is converted to applied technology across a great span in an extremely brief time interval.
Much like LLMs jn our time.
And the listener was sure that the Trisolaran government had already given the order to send a message to that distant world to lure them to respond. Maybe the message had already been sent, but maybe not. If the latter was true, then the listener had a singular chance to make his own humble life glow.
A game where thr holy grain is a Red 10 signal. Meantime discepher other signals abd discover thsn prhaps responding makes no sense.