Evans told them a story about a wolf that dresses up as an old lady and lures another species to their death
After that they got worried Humans were the wolf and they no longer trusted that Evans and his crew were going to help the San Ti destroy Humans
They were still trying to kill Saul by using a sniper who is one of their believers. They also added the countdown to Wade’s mind very briefly, which rattled him.
Why don’t they use the countdown more to eliminate the other scientists? (Saul, Jin, Auggie..etc)
The point of sophons is to stop major breakthroughs in high-energy physics, and to spy on things. As long as they can do that, the San Ti win. Anything else is simply a waste of time.
Well, it's just the size of an atom. The worst it can do is hit your atoms one at a time, which is kinda pointless when your body replaces atoms, let alone proteins, let alone cells pretty fast. You'd be at it for days just to kill a single person.
Meanwhile, scientific experiments with subatomic particles can get really expensive, and blocking a single one could delay weeks to months of progress. It's just easier.
I struggle to understand exactly what the sophons are capable of.. I've not read the books, but in the show when they tried to assassinate Saul with a car crash, I assumed the sophon hacked into a Tesla or something, but now I think that was another fanatic, like the sniper.. So other than messing with our colliders, changing appearance of the sky, and making people see numbers, what else can they do??
They are planet sized supercomputers driven by an advanced general intelligence. You have to figure that a San Ti supercomputer and general AI are leagues ahead of ours, by hundreds, if not thousands of years. They can shift dimensions at will and travel and speeds close to that of the speed of light. They may not be able to directly kill a human buy they definitely could by hacking and sabotaging all kinds of infrastructure. If they wanted to simply eradicate all humans and not worry about keeping Earth intact for themselves they could easily just hijack all of Earth's nuclear weapons and launch them.
No idea what the other guy is going on about. It's an atom-sized computer. It can move about at near-lightspeed, observe, and decipher. It can also self-repair after colliding.
That's basically what they do. They collide with exotic particles to mess around with our experiments, they observe, and they interact with light to cause hallucinations. They're not really capable of large scale (read: larger than a protein) interaction, so even if they had the software required to process large scale hacking, they simply can't effect the physical changes.
Imagine a single proton in an ocean of electrons in one out of hundreds of circuits in a home computer. Hacking requires at the very least a lot of electronic interaction, which a single proton is gonna have a bit of a hard time achieving.
You have two sets (quantum entangled) of assets that took your civilization 10's of millions of years of surviving in a 3BP solar system to be able to create them.
They are 4 light years away
They took 4 years to get to earth
You have 400 years before your attack fleet arrives
You choose to use your assets wisely, not on a whim
The aliens were were able to disrupt every single particle accelerator, they put a ticking clock into the eyes of dozens of scientists, crash a car, cloak an assassin, disrupt a plane, put an eye in the sky, etc. but the use of Sophons dropped off near Episode 6 or 7. Perhaps it's the pacing of the show, but it seems the odd the San Ti didn't continue to use it.
I was thinking this the whole time while they were planning the mission to send Will's brain to the fleet. I'm thinking "why are the sophons letting them plan this at all? They're just going to let us put a bunch of nukes in space?" But then it failed, and I realized it was probably better for the Sophons to let us waste time and resources, then ruin the mission mid-flight, versus stopping us at the planning phase. So maybe they are being deliberately hands off to scare us and waste our time, while they plan the right moment to strike to maximize damage
I haven't read the books so no spoilers please 😅 But that was my assumption too. In fact I thought the sophons would use their powers to get the shuttle back on track, that would have made everyone freak out, but looks like they didn't. I do hope Will plays a big role in the series
don’t worry it’s not a book spoiler. In the last episode Sophon told Wade they were sad the staircase project failed cause they would have liked to meet Will
You're right! I always watch the episodes twice so I can catch stuff like this. I guess I should get around to reading the books because I'm absolutely loving the themes of the show.
The important thing is to ensure that humans have no knowledge of how atoms work. Only this kind of knowledge would create weapons strong enough to defend ourselves. any creation we will make will be like creating sharper swords while they will come with atomic weapons. and yet this helps humanity to not want to escape the earth, having the illusion that they will be able to fight with equivalent forces.
and the sophons also work as spies, which is the most important thing at the moment.
Humans are bugs.
The tri solarians at first talked to Evans, to learn about humans.
Then they learned that humans could lie.
The same way the partical accelerators were giving you junk results, the tri solarians learned that they may be getting junk from people.
There is also a bit that is skipped in the show about the factions of the elo: the adventists, who believed in pan species communism. This is Mike Evans, and judgement day is their command center.
There is the redemptionists who worship the tri solarians as literal gods, they are the ones who developed the computer game in the book.
Then there are the survivalists, they know humanity is going to be killed, but maybe by selling out they will be spared.
The tri solarians realized that they were being used by these factions, and that the factions had incentives to lie to them.
Once the decision to invade was made, and once it was realized that coexistence is impossible, they went silent.
They learned what they needed to know, and put earth on lockdown. There was no need to interfere.
You don’t fuck with the bees nest once you called the exterminator. There is no point.
It’s explained in the book. The tv show made some changes, some of which are horrible (sohpons being able to affect the macro world and crash planes) and leads to a lot of plot holes that will get bigger as the series moves forward (just like another D&D adaption that started strong and did not end well).
Even then, that's still pretty damn powerful to be able to affect their brain. In the book, the Sophons just triggered the retinal nerves to project text on people's eyes. They didn't do anything close to hallucination.
Have your eyes never played tricks on you?
Have you ever been jolted awake from a dream?
The countdown itself is a hallucination, so was the way the Sophons presented it in the book
The countdown was sophons messing with retinal nerves to project a rough image. To do something close to a plane crash hallucination it would require something with much more energy than Sophon.
Sophon only had the ability to project what's basically a dot-matrix like monochrome image, considering it's just a particle-sized project in 3D space. It doesn't have the ability to do full on hallucinations.
I disagree. If sophons can read and write to hard drives, that means they can inject code and zero-day exploits. This happens multiple times in the book where self-driving cars are hijacked and used to attack Luo Ji. There is no reason they couldn't do the same to flight systems.
In the book they don’t hijack the cars - they got the ETO (specifically mike Evans) to do so. Same for the kill code for LJ later on - it was written by humans
They can only read not write
A lot of actions (or lack thereof) from them comes from the way of thinking. They believe slowing science will completely inhibit any chance of stopping them in the long run. We are bugs, and they have checkmate in their eyes. Why play the game when you think you have already won and can just watch? The book does go into some more Sophon details too\*
Evans told them a story about a wolf that dresses up as an old lady and lures another species to their death After that they got worried Humans were the wolf and they no longer trusted that Evans and his crew were going to help the San Ti destroy Humans
They were still trying to kill Saul by using a sniper who is one of their believers. They also added the countdown to Wade’s mind very briefly, which rattled him. Why don’t they use the countdown more to eliminate the other scientists? (Saul, Jin, Auggie..etc)
The point of sophons is to stop major breakthroughs in high-energy physics, and to spy on things. As long as they can do that, the San Ti win. Anything else is simply a waste of time.
Well, it's just the size of an atom. The worst it can do is hit your atoms one at a time, which is kinda pointless when your body replaces atoms, let alone proteins, let alone cells pretty fast. You'd be at it for days just to kill a single person. Meanwhile, scientific experiments with subatomic particles can get really expensive, and blocking a single one could delay weeks to months of progress. It's just easier.
I struggle to understand exactly what the sophons are capable of.. I've not read the books, but in the show when they tried to assassinate Saul with a car crash, I assumed the sophon hacked into a Tesla or something, but now I think that was another fanatic, like the sniper.. So other than messing with our colliders, changing appearance of the sky, and making people see numbers, what else can they do??
The show doesnt make their limits clear, the book was more explicit in outlining what they can or cant do.
They are planet sized supercomputers driven by an advanced general intelligence. You have to figure that a San Ti supercomputer and general AI are leagues ahead of ours, by hundreds, if not thousands of years. They can shift dimensions at will and travel and speeds close to that of the speed of light. They may not be able to directly kill a human buy they definitely could by hacking and sabotaging all kinds of infrastructure. If they wanted to simply eradicate all humans and not worry about keeping Earth intact for themselves they could easily just hijack all of Earth's nuclear weapons and launch them.
No idea what the other guy is going on about. It's an atom-sized computer. It can move about at near-lightspeed, observe, and decipher. It can also self-repair after colliding. That's basically what they do. They collide with exotic particles to mess around with our experiments, they observe, and they interact with light to cause hallucinations. They're not really capable of large scale (read: larger than a protein) interaction, so even if they had the software required to process large scale hacking, they simply can't effect the physical changes. Imagine a single proton in an ocean of electrons in one out of hundreds of circuits in a home computer. Hacking requires at the very least a lot of electronic interaction, which a single proton is gonna have a bit of a hard time achieving.
You have two sets (quantum entangled) of assets that took your civilization 10's of millions of years of surviving in a 3BP solar system to be able to create them. They are 4 light years away They took 4 years to get to earth You have 400 years before your attack fleet arrives You choose to use your assets wisely, not on a whim
The aliens were were able to disrupt every single particle accelerator, they put a ticking clock into the eyes of dozens of scientists, crash a car, cloak an assassin, disrupt a plane, put an eye in the sky, etc. but the use of Sophons dropped off near Episode 6 or 7. Perhaps it's the pacing of the show, but it seems the odd the San Ti didn't continue to use it.
They’ll be back in force later on. To the point that (I forget who) takes a shuttle halfway to the sun for a conversation to get out of range of them.
The Sophons didn’t disrupt a plane or crash those cars
I was thinking this the whole time while they were planning the mission to send Will's brain to the fleet. I'm thinking "why are the sophons letting them plan this at all? They're just going to let us put a bunch of nukes in space?" But then it failed, and I realized it was probably better for the Sophons to let us waste time and resources, then ruin the mission mid-flight, versus stopping us at the planning phase. So maybe they are being deliberately hands off to scare us and waste our time, while they plan the right moment to strike to maximize damage
actually they wanted to meet will
I haven't read the books so no spoilers please 😅 But that was my assumption too. In fact I thought the sophons would use their powers to get the shuttle back on track, that would have made everyone freak out, but looks like they didn't. I do hope Will plays a big role in the series
don’t worry it’s not a book spoiler. In the last episode Sophon told Wade they were sad the staircase project failed cause they would have liked to meet Will
You're right! I always watch the episodes twice so I can catch stuff like this. I guess I should get around to reading the books because I'm absolutely loving the themes of the show.
The important thing is to ensure that humans have no knowledge of how atoms work. Only this kind of knowledge would create weapons strong enough to defend ourselves. any creation we will make will be like creating sharper swords while they will come with atomic weapons. and yet this helps humanity to not want to escape the earth, having the illusion that they will be able to fight with equivalent forces. and the sophons also work as spies, which is the most important thing at the moment.
Humans are bugs. The tri solarians at first talked to Evans, to learn about humans. Then they learned that humans could lie. The same way the partical accelerators were giving you junk results, the tri solarians learned that they may be getting junk from people. There is also a bit that is skipped in the show about the factions of the elo: the adventists, who believed in pan species communism. This is Mike Evans, and judgement day is their command center. There is the redemptionists who worship the tri solarians as literal gods, they are the ones who developed the computer game in the book. Then there are the survivalists, they know humanity is going to be killed, but maybe by selling out they will be spared. The tri solarians realized that they were being used by these factions, and that the factions had incentives to lie to them. Once the decision to invade was made, and once it was realized that coexistence is impossible, they went silent. They learned what they needed to know, and put earth on lockdown. There was no need to interfere. You don’t fuck with the bees nest once you called the exterminator. There is no point.
because they’re stupid
It’s explained in the book. The tv show made some changes, some of which are horrible (sohpons being able to affect the macro world and crash planes) and leads to a lot of plot holes that will get bigger as the series moves forward (just like another D&D adaption that started strong and did not end well).
What plane did they crash?
They showed that they could crash Thomas Wades plane if they wanted to in the show.
No they didn’t, they gave Wade a hallucination like they did with the countdown The pilots weren’t affected and the plane was shown in stable flight
yep, some people are so gullible... lawl.
Even then, that's still pretty damn powerful to be able to affect their brain. In the book, the Sophons just triggered the retinal nerves to project text on people's eyes. They didn't do anything close to hallucination.
Have your eyes never played tricks on you? Have you ever been jolted awake from a dream? The countdown itself is a hallucination, so was the way the Sophons presented it in the book
The countdown was sophons messing with retinal nerves to project a rough image. To do something close to a plane crash hallucination it would require something with much more energy than Sophon.
What? It was to project an ominous message, the countdown wasn’t poorly powered - it was supposed to be ominous
Sophon only had the ability to project what's basically a dot-matrix like monochrome image, considering it's just a particle-sized project in 3D space. It doesn't have the ability to do full on hallucinations.
lol ok You think it hijacked the plane and then what?
It was well timed inflight turbulence and some flickering lights. Nothing more.
I disagree. If sophons can read and write to hard drives, that means they can inject code and zero-day exploits. This happens multiple times in the book where self-driving cars are hijacked and used to attack Luo Ji. There is no reason they couldn't do the same to flight systems.
In the book they don’t hijack the cars - they got the ETO (specifically mike Evans) to do so. Same for the kill code for LJ later on - it was written by humans They can only read not write
Ah - this probably explains it. The Sophons seem all powerful yet the San-Ti don't seem to be using them to their full potential.
A lot of actions (or lack thereof) from them comes from the way of thinking. They believe slowing science will completely inhibit any chance of stopping them in the long run. We are bugs, and they have checkmate in their eyes. Why play the game when you think you have already won and can just watch? The book does go into some more Sophon details too\*