This is a slightly evolved out-take from my recent Vermont Humanities talk, which can be viewed here.
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem was remarkably entertaining, I thought, but the whole San-Ti plot line is built around a basic ecological fallacy. Let me explain. (And I’m referring here to the Netflix series, not necessarily to the novel by Cixin Liu, which I have not read, though I’ve been told by those who’ve read it that it largely holds for that as well.)
The Three-Body Problem is about humanity’s encounter with an alien race, the San-Ti or Trisolarans, who have emerged in a star system that is a three-body system. A three-body system is a classic example of an unpredictable stochastic system: it’s one in which three similar bodies — suns, in this case — exert gravitational pulls on each other that are only stable for limited periods and whose stability cannot be predicted. The mathematics for predicting it is too complex and our, earthly, mathematicians (like the Trisolarans’) have never been able to crack it. (There’s some debate over that, but let’s leave it aside.)
This alien race has developed the means to rapidly dehydrate themselves at the onset of an unstable period and go into a state of suspended animation until the next stable system arises, with presumably enough of them remaining in an underground shelter to monitor things during the intervening chaos. The planet goes from frozen states to hothouse states at will. In this it’s something of a metaphor for Earth, which has also gone from cool to warm periods, but not quite as dramatically as this, and far more slowly. But with the current Anthropocene event, there’s a looming instability that will at least affect our capacity to survive.
What’s wrong with this picture is that the kind of highly technological, space-faring, and 11-dimensional science wielding civilization shown in the series could hardly develop under such circumstances.
It’s not just because technological civilization takes a certain time to develop. It’s because it doesn’t develop on its own. It develops in intimate interdependence with a biosphere of other creatures and elements that harbor it — a hospitable atmosphere, more or less reliable elemental cycles (oxygen, carbon, water, and so on), microbial oceans (that make us up, in fact), ensembles of organisms that serve as food and as economic and/or emotional companions, and so on. Neither the Trisolarans nor humans could possibly exist without the relational allies with whom we have co-evolved and who have made us who we are.
None of this otherness that makes us up, or that makes up the Trisolarans, is shown in the Netflix series: somehow the Trisolarans have evolved on their own to the point that they can both travel and extend their influence across the galaxy. And that, to the best of our knowledge, is ecologically impossible.
Despite its nod to environmental issues in the plotline about the human Trisolaran contactees — two of the main characters practically beg the Trisolarans to invade us because we’re so disregarding of each other and of other species — the question that’s implicitly ignored here is the question of what it means to be human, and, by extension, what it means to be an intelligent species.
Are humans simply “bare humans,” humans-without-others and without surplus, Cartesian brains-in-bodies moving amidst other brains-in-bodies, free to roam around at will from place to place and, by extension (as Elon Musk and others might like), from planet to planet? It’s not surprising that we might think so, since the world’s privileged classes do exactly that today — moving across borders freely, taking jobs, storing capital, parking yachts, and leaving behind waste wherever they go. (As a binational if not transnational academic, I’m guilty of some of that myself.)
The alternative is that we are, and have always been, inherently bound up in relationships, in multispecies entanglements with other people, animals, plants, land, microbes, weather systems and climate regimes, and so much more — creatures and allies, functions and environments, which have made us who and what we are. We are never merely human, however we might define that. To be human is always to be more and less than human, embedded within relationships and processes that subtend and support us, enable and restrain us, invade and engorge us, that overflow our boundaries, and without which we would be nothing at all.
The reality is that there is no chance in hell that a planet whose atmosphere is so geophysically unstable as that of the San-Ti could give rise to a biosphere that would enable a spacefaring technological civilization to evolve within it. Civilizations like that don’t fall from the sky; they co-evolve with and within their biospheric and ecological conditions. That takes aeons of time, including aeons of relative stability for the co-evolutionary give-and-take that builds us.
It’s taking modern humans far too long to learn this lesson about our utter ecological dependence and, in fact, our radical ecological incompleteness. But most cultures that have arisen and flourished on this planet for any respectable length of time have taken that ecological togetherness for granted and couldn’t have survived without it.
That’s what makes the 3 Body Problem (at least the Netflix version) impossible. We can call it the 3 Body Problem Problem.
