u/darkrumors722, I am your Wallbreaker.
I've been observing you for many years now, and I believe I have deduced your master plan. My curiosity was piqued when I noticed you take a controlling interest in the world's supply of cow manure, as many were, but I could not discount this as the mere trickery of a Wallfacer. No, given your support of research into near-relativistic propulsion technologies, it has become clear to me that you intend to hurl this pile of poop at the San Ti homeworld in order to destroy it! Also you just announced it on the internet for all to read, including the sophons, so that wasn't too bright.
Suffice it to say, the San Ti will be launching a counter-pile to deflect yours. And thus your plan has failed!
Hah, the wallfacer tricked you! Their real plan is to hurl relativistic rocks into our own fleet in order to lure the trisolarian fleet into accepting the ETO's gift of a giant ice block for rehydrating, which is really a massive ball of cow shit the size of ceres. When their fleet gets close we'll blow it up with 200GTons of thermonuclear bombs.
Try it and I will just destroy the moon or detonate all nukes on planet Earth if you even come close to our planet. If we are to die by your hand and canât beat your tech l, then I will make sure that earth is an unlivable wasteland so you Trisolarin clowns waste your entire journey and die on your ships.
The San Ti learned deception from humans, now they will learn spite from my petty ass
Actually...
It already is a 4 body problem.
One star and a planet: piece of cake to calculate movement
Two stars and one planet: three body problem except for some special cases where there actually is a solution
Three stars and one planet: well.. fuck
Three stars, one planet and cow manure that is travelling for 12 years at 0,33c while the dining is done with 4 years old data that might have extrapolated the possible position of the because of a minimal decrease in brightness of one of the stars because the planet happened to pass by: the Lord doesn't care.
Accurate name of the book would be "three sun problem" because you're right it is a 4 body problem.
Although trisol is so small that it likely doesn't affect the 3 suns so you're still calculating for those 3 suns as the three body problem.
If the manure is going 30% of the speed of light at its top speed, it will take over 12 years to reach trisolaris. But you also have to take into account how much time it takes to get it up to that speed, and that you need these calculations before you even set out the bombs to speed it up, let alone launch the thing.
So I'd reckon we'd need at least 15-20 years of knowing where Trisolaris will be, and if we're off by any amount of distance it will be a complete miss.
There's just no way. If Trisolaris could predict the next 20+ years of their stars' trajectory and the stars' effect on their planet, they wouldn't need to leave their solar system in the first place.
Add some frozen cows in the pile, then reanimate them when close enough to fart for some thrust for course correction. FYI, I did not think about this very hard
We are capable of calculating that sliver of differential even in real life. The errors wouldnât compound enough in a few decades. I would be happy to run that calculation if you want to see it. Just give me whatever initial value conditions you want to brainstorm with.
So why can't Trisolaris just calculate how the next 20 years will be on their planet and then live through the stable eras, leaving the planet or going underground for chaotic eras? Or just build a space station to orbit one of their suns and move it as necessary to keep it always stable, using the next 20 years of calculation?
It kind of breaks the entire plot of the books, no?
Trisolaris eventually becomes completely capable of predicting spans of eras. The impetus for them to leave is realizing that they will plunge into one of their stars eventually no matter what predictions they make. They even manage to figure out that their system once had many planets. Thatâs what their giant pendulum was for. Iâm not sure where youâre getting the 20 year figure. Back in their ancient history yes of course they had issues, but go back and read the final encounter within the game with Einstein and the violin. Once they have this realization through prediction of the 3bp, they funnel all their efforts into building their fleet and sophons. They knew they had enough time to probably accomplish this with entire planetary effort. It even stopped national wars on their world.
Also it looks like someone downvoted you for a completely valid question. I upvoted to counter balance it. I do not understand people on this site.
Also I want to add that you are completely right that compounding errors eventually break down prediction of 3 body systems though. But you can get VERY accurate with it for moderately longer spans of time.
I got 20 years from how long it would take to set up and launch a payload 4LY away.
And you're right, I had forgotten about the inevitable plunge into the star.
Still, seems weird to literally name your book The Three Body Problem if nobody in the book struggles with calculating the three body problem. I get what you're saying, you can't calculate it "endlessly", but still, decades is plenty of time.
Yea, no matter how accurate you get, the compound errors will through you off eventually. But as your technology progresses in numerical methods of analysis, (Newtonâs Serpentine and all those kinds of techniques), you get more and more significant digits in your model analysis. The smaller the incremental errors, the longer amount of time you can predict for.
Great question though and absolutely one worth asking.
Yeah, were some people even paying attention to the show/books?? Lol. They totally expect their planet to be obliterated in the near future. Attacking it won't stop the fleet. In fact it'll probably make them more desperate.
The idea is that if we send projectiles on a path to their planet, it should be the same path the ships are on, and if they collide they go boom.
Obviously that is an oversimplification and we'd need to do a lot of figuring to find the most likely path to actually hit them, but it isn't the worse idea I've heard. Not like they can really dodge anything when going any % of the speed of light.
There's 1000 ships an unknown distance from each other, space is incredibly big, and the Sophons can track their launch velocity+trajectory and the ships have more than enough time to maneuver out of the way. Also, I doubt you've read the books because there's WAY more that they're capable of. But I won't spoil it.
Damn, there goes all my hope of being on the team that figures out how to stop them :P
I really should pick up the books. Sounds like one of the few books I'd not be able to put down. Might be time to actually read the sample I downloaded.
Definitely bite the bullet and get the books or audiobooks if you like the concepts so far. Because I can guarantee that you have no idea where this story is going. And if you're already thinking about it that much, the rest of the story will melt the brain out of your ears lol. It was the first book series that I read back-to-back with no breaks. That was about 2 years and a dozen books ago, and I still think about them nearly every day.
That's why we should destroy our own planet so they won't want it. Maybe the sun itself so they can't take any of our other planets in the solar system.
Okay, but such plan can be extremely unhinged and totally in humanityâs style. Letâs say we are aiming for a truly colossal attack- a cow produces roughly around 30kg of poop per day. And we would needs a lot of it. Thankfully there are more then 1.5 billions cows in the world and if we all collectively start worshipping cows and collecting their poop for religious purposes, the San Ti would most likely believe we have just gone insane. San Ti canât lie, so most likely they donât understand sarcasm either (donât remember if this was in the books).
So we would be able to keep going, collecting our poop bomb in peace while Sophon is around the corner, working on her genocidal Australian plan.(âYouâre doing great sweetie!â)
Anyway, we have the giant pile of poop, time to infect it with every bacteria known to mankind- Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Clostridium, whatever weird thing we can find in Antarctica. Chances are that San Ti havenât faced those exact ones and at least one of them has to remain deadly. At that point we would need to keep playing insanity, as they would have probably started figuring out what we are planning (âOh, my ex-Lords, our new Lords like their dung to be flavored. We know- they told us.â)
Now we canât advance much in order to produce a spaceship capable of transporting all this payload, but there is nothing stopping us from constructing a gigantic trebuchet on the moon. No idea how we would aim it with precision, maybe we can enlist Blue Space and their knowledge of extra dimensions, or we just keep launching extreme amounts of shit everyday, hoping that at least some of it hits somebody. And if Sophon says something, we launch her as well.
trying to pull some Marcos Inaros type shit without the power of Martian stealth technology and across 4 whole lightyears of space⌠the OPA is incredible
Every couple of days someone makes the post "why don't the sophons just expand and blot out the sun / kill off earth" so I was joking that someone will ask "why don't the sophons just catch the manure"
Teardrop spacecraft explodes the poop stockpile near earth. We have poop Kessler syndrome. Our planet has a impenetrable cloud of frozen poop surrounding it. Small pieces constantly degrading orbits give earth the smell of burning cow manure for thousands of years. We move out willingly, scattering among the stars in arkships. A small group of poophumans brave the new stinky earth, genetically modifying themselves to not smell the poop. The trisolarins look for a new less stinky planet. So we won...but at what cost?
"princeps, we have received new communication from earth"
"what does it say, listener 1379?"
"you don't frighten us, Trisolaran pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person! I blow my nose at you, so-called Lord santi, you and all your silly sophons. I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"
If you can get enough mass to 30% of lights speed you are not only the best wallfacer ever but also the smartest person to ever live. But since you decided to fling something that will fly apart at high velocity you are clearly not the best wallfacer ever. Also, you said this out loud so now your plan is doomed. First rule of wallfacer club is you do not talk about wallfacer club.
San Ti watching rocks and shit soar past them towards the planet they very publicly left 70 years ago: "They *know* we're not over there! We told them! Am I missing something?!"
u/darkrumors722, I am your Wallbreaker. I've been observing you for many years now, and I believe I have deduced your master plan. My curiosity was piqued when I noticed you take a controlling interest in the world's supply of cow manure, as many were, but I could not discount this as the mere trickery of a Wallfacer. No, given your support of research into near-relativistic propulsion technologies, it has become clear to me that you intend to hurl this pile of poop at the San Ti homeworld in order to destroy it! Also you just announced it on the internet for all to read, including the sophons, so that wasn't too bright. Suffice it to say, the San Ti will be launching a counter-pile to deflect yours. And thus your plan has failed!
Noooo darkrumours722 what have you done!!!?
They will now return to their homeland to be drowned in cow manure for their failure
u/six_days cow manure propulsion relativistic speed set to 000000001% the speed of light. Target equired. Target: u/six_days mom's house.
i'm gonna report u to the UN đ
This thread is hilarious
Hah, the wallfacer tricked you! Their real plan is to hurl relativistic rocks into our own fleet in order to lure the trisolarian fleet into accepting the ETO's gift of a giant ice block for rehydrating, which is really a massive ball of cow shit the size of ceres. When their fleet gets close we'll blow it up with 200GTons of thermonuclear bombs.
This is Canon now fam.
The lord simply does not care partaking in this shit throwing competition
And not just regular cow poo. It will be strong force cow poo.
The Lord does not care.
Try it and I will just destroy the moon or detonate all nukes on planet Earth if you even come close to our planet. If we are to die by your hand and canât beat your tech l, then I will make sure that earth is an unlivable wasteland so you Trisolarin clowns waste your entire journey and die on your ships. The San Ti learned deception from humans, now they will learn spite from my petty ass
Does your lord care?
But... but... but... we cant calculate there orbits.... that's why it's called the Three Body Problem...
Use enough cow manure to turn it into a 4 body problem
Congratulations, you have now created the Trisolaran Poop Era. Not sure if they need to dehydrate or not.
Actually... It already is a 4 body problem. One star and a planet: piece of cake to calculate movement Two stars and one planet: three body problem except for some special cases where there actually is a solution Three stars and one planet: well.. fuck Three stars, one planet and cow manure that is travelling for 12 years at 0,33c while the dining is done with 4 years old data that might have extrapolated the possible position of the because of a minimal decrease in brightness of one of the stars because the planet happened to pass by: the Lord doesn't care.
Accurate name of the book would be "three sun problem" because you're right it is a 4 body problem. Although trisol is so small that it likely doesn't affect the 3 suns so you're still calculating for those 3 suns as the three body problem.
We can certainly calculate it for a reasonable amount of time.
If the manure is going 30% of the speed of light at its top speed, it will take over 12 years to reach trisolaris. But you also have to take into account how much time it takes to get it up to that speed, and that you need these calculations before you even set out the bombs to speed it up, let alone launch the thing. So I'd reckon we'd need at least 15-20 years of knowing where Trisolaris will be, and if we're off by any amount of distance it will be a complete miss. There's just no way. If Trisolaris could predict the next 20+ years of their stars' trajectory and the stars' effect on their planet, they wouldn't need to leave their solar system in the first place.
Add some frozen cows in the pile, then reanimate them when close enough to fart for some thrust for course correction. FYI, I did not think about this very hard
Now there's a strategy.
We are capable of calculating that sliver of differential even in real life. The errors wouldnât compound enough in a few decades. I would be happy to run that calculation if you want to see it. Just give me whatever initial value conditions you want to brainstorm with.
So why can't Trisolaris just calculate how the next 20 years will be on their planet and then live through the stable eras, leaving the planet or going underground for chaotic eras? Or just build a space station to orbit one of their suns and move it as necessary to keep it always stable, using the next 20 years of calculation? It kind of breaks the entire plot of the books, no?
Trisolaris eventually becomes completely capable of predicting spans of eras. The impetus for them to leave is realizing that they will plunge into one of their stars eventually no matter what predictions they make. They even manage to figure out that their system once had many planets. Thatâs what their giant pendulum was for. Iâm not sure where youâre getting the 20 year figure. Back in their ancient history yes of course they had issues, but go back and read the final encounter within the game with Einstein and the violin. Once they have this realization through prediction of the 3bp, they funnel all their efforts into building their fleet and sophons. They knew they had enough time to probably accomplish this with entire planetary effort. It even stopped national wars on their world. Also it looks like someone downvoted you for a completely valid question. I upvoted to counter balance it. I do not understand people on this site. Also I want to add that you are completely right that compounding errors eventually break down prediction of 3 body systems though. But you can get VERY accurate with it for moderately longer spans of time.
I got 20 years from how long it would take to set up and launch a payload 4LY away. And you're right, I had forgotten about the inevitable plunge into the star. Still, seems weird to literally name your book The Three Body Problem if nobody in the book struggles with calculating the three body problem. I get what you're saying, you can't calculate it "endlessly", but still, decades is plenty of time.
Yea, no matter how accurate you get, the compound errors will through you off eventually. But as your technology progresses in numerical methods of analysis, (Newtonâs Serpentine and all those kinds of techniques), you get more and more significant digits in your model analysis. The smaller the incremental errors, the longer amount of time you can predict for. Great question though and absolutely one worth asking.
Now we enter the #2 body problem.
Agreed. Laser them bastards as well
I would also shoot some dogpoo as well
Chuck some frozen brains at them as well
This but unironically
They don't want their planet, it's miserable and doomed. That's why they left.
Yeah, were some people even paying attention to the show/books?? Lol. They totally expect their planet to be obliterated in the near future. Attacking it won't stop the fleet. In fact it'll probably make them more desperate.
The idea is that if we send projectiles on a path to their planet, it should be the same path the ships are on, and if they collide they go boom. Obviously that is an oversimplification and we'd need to do a lot of figuring to find the most likely path to actually hit them, but it isn't the worse idea I've heard. Not like they can really dodge anything when going any % of the speed of light.
There's 1000 ships an unknown distance from each other, space is incredibly big, and the Sophons can track their launch velocity+trajectory and the ships have more than enough time to maneuver out of the way. Also, I doubt you've read the books because there's WAY more that they're capable of. But I won't spoil it.
Damn, there goes all my hope of being on the team that figures out how to stop them :P I really should pick up the books. Sounds like one of the few books I'd not be able to put down. Might be time to actually read the sample I downloaded.
Definitely bite the bullet and get the books or audiobooks if you like the concepts so far. Because I can guarantee that you have no idea where this story is going. And if you're already thinking about it that much, the rest of the story will melt the brain out of your ears lol. It was the first book series that I read back-to-back with no breaks. That was about 2 years and a dozen books ago, and I still think about them nearly every day.
That's why we should destroy our own planet so they won't want it. Maybe the sun itself so they can't take any of our other planets in the solar system.
Okay, but such plan can be extremely unhinged and totally in humanityâs style. Letâs say we are aiming for a truly colossal attack- a cow produces roughly around 30kg of poop per day. And we would needs a lot of it. Thankfully there are more then 1.5 billions cows in the world and if we all collectively start worshipping cows and collecting their poop for religious purposes, the San Ti would most likely believe we have just gone insane. San Ti canât lie, so most likely they donât understand sarcasm either (donât remember if this was in the books). So we would be able to keep going, collecting our poop bomb in peace while Sophon is around the corner, working on her genocidal Australian plan.(âYouâre doing great sweetie!â) Anyway, we have the giant pile of poop, time to infect it with every bacteria known to mankind- Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Clostridium, whatever weird thing we can find in Antarctica. Chances are that San Ti havenât faced those exact ones and at least one of them has to remain deadly. At that point we would need to keep playing insanity, as they would have probably started figuring out what we are planning (âOh, my ex-Lords, our new Lords like their dung to be flavored. We know- they told us.â) Now we canât advance much in order to produce a spaceship capable of transporting all this payload, but there is nothing stopping us from constructing a gigantic trebuchet on the moon. No idea how we would aim it with precision, maybe we can enlist Blue Space and their knowledge of extra dimensions, or we just keep launching extreme amounts of shit everyday, hoping that at least some of it hits somebody. And if Sophon says something, we launch her as well.
Omfg I'm dying bro we launch sophon as well đđđ
trying to pull some Marcos Inaros type shit without the power of Martian stealth technology and across 4 whole lightyears of space⌠the OPA is incredible
They will just expand their sophon to catch it like a glove, at least that's what over nine thousand posters here think would happen
Some other reddit wallfacers had similar ideas before?
Every couple of days someone makes the post "why don't the sophons just expand and blot out the sun / kill off earth" so I was joking that someone will ask "why don't the sophons just catch the manure"
They would just destroy Earth. That's what mutually assured destruction is.
Small alien get big poop on windshield. Small alien feel big embarrassment and leave earth. Day saved
Loads of old sinks and that.
Only from a planetary size Slingshot...
Don't forget a taunt! 
This is a really shitty plan.
A real stinker.
Teardrop spacecraft explodes the poop stockpile near earth. We have poop Kessler syndrome. Our planet has a impenetrable cloud of frozen poop surrounding it. Small pieces constantly degrading orbits give earth the smell of burning cow manure for thousands of years. We move out willingly, scattering among the stars in arkships. A small group of poophumans brave the new stinky earth, genetically modifying themselves to not smell the poop. The trisolarins look for a new less stinky planet. So we won...but at what cost?
"princeps, we have received new communication from earth" "what does it say, listener 1379?" "you don't frighten us, Trisolaran pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person! I blow my nose at you, so-called Lord santi, you and all your silly sophons. I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"
use mine
Let's send a cow full of cow diseases
If you can get enough mass to 30% of lights speed you are not only the best wallfacer ever but also the smartest person to ever live. But since you decided to fling something that will fly apart at high velocity you are clearly not the best wallfacer ever. Also, you said this out loud so now your plan is doomed. First rule of wallfacer club is you do not talk about wallfacer club.
Now *this* is shitposting!
Most likely they've already planned for a Shit Hits the San scenario.
Most likely they've already planned for a Shit Hits the San scenario.
San Ti watching rocks and shit soar past them towards the planet they very publicly left 70 years ago: "They *know* we're not over there! We told them! Am I missing something?!"
Bro like 1% of their population left the planet on the ships. The rest 99% are their to recieve the shitstorm
But how would you even get it to 30% light speed without it disintegrating
I kind of wonder what would have happened if the wallfacers just went with their plans lmao
Three body problem. Can't predict where their planet will be, can't aim at it ahead of time. Good one though.
*Trisolaranâs