The Three Bodies Problem is a new sci-fi series that premiered on Netflix in March. The plot is about humanity’s contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Chinese writer Liu Сixin, but it has a number of differences from the book.
The Three Body Problem series. Source: netflixqueue.com
What happens in the series The Three Bodies Problem
On March 21, 2024, the science fiction series The Three Bodies Problem was released on Netflix. It is a film adaptation of the series of books by Chinese writer Liu Сixin called The Memory of the Earth’s Past, or rather, mainly the first of the series, the title of which coincides with the title of the series. Over the course of eight episodes, events take place in two time periods: in China in the 60s and 80s of the 20th century and in the modern world.
The main character of the “Chinese” part is a young physicist Ye Wenjie. Her father, a famous scientist, is killed during the Cultural Revolution, and she finds herself forced to work as a deforestation laborer. Soon, she is transferred to work at the Red Bank base, the location of a giant antenna on which strange experiments are being conducted.
Soon Ye Wenjie learns that the development of new weapons is not the main purpose of the Red Bank’s existence. In fact, they are trying to establish contact with aliens. A few years later, Ye Wenjie succeeds, and under the influence of her bitter experience, she invites an extraterrestrial civilization to come and save humanity from itself.
The series is set in China during the Cultural Revolution. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com
The second time-line revolves around a group of friends – former or current physicists living in modern Britain. Strange things are happening in the world: scientists are dying, the stars in the sky at some point start flashing, and former policeman Clarence Shea, who now works for a super-governmental organization, is investigating what is happening.
Then the focus turns to an amazing virtual game, which you can take part in by wearing a helmet of unknown origin. The essence of the game is to unravel the principles of the functioning of a strange world, where the eras of Order, during which the Sun in the sky behaves as usual, are replaced by eras of Chaos, during which it rises and sets as it pleases.
After a while, it turns out that representatives of another civilization and their supporters on Earth are behind all this. The aged Ye Wenjie is also involved, but her actual role in all this is revealed by the end of the series.
Heroes of the series The Three Bodies Problem. Source: itc.ua
Why you should watch the series
The Three Bodies Problem is a “landmark” series. With all its drawbacks, it is science fiction that raises questions that are usually ignored by authors of other works. The aliens here are really smart and unconventional. They are not coming here because they just want to destroy us. They have their own quite rational reasons for visiting our planet and treating us in a certain way.
Also, unlike many other science fiction works, they are not opposed by some schoolboy or random person, but by serious and even cynical government organizations and scientists. Thanks to this, the events turn into a really interesting conflict, not a teenage urban fantasy.
Finally, there are physicists, scientists who take their work and the scientific principle of understanding the world seriously. We see them as real people with their own problems, which are closely intertwined with the field of knowledge production. And they use their knowledge to solve the mysteries around them.
The series is also really beautifully and efficiently shot. Special effects allow us to show even the most incredible events that happen to the characters. The action does not “sag”, something is always happening on the screen, which is quite interesting to watch.
What’s wrong with film adaptation
Nevertheless, the film adaptation of Liu Cixin’s works can hardly be considered successful. The original source was primarily a scientific detective story. The reader and the characters were given some facts, and they had to understand what was happening using scientific knowledge and logic. And for those who are not physicists or astronomers, the characters of the book explained what was going on in popular terms.
The authors of the series even omitted a key scene that allows us to understand what the real problem is. At the beginning of the book, the characters play billiards, demonstrating that if the balls, cues, and cloth are the same, the same blows will have similar consequences no matter where the table is. Because the laws of physics work the same everywhere.
A still from the series
So scientists are building ever more complex and expensive billiard tables called “particle accelerators” to look deeper and deeper into matter. Suddenly, their “pool tables” began to show complete nonsense. Physics is dead, and the rest of the book is about this fact.
There is a moment with accelerators in the series, but it remains unexplained. That’s why the scientists commit suicide not because they can’t continue to explore the world, but because they see the numbers. If this moment seemed unconvincing to you and you did not understand what the end of the countdown threatened them with, then you should know that the importance of these numbers is an invention of the series’ authors. The book did contain a countdown, but it clearly states that it is just a scarecrow for the faint of heart.
The story with the flashing stars is similar. In the book, it was a mini-quest, because it was not about the visible light of astronomical objects, but about microwave relic radiation, and to observe it, it was necessary to find a suitable observatory. However, the creators of the series decided not to bother with this, so the aliens in the series look much more powerful than they do in the book.
A still from the series
The entire arc with the virtual game is also greatly shortened. In the book, it was quite familiar, just designed for the virtual reality helmets that are quite common nowadays. But it was the scientific detective that fascinated the reader, who spent most of the book solving the puzzle step by step with the characters. For example, can you guess why one bright star in the sky is a sign that everything will continue to be bad… and two stars mean that everything will be fine, and three – that the world will end in a global icing over?
So it was only logical that scientists who suddenly found themselves out of work would rush to play this game. Because it was essentially a substitute for work, requiring them to analyze data and build theories based on it.
However, the series has severely cut the scientific component, so instead of the above, viewers will admire a helmet made using extraterrestrial technology, sympathize with a little girl who dies over and over again, and listen to the vague conclusions of the characters.
Again, if you haven’t realized who makes those helmets while watching, you should know that this is another invention of the series’ authors, which they haven’t thought through to the end. In the book, the aliens do not give any technology to their supporters on Earth, because they simply don’t trust them naturally.
A still from the series
The most controversial moment of the series is the complete change of the main characters. On the one hand, this is a good choice, as it allows us to empathize with them better. In the book, they were all Chinese, and their personalities were not revealed.
However, the creators of the series clearly overdid it. Liu Cixin’s scientists still mostly talk about scientific problems, while Netflix’s talk about their own experiences and personal relationships. If you started to get annoyed by all this melodrama towards the end, you should know that most of it was invented in much the same way as the deadly countdown and the alien helmet.
The fact is that after the authors threw out all the scientific mysteries from the plot, it became too short for 8 episodes. That’s why it was diluted with story arcs, which are actually present only in the sequels, and melodrama.
A still from the series
The three bodies problem
Even the meaning of the title has fallen victim to the unsuccessful adaptation. In the series, the scientist Jin Chen simply proclaims that everything that happens in the game is a consequence of the fact that the planet is in a triple star system, and gives the most concise explanation: the era of Order is when it is in orbit around one of the stars, and the era of Chaos is when it travels between them.
At the same time, it seems as if the title of the series is connected to the fact that a fleet of conquerors is flying to us from the neighboring trisolar system. But in fact, this is the name of a scientific problem that occupies an important place in the book, but which was not mentioned in the series at all, because it is a continuation of the story about how science works, and it was dropped from the series.
The book is quite popular in telling us that the next step in understanding the universe after analyzing observations is to create equations that allow us to predict the behavior of the observed phenomenon. However, if the system consists of three close and more or less equal-sized bodies, then normal equations cannot be developed for most cases.
Some stable situations in the three-body problem. Source: Wikipedia
One can only use the summation of an incredibly large number of coefficients, each of which must be calculated separately. It is impossible to do this solely by human forces, and even modern computers are of limited help. And it is precisely to make these calculations that a civilization that has been prevented from developing electronics by the era of Chaos and catastrophe has to build a computer out of people. In the series, this scene, although impressive, remains incomprehensible.
Sophones.
Another element that remains little understood in Netflix’s creation, but is an interesting and well explained idea in the book is sophones. The series takes about five minutes to explain the principles of their functioning, so you can only guess what they are if you know something about this topic beforehand and listen very carefully.
Liu Cixin’s detailed explanations and principles of operation are shown in an arch, where the events after Ye Wanjie contacted them are shown from the perspective of the trisolatians. The sophons are based on the idea that our space actually has not three but 10 spatial dimensions, but most of them are compacted to values that we cannot measure. This is a completely scientific idea that is quite popular among physicists.
Sophones. A still from the series
Any object – for example, a proton – can actually exist in these dimensions and be much larger than it seems. Here we can resort to an analogy with a sheet of very thin paper rolled into a ball. Meanwhile when talking about a proton, we mean increasing the dimensionality not by one, but by 7. So when rolled out into a plane, the particle is larger than a planet.
It was on this particle that the inhabitants of the three-sun system printed a supercomputer, which they connected to another with the help of quantum entanglement and learned to use the energy of the vacuum. It took them years to do all this in the book, and they can’t create very many sophons.
In the series, the sophons look almost omnipotent, but in the book, they are incapable of doing anything but spying, disrupting accelerators, and creating various illusions. But more is not expected of them, because their only goal is to prevent the development of science on Earth. The main idea of the book is that the deeper you can understand matter, the more power you will have over the world. The sophons are the embodiment of the Santi’s scientific superiority, and they are used to prevent humans from catching up with the aliens.
A still from the series
Because all the cunning military plans mean very little if the enemy has technologies that you cannot distinguish from magic. Science is in charge of turning magic into technology, but if civilization is deprived of the ability to do experiments, this whole mechanism doesn’t work. And people really become just bugs under someone’s boot.
The series ends with the same scene as the first book. At the same time, the authors have included several storylines that are supposed to be developed in future seasons. If they do, we will be shown how humanity is trying to get out of the situation it is in and will face new problems.
