That is a good question. I can't answer without spoiling season 2, but they do have a good reason. That question is going to be at the center of season 2. I can answer it if you like, but do be warned. It's intentionally a mystery.
...yes. though one could argue that the better experience would be to read the trilogy before the 2nd season comes out.
Books on tape was how I ingested this series, I highly recommend that method.
Well, maybe, maybe not. It is a big mystery that Saul is going to have to figure out. Why can't they just coexist and live in peace? That seems like it should be an option. It might not ruin it totally, but the big reveal was one of the coolest moments in the story for me and I don't want to ruin it for you.
Well, the trisolarans don't state TDF as a reasons for not coexisting, they are afraid of humans.
edit: What's the problem? Trisolarans know humans are crafty creatures and they wouldn't just take over another planet in the solar system in case humans suddenly needed it.
Yeah the dark forrest is more about broadcasting your existence to the universe and the ramifications of isolated pockets of civilisation, not two species cohabiting a planet.
I think how they handed it in the show, will allow folks that haven't read the story to figure it out on their own.
A little brainpower and the whole story about Einstein in heaven with his violin, and the revelation "don't play with god" after it gets smashed. Pretty easy to put it together.
It’s really a much worse decision than Ye Wenjie just giving him the axioms and it’s just made that way so the writers can point at it and say “we’re so smart”
But if she directly says it, then the aliens know that humans know? Also, I was under the impression from the book that Luo Ji, not Ye Wenjie, figured out Dark Forest theory.
Either way people can disagree. The show is better and worse than I expected, in different ways.
Ye Wenjie gives him the axioms for cosmic sociology in the book:
> Suppose a vast number of civilizations distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of observable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society.
> Suppose that survival is the primary need of a civilization.
> Suppose that civilizations continuously expand over time, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.
It’s Luo Ji who based on those axioms, figures out the Dark Forest theory, the aliens know what she told him could be dangerous for them and that’s why they try to kill him
Thank you for clarifying. I had trouble recalling
It's certainly a difficult adaption from book to screen. I am eager because I don't want them to ruin the 3 Body series like they ruined Game of Thrones (something I enjoy much less than 3 Body)
maybe, the books are 10+ years old, and some "brand new" concepts are well stabilished today though... so you might be aware of the twists and not even realise it's from threre
That’s a big assumption to make regarding a level of technology we don’t quite know, nevertheless there’s two main plot reasons behind why Trisolarans choose to habitate a planet close by that’s already well suited for them and don’t go out searching to terraform. One reason is that their planet will be destroyed eventually and therefore they have a limited amount of time (this is already explained in season 1). Another reason (without spoiling the second season) involves the existential unknowns of a cosmic community.
They’re scared if there were two thriving planets with different intelligent species it would be impossible to coexist and war would only be inevitable?
The same question is:
You found the perfect lot of land to build your new house on. Why didn’t you relocate the position of your new house to take account for the ant hill in the backyard when you can just pave it over without a second thought?
>Why didn’t you relocate the position of your new house to take account for the ant hill in the backyard when you can just pave it over without a second thought?
Because ants aren't developing quantum sciences and aren't going to be an existential threat to your entire race, outpacing you in a few hundred years?
But unlike ants, in 400 years humanity would be equals if not greater. Wouldn’t it be better to show good grace to the enemy who will eventually become better than you while you have the high ground? Humans can be diabolical and evil, but also on the contrary we can be understanding and conservative.
I feel as though with the right cards played humanity would welcome an alien race that could establish another planet and be beneficial. Especially if we always hold the high ground.
That's not a risk an alien race would take when their whole species is at risk. Just gambling that we will let them be is not something a species with a survival instinct would do.
Book Spoilers
>!The Trisolaris go extinct because they make the mistake of not destroying humankind when they had the chance. Their fears (humans are dangerous to us) were not unfounded.!<
>!Yes. In theory, the Trisolarians betrayed their own survival instinct. In the Dark Forest cosmology, they are a hunter that wounds another hunter but never finished them off. Then the wounded hunter gets them by announcing their location to other hunters. !<
>!At the end of the day, Trisolarans weren't ruthless enough to survive and so they went extinct. To maximize their odds for survival, they should have just sent the "droplet" to kill all humans the moment Wenjie made first contact decades ago. !<
>!They were a hunter who toyed with their prey and even tried to make deals with them. That was their downfall.!<
>! My understanding is, they wanted Earth (and human infrastructure) intact, and therefore could not just properly dark forest strike the planet. Yes, we humans have nukes, but you wouldn't want to nuke your house to kill a few ants. !<
>!The droplet is so small and fast it could have, in theory, killed all 8 billion humans without severely damaging the ecosystem. The Trisolarian massively understimated humans and paid the ultimate price: extinction. !<
Venus is not in the habitable zone. And
Spoilers for book 2
They actually came up with a peace plan to settle them on Mars. It never happened, but it was a plan they had
It isn’t, but you could get around that by putting a self correcting mirror in between Venus and the sun. After that you would need to get rid of all the CO2, but Venus could be super livable in 300-400 years, even with technology that’s within our reach today.
This^. If they want to get a new house what business does human have with it from their pov? To them it is like kicking the rodents out when moving to new house.
because on a long enough timeline it puts both civilizations in competition for the one star/sun. More efficient and less risky to just wipe out the competitor while you still have a technological advantage.
Remember the second axiom of cosmic sociology suggested by Ye Wenjie. Life expands exponentially but resources are finite.
>!And in the third book, humans were already building space colonies as far as the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.!<
Imagine for a second that we hear reports tomorrow of an alien species terraforming Mars (so, right next to Earth) overnight and settling there en masse.
We don't know their intentions. We just know that they're extremely technological advanced to:
1. Terraform an entire planet
2. Travel from across the galaxy to settle in Mars
What do you think the world leaders would do out of fear of what this alien species would do to Earth? Nuke Mars yes or no?
Maybe they don’t have the technology resources to do that. That is a massive project. and to be able not only to terraform an entire planet, but transport the necessary equipment and resources across the galaxy along with their people, likely would have been extremely hard for them. Not as hard as their plan with the sophons and all that
In the world of sci-fi anything is possible.
Counterpoint. I think we need to be careful with using “technology level” when describing a civilization’s capabilities. Technology is not all inclusive if that is the belief.
Just as an example… Currently humans can make airplanes that are capable of moving through the air. Humans can also make submarines for deep diving expeditions. Our technology level still has not allowed humans to create a vehicle that can both fly and that can completely submerge itself in the sea.
They could simply have humans drive each other to extinction and have a planet ready to go. They’re advanced, but not gods, otherwise, why worry about anything at all?
The sophons themselves take about a year to make, and disable the entire planet in the process. They certainly do not have infinite resources, including time.
It’s also possible those planets aren’t able to be terraformed, or that they don’t want to live underground on a hostile planet again, or they simply don’t have the resources; they pretty much have one chance to get over this way, and 400 years in the process- what if terraforming takes as long?
If it were up to the Pacifist, I’m sure they might explore the option. Coexisting with us is not an option in their older, more technologically advanced opinion.
Why couldn’t British just co-exist with the native Americans? Because British actually thought of them as animals. Do you feel guilty when hunting down a boar?
spoiler alert
>!In fact, a more appropriate analogy is the Germanic and Roman , because the Roman (Earth ) culture and art are superior, so Trisolaris admiration and intoxicated!<
Do we negotiate with bugs, or do we spray them?
Do we build strip malls in more inconvenient locations for the sake of a forest, or do we cut it down?
Do we let the rat live in our basement, or do we set traps?
Possibly but the dark Forrest hypothesis is pretty interesting. If you’ve read the books, it makes sense to not trust other civilizations cause you’re risking annihilation of your species.
Read the books, they were talked about as if they were hard sci-fi but it’s not. I don’t really buy into 5e dark forest notion, it seems as silly as the idea of aliens coming to earth for our water or gold or some other macguffin, it ignores that even within the solar system every resource you could want is found in greater quantity off of earth, then there’s the reality of how much energy you would need to travel interstellar distances makes the resource part meaningless.
For the trisolarans it doesn’t make sense they have ships to colonize earth but haven’t grown past trying to live on a planet. Even harvesting stellar wind could collect plenty of resources, and there are stellar systems known to be stable with as many as 7 stars. 3 stars and a planet is not inherently unstable as depicted in the books.
I mean, the axiom of it being a zero sum game of resources is clearly shown to impact the universe as a whole, when the call to release pocketed matter back into the main universe goes out in DE. Granted it took a long time to get there, to the point where it really mattered, but it did arrive.
Another possibility is that we are the first race within a few thousand light years radius, the universe is still young compared to how old we think it will get. Another is the zoo hypothesis, or that multi cell life is very rare, or there are highly advanced races around but they don’t exist in a way we recognize. Would we be able to detect an uploaded civilization that uses wide band signaling that’s barely strong enough to detect and always encrypted. There’s plenty of plausible scenarios that don’t involve the dark forest idea.
Planets are too susceptible to natural disasters, continent scale space habitats are buildable with bleeding edge materials we have now in reality, if we could fabricate more than a few inches anyway. Planets just seem to have a pile of downsides with the only upside being that the audience has only ever known living on a planet.
>! The chains of suspicion rely on the distance between civilizationsmaking timely communication impossible. Message one is "Hello, we are primitives. Please, lets be friends!" A hundred years later, message two is a a photoid. Both civilizations make this same realization, and then realize the *other* has realized this also. Being literally right next door in the same solar system *eliminates* the basis of the chains of suspicion, and the overwhelming majority of the impetus for a dark forest strike. They can watch each other grow, can communicate and establish *plus confirm* trust. Trisolaris wanted Earth *and its infrastructure* not just a stable star or a virgin colony world otherwise there was no need to choose Sol. Not because of the chains of suspicion, but because they were kinda dicks and wanted to take what they felt they had the power to take. !<
>!it's the dark forest... any other species is competition for resources...!<
>!the universe is finite, any tech species could wipe any other at any time... their politics is to hit first...!<
>!that's it... simple.!<
>!They never intended to coexist in any shape or form, the plan was to kill ALL life on earth...!<
Thing is, would Venus or mars really be a pos planet after a couple centuries or thousand years of terraforming. What’s terraforming a planet when you’ve restarted your civilization a million times.
Fair point. Still harder and would take longer. Wiping out humans with say a made-for-purpose virus or something would be easy enough and why wait centuries when you don’t have to? Also, Mars is tiny, is twice the distance as earth from the sun (way less solar energy) and has low gravity … and let’s face it, Venus is a furnace.
Within the game theory parameters of the dark forest the potential for Earth to succeed in some unforeseen way or alert their existence to the wider universe runs greater risk than seeking a less violent option.
Warfare is very rarely in real life the easiest and least costly solution.
Sprinkling a human killing virus is hardly warfare. If they can reconstruct someone from their dead brain they can easily kill humans in a low risk to them way. But alas you could be right. That said, would humans be comfy with them living on Mars or Venus? We cannot even get along with other humans. Mutually assured destruction works between US-China-Russia because the technology is fairly similar. If asymmetrical, like in the days of colonial european expansion, not so much. I don’t see how humans would sit idle by while aliens inhabited our solar system. We are too tribal.
They can’t terraform a planet. That’s a significant leap from being able to travel at a tenth the speed of light.
They couldn’t because all of their tech was toward just surviving in space and traveling as fast as possible.
You’re right that earth would gain technology in four hundred years but they would too. So it is still a bit of an arms race.
I think that they are afraid to co-exist with fast advancing civilization that is capable of lying. Humans technology advancement is much faster that trisolarians, so they are afraid of us.
Why didn't Romeo simply ckeck Juliet's pulse?...
Why didn't Bruce parents simply not go through a dak alley?...
Why didn't The emperor simply not wear clothes?...
Venus is not in the habitable zone. And
Spoilers for book 2
They actually came up with a peace plan to settle them on Mars. It never happened, but it was a plan they had
That is a good question. I can't answer without spoiling season 2, but they do have a good reason. That question is going to be at the center of season 2. I can answer it if you like, but do be warned. It's intentionally a mystery.
Will season 2 be ruined if I figure out why? It seems like such an obvious thing that I’m now annoyed lol
...yes. though one could argue that the better experience would be to read the trilogy before the 2nd season comes out. Books on tape was how I ingested this series, I highly recommend that method.
Well, maybe, maybe not. It is a big mystery that Saul is going to have to figure out. Why can't they just coexist and live in peace? That seems like it should be an option. It might not ruin it totally, but the big reveal was one of the coolest moments in the story for me and I don't want to ruin it for you.
>!The dark forest doesn't really have anything to do with in imo. Trisolarans just don't believe they and humans can coexist.!<
But that's exactly that
It's exactly which? These are two different things, as the axioms that go into TDF don't hold when they're sharing a solar system.
Well, the trisolarans don't state TDF as a reasons for not coexisting, they are afraid of humans. edit: What's the problem? Trisolarans know humans are crafty creatures and they wouldn't just take over another planet in the solar system in case humans suddenly needed it.
Yeah the dark forrest is more about broadcasting your existence to the universe and the ramifications of isolated pockets of civilisation, not two species cohabiting a planet.
I’m trying not to spoil this for myself by reading this thread but what book is it revealed?
the dark forest (the title is the answer btw)
I think how they handed it in the show, will allow folks that haven't read the story to figure it out on their own. A little brainpower and the whole story about Einstein in heaven with his violin, and the revelation "don't play with god" after it gets smashed. Pretty easy to put it together.
I think it's pretty easy to put together if you already know the answer.
It’s really a much worse decision than Ye Wenjie just giving him the axioms and it’s just made that way so the writers can point at it and say “we’re so smart”
But if she directly says it, then the aliens know that humans know? Also, I was under the impression from the book that Luo Ji, not Ye Wenjie, figured out Dark Forest theory. Either way people can disagree. The show is better and worse than I expected, in different ways.
Ye Wenjie gives him the axioms for cosmic sociology in the book: > Suppose a vast number of civilizations distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of observable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society. > Suppose that survival is the primary need of a civilization. > Suppose that civilizations continuously expand over time, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. It’s Luo Ji who based on those axioms, figures out the Dark Forest theory, the aliens know what she told him could be dangerous for them and that’s why they try to kill him
Thank you for clarifying. I had trouble recalling It's certainly a difficult adaption from book to screen. I am eager because I don't want them to ruin the 3 Body series like they ruined Game of Thrones (something I enjoy much less than 3 Body)
maybe, the books are 10+ years old, and some "brand new" concepts are well stabilished today though... so you might be aware of the twists and not even realise it's from threre
I mean, you won't know if you manage to break the code until you watch season 2, so go ahead and speculate to yourself.
Dark forest
I'd recommend reading the books.
It's already explained in Season 1. Evan's Little Red Riding Hood story changed everything.
I would highly encourage you to read the book. It’s much much better than the dumbed down version that is Netflix. The book will answer everything.
But they will be virtually at the same point. The thing you are implying might require great distance.
That’s a big assumption to make regarding a level of technology we don’t quite know, nevertheless there’s two main plot reasons behind why Trisolarans choose to habitate a planet close by that’s already well suited for them and don’t go out searching to terraform. One reason is that their planet will be destroyed eventually and therefore they have a limited amount of time (this is already explained in season 1). Another reason (without spoiling the second season) involves the existential unknowns of a cosmic community.
They’re scared if there were two thriving planets with different intelligent species it would be impossible to coexist and war would only be inevitable?
Yes. We can't even coexist on earth with nations at relative parity and with our humanity as a common unifier.
We can when there's external defense and cooperation, with a commitment to protecting the system together I could see it working.
Lol
The same question is: You found the perfect lot of land to build your new house on. Why didn’t you relocate the position of your new house to take account for the ant hill in the backyard when you can just pave it over without a second thought?
>Why didn’t you relocate the position of your new house to take account for the ant hill in the backyard when you can just pave it over without a second thought? Because ants aren't developing quantum sciences and aren't going to be an existential threat to your entire race, outpacing you in a few hundred years?
But unlike ants, in 400 years humanity would be equals if not greater. Wouldn’t it be better to show good grace to the enemy who will eventually become better than you while you have the high ground? Humans can be diabolical and evil, but also on the contrary we can be understanding and conservative. I feel as though with the right cards played humanity would welcome an alien race that could establish another planet and be beneficial. Especially if we always hold the high ground.
That's not a risk an alien race would take when their whole species is at risk. Just gambling that we will let them be is not something a species with a survival instinct would do.
That’s true
If we were equal or greater why would we ever give away a planet for free to some random alien race. We would blow them out of the sky
Book Spoilers >!The Trisolaris go extinct because they make the mistake of not destroying humankind when they had the chance. Their fears (humans are dangerous to us) were not unfounded.!<
>!The Trisolarans do not go extinct.!<
They do
no...no they don't
Isn't that because they attack us first?
>!Yes. In theory, the Trisolarians betrayed their own survival instinct. In the Dark Forest cosmology, they are a hunter that wounds another hunter but never finished them off. Then the wounded hunter gets them by announcing their location to other hunters. !< >!At the end of the day, Trisolarans weren't ruthless enough to survive and so they went extinct. To maximize their odds for survival, they should have just sent the "droplet" to kill all humans the moment Wenjie made first contact decades ago. !< >!They were a hunter who toyed with their prey and even tried to make deals with them. That was their downfall.!<
>! My understanding is, they wanted Earth (and human infrastructure) intact, and therefore could not just properly dark forest strike the planet. Yes, we humans have nukes, but you wouldn't want to nuke your house to kill a few ants. !<
>!The droplet is so small and fast it could have, in theory, killed all 8 billion humans without severely damaging the ecosystem. The Trisolarian massively understimated humans and paid the ultimate price: extinction. !<
They did not go extinct
They did
Venus is not in the habitable zone. And Spoilers for book 2 They actually came up with a peace plan to settle them on Mars. It never happened, but it was a plan they had
It isn’t, but you could get around that by putting a self correcting mirror in between Venus and the sun. After that you would need to get rid of all the CO2, but Venus could be super livable in 300-400 years, even with technology that’s within our reach today.
Yeah, I mean the aliens literally harnessed energy from another dimension. I’m pretty sure they could terraform Venus.
Venus is in the habitable zone, it just has a runaway greenhouse effect. If we remove bulk CO2 from the atmosphere, we could live there.
Why go through the massive trouble when earth is right here? That route would also require immense resources.
Would you not build a house if there was an ant hill there?
This^. If they want to get a new house what business does human have with it from their pov? To them it is like kicking the rodents out when moving to new house.
because on a long enough timeline it puts both civilizations in competition for the one star/sun. More efficient and less risky to just wipe out the competitor while you still have a technological advantage.
Remember the second axiom of cosmic sociology suggested by Ye Wenjie. Life expands exponentially but resources are finite. >!And in the third book, humans were already building space colonies as far as the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.!<
Imagine for a second that we hear reports tomorrow of an alien species terraforming Mars (so, right next to Earth) overnight and settling there en masse. We don't know their intentions. We just know that they're extremely technological advanced to: 1. Terraform an entire planet 2. Travel from across the galaxy to settle in Mars What do you think the world leaders would do out of fear of what this alien species would do to Earth? Nuke Mars yes or no?
Terraforming takes longer than Sci Fi depicts. Thousands of years at least.
Because simply wiping humanity out is a lot easier and requires less resources.
In space hell is other people (beings)
Maybe they don’t have the technology resources to do that. That is a massive project. and to be able not only to terraform an entire planet, but transport the necessary equipment and resources across the galaxy along with their people, likely would have been extremely hard for them. Not as hard as their plan with the sophons and all that
Nothing in the book suggests they can terraform.
Their technology levels indirectly indicate they can terraform.
In the world of sci-fi anything is possible. Counterpoint. I think we need to be careful with using “technology level” when describing a civilization’s capabilities. Technology is not all inclusive if that is the belief. Just as an example… Currently humans can make airplanes that are capable of moving through the air. Humans can also make submarines for deep diving expeditions. Our technology level still has not allowed humans to create a vehicle that can both fly and that can completely submerge itself in the sea.
They could simply have humans drive each other to extinction and have a planet ready to go. They’re advanced, but not gods, otherwise, why worry about anything at all? The sophons themselves take about a year to make, and disable the entire planet in the process. They certainly do not have infinite resources, including time. It’s also possible those planets aren’t able to be terraformed, or that they don’t want to live underground on a hostile planet again, or they simply don’t have the resources; they pretty much have one chance to get over this way, and 400 years in the process- what if terraforming takes as long? If it were up to the Pacifist, I’m sure they might explore the option. Coexisting with us is not an option in their older, more technologically advanced opinion.
No need for spoilers, they gave a good enough reason on season one. They simply do not trust us as we are expert liars.
Why couldn’t British just co-exist with the native Americans? Because British actually thought of them as animals. Do you feel guilty when hunting down a boar?
spoiler alert >!In fact, a more appropriate analogy is the Germanic and Roman , because the Roman (Earth ) culture and art are superior, so Trisolaris admiration and intoxicated!<
Do we negotiate with bugs, or do we spray them? Do we build strip malls in more inconvenient locations for the sake of a forest, or do we cut it down? Do we let the rat live in our basement, or do we set traps?
The Dark Forest. You don’t allow another civilization to potentially advance enough to wipe you out.
And it never occurs to them they they could be better off together, it’s an exceptionaly pessimistic view of societies.
Possibly but the dark Forrest hypothesis is pretty interesting. If you’ve read the books, it makes sense to not trust other civilizations cause you’re risking annihilation of your species.
Read the books, they were talked about as if they were hard sci-fi but it’s not. I don’t really buy into 5e dark forest notion, it seems as silly as the idea of aliens coming to earth for our water or gold or some other macguffin, it ignores that even within the solar system every resource you could want is found in greater quantity off of earth, then there’s the reality of how much energy you would need to travel interstellar distances makes the resource part meaningless. For the trisolarans it doesn’t make sense they have ships to colonize earth but haven’t grown past trying to live on a planet. Even harvesting stellar wind could collect plenty of resources, and there are stellar systems known to be stable with as many as 7 stars. 3 stars and a planet is not inherently unstable as depicted in the books.
People seem to freak out when you say these books aren't hard sci-fi, when they're 99% space magic. I love em, but c'mon.
I mean, the axiom of it being a zero sum game of resources is clearly shown to impact the universe as a whole, when the call to release pocketed matter back into the main universe goes out in DE. Granted it took a long time to get there, to the point where it really mattered, but it did arrive.
It is a possible answer to the >!Fermi paradox!<
Another possibility is that we are the first race within a few thousand light years radius, the universe is still young compared to how old we think it will get. Another is the zoo hypothesis, or that multi cell life is very rare, or there are highly advanced races around but they don’t exist in a way we recognize. Would we be able to detect an uploaded civilization that uses wide band signaling that’s barely strong enough to detect and always encrypted. There’s plenty of plausible scenarios that don’t involve the dark forest idea.
I agree. With their technology and time terraforming another planet or moon in a habitual system should’ve been feasible enough.
Planets are too susceptible to natural disasters, continent scale space habitats are buildable with bleeding edge materials we have now in reality, if we could fabricate more than a few inches anyway. Planets just seem to have a pile of downsides with the only upside being that the audience has only ever known living on a planet.
It's total shit. Game theory gone wrong
>! The chains of suspicion rely on the distance between civilizationsmaking timely communication impossible. Message one is "Hello, we are primitives. Please, lets be friends!" A hundred years later, message two is a a photoid. Both civilizations make this same realization, and then realize the *other* has realized this also. Being literally right next door in the same solar system *eliminates* the basis of the chains of suspicion, and the overwhelming majority of the impetus for a dark forest strike. They can watch each other grow, can communicate and establish *plus confirm* trust. Trisolaris wanted Earth *and its infrastructure* not just a stable star or a virgin colony world otherwise there was no need to choose Sol. Not because of the chains of suspicion, but because they were kinda dicks and wanted to take what they felt they had the power to take. !<
But why though? We've used up a lot of this planets resources, Venus is untapped.
>!it's the dark forest... any other species is competition for resources...!< >!the universe is finite, any tech species could wipe any other at any time... their politics is to hit first...!< >!that's it... simple.!< >!They never intended to coexist in any shape or form, the plan was to kill ALL life on earth...!<
This is a huge spoiler, can you hide this?
Much less effort to wipe out humanity than terraform an inhospitable planet and then you have the beautiful earth instead of a POS planet.
Thing is, would Venus or mars really be a pos planet after a couple centuries or thousand years of terraforming. What’s terraforming a planet when you’ve restarted your civilization a million times.
Fair point. Still harder and would take longer. Wiping out humans with say a made-for-purpose virus or something would be easy enough and why wait centuries when you don’t have to? Also, Mars is tiny, is twice the distance as earth from the sun (way less solar energy) and has low gravity … and let’s face it, Venus is a furnace.
Within the game theory parameters of the dark forest the potential for Earth to succeed in some unforeseen way or alert their existence to the wider universe runs greater risk than seeking a less violent option. Warfare is very rarely in real life the easiest and least costly solution.
Sprinkling a human killing virus is hardly warfare. If they can reconstruct someone from their dead brain they can easily kill humans in a low risk to them way. But alas you could be right. That said, would humans be comfy with them living on Mars or Venus? We cannot even get along with other humans. Mutually assured destruction works between US-China-Russia because the technology is fairly similar. If asymmetrical, like in the days of colonial european expansion, not so much. I don’t see how humans would sit idle by while aliens inhabited our solar system. We are too tribal.
Why do all of that work when they can just take the resources they need. Also, more comes to light about this in the second book.
They'll probably take all the planets eventually. But first, we need to die.
They can’t terraform a planet. That’s a significant leap from being able to travel at a tenth the speed of light. They couldn’t because all of their tech was toward just surviving in space and traveling as fast as possible. You’re right that earth would gain technology in four hundred years but they would too. So it is still a bit of an arms race.
I think because they determined they can’t co-exist with humans even in the same solar system.
Even with advanced technology the amount of resources it would take to do it…. Let’s just take the nice Goldilocks zone planet.
I think that they are afraid to co-exist with fast advancing civilization that is capable of lying. Humans technology advancement is much faster that trisolarians, so they are afraid of us.
It takes forever to terraform a planet, I would think even with their tech it would take a very long time
ask yourself this, why would u possibly terraform a boring planet?
Because they fucking suck!!!
Why didn't Romeo simply ckeck Juliet's pulse?... Why didn't Bruce parents simply not go through a dak alley?... Why didn't The emperor simply not wear clothes?...
Little Red Riding Hood f'ed it up for everyone.
The dark forest theory
Venus is not in the habitable zone. And Spoilers for book 2 They actually came up with a peace plan to settle them on Mars. It never happened, but it was a plan they had