The Turkey Economists

Are our mainstream economists turkeys or flat-worlders?

Farmer versus Shooter Models

Change of pace from recent posts today. I revert like a child to hard scifi when depressed and unable to focus. Three Body Problem was recommended, but sadly it turned out to be very soft scifi. Still… it did the job. However, it did a little more. Since the Netflix version of the novels is now streaming, it has entered mainstream pop culture, so that’s an opportunity for an MMT activist, physicist and philosopher to draw some major fodder from while writing for popular consumption.

Geeky stuff out of the way first?

Chaos Theory

The relevance of the 3-body problem to macroeconomics is palpable. Henri Poincaré was one of the first to see classical dynamics is next to insoluble, when he showed that the solar system is unstable and the general solution to even three gravitating bodies in motion is chaotic. Technically that means any numerical attempt at a solution will very soon wildly diverge in prediction from reality.

In modern times exact solutions have been found, but they are incredibly special, and do not occur naturally. They are what you would call mathematical results, not truly physical. (That is so even if we ignored effects of quantum mechanics and general relativity.) This is a major plot failure in The Three Body Problem, since the humans attempting to solve the solar system calendar problem for the Trisolarians would know the Newtonian problem is not physical. In the novels this is turned into a feature, since those humans are portrayed as pseudo-religious. They’ve wilfully, one presumes, ignored general relativity (time dilation effects). Presumably the attempt to Redeem humanity is merely an attempt to show the Trisolarians humans are capable of solving incredibly hard but useless mathematics puzzles. (Cryptocurrency all over again! 🤣) Or at least that’s they way I have to read the novel to enjoy it!

((Oh no! I can already feel this blog post is going to have the highest lol emoji density of them all.))

It has been a rather silent triumph of Twentieth and 21st century mathematics that stable solutions to the gravitational three body problem have been discovered , but no one was expecting this to be possible. However, it is still true that general solutions are nearly impossible to compute.

When I write “impossible to compute” I have a technical result in mind, one can read more here and more for lay readers here

Remarkably, in 1912 Karl Fritiof Sundman proved there is a way to compute the general solution to the gravitational 3-body problem. Unfortunately it is totally impractical. In any case, the gravitational problem of most interest to us is for our solar system, which is what… a 10-body problem?${}^\dagger$ That means ignoring the moons of planets and the asteroid belt. So you might be surprised that in the real world solar systems are fairly stable even though mathematics says they should generically not be stable. The resolution is found in knowing the time scales involved. NASA or any future space engineers, can safely plot trajectories for spacecraft on year-long time scales because the typical time periods over which our solar system becomes unpredictable are extremely long in duration. Also, space navigators do not need to know analytical solutions, they can compute approximate trajectories numerically with decent precision. Again, that’s because they are operating with time scales far shorter than that of the orbits of the planets and moons.

(${}^\dagger$A reddit’er, who else, points out the Trisolarians face a 4-body problem, since they have three Suns, plus their planet.😂 Completely missing the point that on a calendar prediction time-scale the perturbations of a planet on a star are truly negligible. Even with chaotic motion. If you cannot measure the initial configuration of the three stars within a millimetre, then your puny planet’s effect will be less than the chaotic motion divergence.)

Also, to emphasize the point: instability and predictability are totally different concepts. Our solar system is both, it is for sure unpredictable, but might also be unstable. However this matters little to human space explorers because the time over which planetary motions get unpredictable is on the order of years or maybe centuries (I am not exactly sure of the typical time period off the top of my head), not days or years. Even if our solar system is stable over millions of years (no planets will collide or shoot off to infinity) it is still unpredictable over perhaps thousand year intervals. That just means we need a lot more data to predict where planets will be exactly in a thousand years compared to next year. We’d need much more than a thousand times as much precision data.

In the 1960’s the meteorologist Edward Lorenz showed the same for a very simple model of “weather” (fluid convection). Eventually some heterodox economists caught on to this, and realized economic systems were far from equilibrium too (will wonders never cease), and inherently chaotic. The folks at the Sante Fe Institute were leaders in such thought, and later John Blatt and Steve Keen made their valuable contributions. Amazingly, and sadly, mainstream economics never caught on and has remained in the dark ages of equilibrium modelling. This is due to the whole ideological indoctrination that “perfect markets” thinking does for you. You think prices would be stable and sales will clear, if only government took its sticky finger off the free market. LOL. 🤣

((Why would you even think an economy has to be solvable? Maybe you are a little neoclassical baby?))

But that’s not my topic for today. If you think idealized toy models that are solvable can tell you anything useful about the real world economy, then good luck to you. But for the love of God please stay clear of any policy round-tables you crank.

Instability versus Unpredictability

One thing which confuses weak minded economists, I suspect, is that they look at empirical data (I suppose) and see cycles and periods of stability with no hyperinflation. There is then a natural childish tendency I can sympathize${}^\ast$ with in wishing to model the economic system in equilibrium terms, because after all, things seem to swirl around some sort of stable relative price vector, after accounting for nominal price adjustments (just looking at relative prices).

Sadly this is delusional.

${}^\ast$In theoretical physics and computer programming I do seek simplicity, like a grown-up child. The thing about being a child at heart is that although it can be a wonderful thing, you really aught to also know when that is not appropriate.

In fact delusions of this nature are more akin to illusions. Like seeing Jesus in the Turin Shroud. The periodic motions of the economy are not stable orbits about an ideal equilibrium. They are (generically) quasi-periodic motions far-from-equilibrium. But this does not mean the economy is unstable. It means it is unpredictable. There is a big difference.

Chaotic systems can of course also be unstable. Our Solar System is thought to be unstable, though no one can prove it for sure, what a dynamicist can do is point out our solar system is generically unstable, meaning it would be pretty lucky if it were stable. They can also tell us the characteristic time scale for instability (the time period up until which the motions of the Sun and our neighbouring planets is constrained to more or less fixed orbits). I forget the number, but the characteristic period is probably on the order of billions of years. The Sun could die out before any of our planets go haywire and shoot off to interstellar “infinity” or two planets collide. (Don’t quote me on this. If you want to know then pull up a DuckDuckGo or Perplexity ai tab.) About 17 billion years before any likely major planetary collision?

Hard scifi Gripes?

I have no interest in critiquing the “Physics of Three Body”. But I can’t help myself. You can search youtube for people doing reaction videos to Three Body Problem, and so I might be entirely redundant. What I do care about is being a bit of a hard scifi snob. My attitude is why put in fantasy elements into a good scifi story if you could instead make it far more interesting with heavy realism?

The honest truth is there is far too much physics that gets stretched in Three Body the novel than I have time or patience to critique, so I’m letting it rest, except for when there is an interesting literary angle to comment upon.

The first one worth mentioning is the 3BP virtual reality game character, von Neumann. He and the game’s Isaac Newton, along with the main protagonist Wang Miao, convince a feudal emperor to build a human computer, with 30 million soldiers doing essentially mindless logic gate tasks. The trouble with this plot line is that they appear to be building a general purpose computer. What I’d have done is construct a single purpose 30 million solider machine. Less prone to error, faster compute. However, this is truly a pedantic gripe, because Liu Cixin writes the correct realist reason the 30 million soldier computer fails to predict the Trisolar orbits — namely the Newtonian dynamics model lacked general relativity corrections.

Knowing this, you might ask why the classical three body problem to this day still attracts some mathematicians? I cannot tell you why, except that mathematicians are fond of torture.

((In the novels this is attributed to the psychological acquisition of a false religion, a pseudo-religion, among the Redemptionist faction of the ETO. They begin to simply believe as a matter of faith that if they solve the three body problem the Trisolarians will leave Earth alone. By the way, this fits my definition of religion — which is “A source of Good.” The Redemptionists believe their solving the 3BP will lead to good for all, so it is at least a pseudo-religion. It is also a false religion because their solving the 3BP is not a source of Good. It is merely a source of interesting mathematics which is morally neutral, inapplicable to the real world.))

Why are mathematicians so fond of torture? Why would they work on a Newtonian mechanics problem that has no real world applications?

I imagine their response would be, “Sure, sure general relativity makes the three body problem pure art, not science. But so what? Mathematics is art!”

I happen to agree with this attitude. But you should know it is painful art. One never knows when a piece will be finished, nor whether certain subjective standards of elegance will be met. Often the aesthetics really suck. But the humble mathematician indulges in this tortuous art anyway.

Applied Mathematics is very different, for here one does seek utility in physics or other sciences, and no one alive today working on the Newtonian three body problem would be accused of being an applied mathematician.

However… if someone ever did figure out an efficient algorithm for real-time Newtonian dynamics, it is possible it might find a real world application. But because solar system dynamics does require general relativity, it would not be an application in astronomy or space travel… or I guess it could be used for very short time-scale trajectory computations, where effects of general relativity are negligible.

For normies: I cannot easily describe why general relativity turns astronomy dynamics into a nightmare, you’ll have to take it upon authority it does. The equations for general relativity are so severely difficult to compute that exact solutions are known only for truly incredibly symmetric spacetimes, and they are… what?… less than a handful in number, and totally useless for astronomical applications. (Fascinatingly, these maximally symmetric solutions are very useful in theoretical work, because a couple of them describe ideal approximations to at least two very important real physical phenomena: the entire cosmos, and rotating black holes.)

Having said that, with enough computing power general relativistic systems, like colliding black holes, can be pretty well simulated these days, so the lesson there is with gargantuan enough compute power, the classical three body problem has about the same status as a relativistic gravitational problem. All of them are hard problems in real applications.

The astounding thing is that the Newtonian three body problem is so damn hard! It should be a lot easier than a typical GR calculation, but in computational algorithmic terms the problems are about the same. This is typical for chaotic dynamics. If the system has any non-linearity, then,

• the computations to solve the system numerically will be hard,
• they’ll all be about as hard as each other for the same $N$.
• The bigger $N$ the worse, exponentially so, so extremely frickin’ harder.

and it gets even more interesting,

• Once $N$ becomes truly gargantuan, the $N$-body problem can be immensely simplified to the point of “solvability” — this occurs when there are so many molecules that the entire system can be coarsely described on a large scale using statistical mechanics.

With statistical mechanics we give up worrying about what any one body is doing, entirely, we are not interested in the single body trajectories, and instead we define macroscopic variables, like temperature, pressure, volume, density, and these fictional variables are then treated as new higher order or emergent variables. Even if the molecular dynamics are highly chaotic, the macroscopic variable time evolution can, under strict conditions, be simple and solvable. The class of such solvable statistical mechanics systems are those in equilibrium. Thermal equilibrium.

This has concern for my macroeconomics and political economy allegory. The macroeconomic system we live within is — luckily${}^\ddagger$ — not in thermal equilibrium in any sense. This is essentially why neoclassical economics does not work. (And also why, perhaps to the chagrin of some socialists, why Austrian School economics is not entirely stupid. The Austrians are dummies only because they think gold is currency and “free markets” are possible, neither of which is true, so in the end they are as rotten as the neoclassicals. Being half-right in a field where Justice and Trust matter is as good as being all wrong.)

${}^\ddagger$“Luckily” because an economic system in equilibrium would mean we are all dead…. or all Borg.

As the baby of all hard chaos dynamics problems, the three body problem has a sort of mythic status. That is another reason why pure mathematicians might like the problem. (By the way, the Trisolarians, like humans, would have known this well before being capable of interstellar travel.) How would we know macroeconomic systems are in a state of equilibrium? We would know if the macroeconomics could be well-described by a small number of dynamical variables (analogies to temperature, volume, density &c.)

In fact, our macroeconomic systems (taken per country, say) are far-from-equilibrium systems, but also not totally anarchic. There are macroscopic observables that can usefully describe the time evolution of a macroeconomy. The analogy is like a complicated fluid, or the weather. Although this is only a very weak analogy.

In particular, while the Sun tends to monopolize the behaviour of our weather, governments tend to monopolize the behaviour of our macroeconomics. And to extend the analogy somewhat comically, while the Sun does not know what it is doing to us, nor do politicians in government know what they are doing to the macroeconomy. I take this not as an argument against government and for anarchy, but rather an argument for a better informed and educated government. If you have something as powerful as the Sun but exists next door at room temperature and has eyes and ears and an email account, it could be a good idea to use it for the greater Good.

Does that sound like an endorsement of authoritarianism to you? It should not, but to see why… read onwards!

Remembrance of Earth’s Past

Whoa! Liu Cixin is no Proust. Although, to be fair, Proust is a little over-rated. I loved reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu when I was a teenager, but when I matured I better understood why the Monty Python skit is even funnier than it first appears. The Proustian romance and pathos is one thing, but you really can’t appreciate it until you’ve lived a good life and have experienced true loss of love and loss of innocence. Same for Mishima’s Sea of Fertility — even in translation it was a heck of a trilogy to read, and a masterpiece of Japanese literary art, all despite Yukio Mishima’s warped politics and odd-duck lifestyle. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had been spared all the heartache and sorrow? Probably would have been superficially nicer, but probably not as meaningful.

Anyhow, I guess I will have something to say about the politics of hard scifi, and will use the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy as a case study, since… why not? Game of Thrones is over-cooked by now.

For scifi fans, I’d recommend the EPUB books, you can get them free-libre, or look for the Chinese TV series. Reading subtitles is not the worst thing in the world, my daughters who have Smartphone addiction and extremely normal average “ADHD” (the type every kid has these days, total normality) watch a lot of Korean sitcom and romcom drama. I guess they’ve evolved eyeballs that can flicker in sync with subtitle display frequency with no conscious mental effort.

Music Geeks

I liked some of the scores used for the CHoinese TV series that I am following in parallel with reading. The end credits remind me of the theme used in Donnie Darka — Mad World by Tears for Fears written by Roland Orzabal. Little touch of genius. I hate to admit my older sister sometimes had good taste in pop music.

The Premise

I’ll be writing in real-time as I read the novels. Thus without foreknowledge of the plot twists.

I have to say, I did read a little about Liu Cixin, and the opinions about his politics. To summarize, he’s a little bit apolitical, but has this weird view that authoritarianism is the natural end state of human civilization… I think, if I read the reports correctly. I could be wrong. This has offended some scifi fans . Is Remembrance of Earth’s Past really Chinese state propaganda? Whoa!

But like Vladimir Nabokov was a dick, I wouldn’t put an author’s political opinions in the way of a good read. For me, I can easily filter out political propaganda, and will often laugh at it, but the merits of the scifi story as entertainment could still be considerable. Anyone remember The Matrix?

At worst, dumb-dumb politics ruins the novel immersive experience, so it’s depressing. But I rarely get angry and fumed up about it, no novelist is perfect, and life is too short to write angry letters to artists telling them their politics suck.

I will confess then that I liked the premise of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The one-liner “Physics does not exist, and never will exist” is pretty good. Why? It is because you should have researched the author, and know he is a computer engineer. Thus you know damn well he better have a very good plot for how the heck physics cannot exist!

In addition, early in the English book translation the story notes what the essence of physics is for us, which is the patterns of invariant structures, or symmetries to put it more elegantly. Physics is nothing if not the study of the most basic elementary symmetry principles that hold within our universe.

Newton’s Laws, electromagnetism, Einstein’s gravity, quantum mechanics — all can be written in terms of fundamental symmetry principles governing the interaction of matter and spacetime.

Hence, and Liu Cixin knows this, for physics not to exist would mean the symmetries physicists have discovered are illusory.

This opens up a panoply of something like a Matrix universe, one that is programmed and at the whim of the “universal programmer”. (Wolfram physics ya nerds! 🤣) I cannot tell if that is where Liu Cixin takes the story, but he has opened up a wide field for the plot. A nice master-stroke. Probably not Chinese state propaganda. Just sayin'.

Having not yet gotten to the crux of Three Body Problem, I have to insert my own bit of politics.

Harder scifi

I reckon you can take Remembrance of Earth’s Past as poetic allegory. I am damn sure this is not what Liu Cixin was thinking, but I’m telling you this is one way I can absorb the whole idea looming in Three Body Problem. Which metaphors then? Well, you can say “Capitalism does not exist, and never will exist”. But that’s almost too comical.

Or is it?

The way I think of the Marxist counter to capitalism is as a bit of a fantasy. Neither the capitalists nor the marxists are theorising about reality as far as I can tell. Their economics does not exist. So I’d get my proper poetic analogy via “Economics does not exist”.

As allegory I’d take this to mean our economy surely exists (as does matter and spacetime probably in Remembrance of Earth’s Past? Not yet sure!) The problem is that what economists think economics is is totally unreal. That’d be my poetic take on the Three Body Problem story.

The only trouble is this is a good thing, whereas in the Three Body Problem it is supposedly getting teed up as a bad thing? (“Physics does not exist” is some sort of incipient war on science or intellectuals in the story?) In macroeconomics it is a damn good thing the marxists and neoclassicals preach bogus economics, because no one should ever be forced to live in their “gold is currency” and “capitalism is revolutionary” fantasy universe.

(Disclosure: I used to think “capitalism is the revolutionary force” was a fair enough theory. But a better grasp of neoliberalism has disabused me of this childish reading of marxism. Neoliberal capitalism has potential to persist on state life-support forever. F-o-r-e-v-e-r!!! How? UBI ya’ sockcuckers! The revolutionary force, if there ever is to be one, has to be the spiritual capacity of people working together to overthrow tyranny and injustice. This is not “capitalism” by any definition.)

This is at least a nice way to enjoy the scifi story, because I am unable to enjoy it much as a physicist myself. It is too fantastical, so not good enough hard scifi. I cannot tolerate fantasy literature for long periods. Short stories with some sort of allegorical moral fable are ok, but the immersive fantasy literature stuff is to me like reading superhero comics. A complete waste of my time when I was a kid, like Commodore 64 video games.

I know adults indulge in these forms of entertainment, and a million people watch reality TV shows. I just don’t understand it — who has that amount of free time? Or… what the heck is wrong with me that I don’t have such free time?

The reason The Matrix was cool was because you could read it as allegory for a materialistic society. Even if the Wachowski’s did not intend for this to be the poetic reading. Who has you trapped in the real Matrix? You do. You and your ego and insatiable desires for material wealth and comforts. Agent Smith was, all said and done, a human invention. To extract yourself from the real Matrix you want to recognize what truly matters in your life. And that’d be love and kindness. Waking up from the real Matrix means becoming a more spiritual person.

In the macroeconomics/political economy allegory, Agent Smith is something like the White Supremacist or Neocon or Christian Fascist (they’re not entirely disjoint categories). His “religion” is rule of the machines. Or not even that, it is rule by Agent Smith, beyond fascism (the nation is sacred) to total monarchy (the King is sacred). ((I always shed a tear for my friends in Thailand at such points in my thought. One nation within which a sizeable proportion of citizens still has a very unhealthy regard for their monarch.))

This leads to the extension of my allegory: humanity in our times is in fact gripped by the tentacles of an insidious sort of vague ideology. I’d call it neoliberalism, but it goes beyond the narrow meaning of that word. It extends to the whole plethora of false doctrines in economics, macroeconomics, sociology and politics that tells us human beings are mere animals and incapable of peace. The idea is we have to be competitive${}^\dagger$, this is how we survive, we have to dominate others, and moreover this is bred into us in our DNA… and so forth. I will not belabour the whole blackpill nihilist thesis, there are too many varieties, I’m just sketching the cartoon of the idea. However, I do mean to refer to the real world.

${}^\dagger$Or, more extreme, the idea we do not have any choice in the matter, since we have no free will (the idiocy of Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky and their like). (First define “free will” for me bros!))

It is a pervasive ideology, infecting popular culture and social discourse everywhere, and it is ruinous for the chances of a decent civilization. However, unlike nihilists, I believe humanity has the collective capacity to overcome this narrow dystopian world view. Call me an optimist, a hopeless romantic, but it is what I believe is possible. Just don’t ask me to offer any probabilities. I’d say 100%, but have no clue what the time-frame would be. Asymptotics is easy, real-time dynamics is hard-to-impossible. But this is also not the topic of this article today.

The Farmer and the Shooter Hypotheses

TODO:
* The concept in 3BP.
* How it appears in the allegory of modern political 
economy. The hapless Turkey, the Foolish Disk Worlder.
* The dis-analogy of it, and why some allegories are 
made to be motive to overcome the main problem.

Maybe I should not waste space expanding on the Turkey and the Flat worlder metaphors. I think the better point to make is how this sets up a false dichotomy in the Three Body story. The viewpoint the reader is (supposedly) drawn to is this binary option: either we are like Turkeys thinking the dawn brings food every day, oblivious of the catastrophe of Thanks Giving; or we are Flat Worlders oblivious some 3D entity is toying with our world as if we were ants, meaning pretty oblivious of our cares and desires.

Whether you go all Nihilist and pomo, or Nietzsche, in response may indicate some political persuasion, but I think I am an optimist (talking about our real world now) because I believe most ordinary people are capable of a more enlightened world view. The one where human beings might seem insignificant, but that we are nonetheless amazing creatures. As are any other alien civilizations in our universe who are sentient and have developed science and technology.

The big lie is that sentience is a total accident.

We might not be Turkeys nor Flat Worlders. At any primitive time in human history maybe it seems that way, but that’s an individualistic attitude, whereas I can both appreciate the worth of every individual creature, and imagine collectively life is something special. There is also the point nihilists should consider, which is that even if life was not special, it might become special. In my political economy allegory: neoliberalism is probably a transitory abomination.

I mean, why would you suppose we are accidents? Of course I know why, and I maintain a physics and a philosophy blog where I write more about such topics. But the short version would be we just cannot truly know, and yet we could very likely be a remarkable species. Being small in the universe does not equate with insignificance. (Isn’t it a “very male” fallacy to consider size to be of any importance? Hence, most likely dead wrong? 🤣)

Size and mass are important for many things of course. But (a) get too massive and you eventually become a useless sucky black hole. (b) when size is not important is of most importance. In the spiritual realm size has a completely different meaning to anything physical. In the abstract, being a spiritual giant connotes great wisdom and compassion. In a physical world where spiritual beings subsist, this sort of size truly does matter. I always think of the output from mathematics and science to be inexorable companions of spiritual maturation.

Another thing worth mentioning — the eco-extremists. I’ve never found the extreme animal rights and eco-extremist people to be very spiritual. They, like the Three Body character Dr Ye Weinjie, and the even more extreme Mike Evans and Pan Han characters, have a jaundiced view of humanity. I lump them (rightly or wrongly) in the same category as Agent Smith in The Matrix. It’d be sad if Liu Cixin was among them, (is he?). Half-way through the book it looks possible Ye Wenjie will turn to more compassion for humanity. (I guess it is nice for my depression that I am immersed enough in the book to care for her character!)

((Also, I wonder which character is Liu Cixin identifying with as author? Not that we need to care, but is it Ye Wenjie or Wang Maio — or the Trisolarian! that’d be funny! 🤣 It is starting to become that sort of story where I care about the author’s views, which is a bad sign. A sign of a poor writer. If it goes all full Authoritarian Big Daddy mode on us, I doubt I’ll get to the 2nd and 3rd books. Having Mums and Dads is great. But it does not scale. I am pretty much now locked-in against solution by authoritarian rule…. even if it frickin’ worked!))

The plot problem is really about how an individual’s bitter experience can lead them to think of all of humanity as evil and irredeemable. It’s an incredibly childish and self-centred attitude. The truth is, and I think most people are like this, we can save the animals, save the biosphere, and also love humanity. These are not contradictory or mutually exclusive options. To think otherwise is an imbecilic rotten apple fallacy.

I’d go further: the human species is not a cancer or plague, we are a natural outcome of life on Earth. So maybe have a little compassion for us too, as well as the swallows?

By this account (and you have no reason to think I am correct, but I’ll state it anyway) the greater a people are spiritually, the greater will be their science. The greater will be many of their aspects. Greater in both abstract spiritual and material advancement awesomeness. Moreover, in such wise a tiny insignificant creature on a mundane living planet, might reach out to the stars. It will not be long in the grand scheme of things before humans do reach the stars. By then, the “insignificance” of any one human might, I suppose, might still be regarded by fools as cause to think our lives have no cosmic importance, but to the more sagacious and wise it can be true one puny life has a lot of meaning, by virtue of its tiny insignificant contribution to the whole.

As I keep trying to remind some tentatively nihilist MMT friends who give up on elections for government, no one vote seems to count, but in fact they all do and that is the power of summation. Addition is a powerful thing.

Subtraction is also a powerful thing, once you get to zero you are dead.

When people withhold their vote in elections they are ceding power to those who do vote, so it is disgusting defeatism. Using your vote to register a protest means voting for someone or something, not abstaining. Unless the result of mass abstinence is some good (abstain from voting when there is only one horrible choice). But if you abstain it seems morally incumbent upon you to exert great effort to create a better system where your vote is worthwhile, is it not?

I say, give up on political parties — they are anathema for a decent society. But do not give up your vote. Do not rely solely upon the collective power of a vote either. All means available for peaceful revolution need to be employed.

An Excellent Dialogue

About half way in to Three Body Problem the protagonist Wang Miao asks the venerable and gentle Dr Ye Wenjie about “physics does not exist”. She answers that it is not that physics does not exist, but that what we think is physics is wrong.

I’m not sure of the spin the Netflix adaptation will have on this, nor am I sure how this remark will play out in the original novels, but it is a crux… for me at least, worth writing about… and with my allegorical interpretation too.

Ye Wenjie likens scientists now to the Church of old, who thought Copernicus as guilty of heresy, Bruno and d’Ascoli worth the stake, and Galileo worth the Spanish Inquisition. She says, “Maybe we are like the Church.” Meaning with respect to today’s scientific apostates.

It is a lot less dramatic for physics these days though, than it is for political economy, since physics base marble is in pretty close contact with us now though particle accelerators and cosmology, and quantum computing of course (very base level, since the QC’s are exploiting entanglement). Entanglement is the base marble of our universe, and perhaps it is no accident Schrödinger’s Cat gets a mention in the immediately preceding scene with the detective Shi Qiang.

We are nowhere near the base marble of economics, but MMT is part of the base. A huge gap remains in orthodox and even MMT-inspired political economy, and that is the spiritual realm, and I’ve not encountered any professional economists who even dare acknowledge this yet — maybe there are a few like Kate Raworth or Jason Hickel, but I do not really know for sure, are they merely acting ethically because they think it good for themselves, or do they realize spiritual principles are at the very heart of true economics?

Not just ecological principles, but spiritual principles. I suspect they do not acknowledge. They place the ecology ahead as primary, but this is a grave mistake, because we cannot have a sound ecosystem by just asserting ecology is important. Spiritual prerequisites are needed, even if only at a bare minimum level of political recognition that the ecological economics importance is something worth caring about.

If your economists do not care about ecology then nothing wil be done politically. The ecological economics academics can scream their heads off, it will only be when people dying is a clear consequence of ignorance of ecology that politicians will lift a finger to dial the ecologists and invite them to the table. Too late. But it doesn’t have to play out that way. If people can learn spiritual principles are more important even than ecology, then there is hope of avoiding catastrophe. I know it is a hard ask for a realist, even harder for a dumb-dumb materialist, but you’ve got to ask.

((At this point through reading 3BP, I am certainly worried (for my entertainment pleasure) that Liu Cixin might head towards blackpill nihilism. I hope that’s not the case. Getting immersed into a story is a wonderful form of entertainment, but if the bubble is shattered it’s kinda’ depressing, which defeats the purpose.))

Interestingly, although I am not close friends with Warren Mosler, only a friendly acquaintance, I think he has a moral component to his work over the decades on what became MMT. He has always said he talks to anyone in power or schools or the general public who is listening, out of a sense of public duty and moral obligation. Few other economists teach from this motive. They teach from textbooks for a paycheck and academic career. They have no idea at least 25% of what they teach is nonsense, and in fact unethical. If you know this, what are you teaching for?

Never teach for a paycheck.

Expect a paycheck, but don’t let that be the reason you teach. OK, I do not personally know a lot of economics teachers, I’m just guessing, but prove me wrong! Can it be that they are not teaching economics for a pay check and yet refuse to inquire into the fundamental truths of the subject? What I do know is that Mosler at least does not do it for any income. He is pure. But, of course, considered a crank and heretic by mainstream economists, of all persuasions, post-keynesians, marxists, new Keynesians and neoclassical alike. Warren Mosler is a Copernicus of our times. It is lucky Stephanie Kelton has not yet been burned at the metaphorical stake. You could say Steve Keen was the one burned at the stake, but like you’d expect for an Aussie, he survived the ordeal and only increased his cuss word frequency.

Blackpill versus Pomo

About the pill colours. They come from the red-pill/blue-pill choice in The Matrix. I use “blackpill” almost synonymously with nihilism, though they are not the same.

From the online Britannica encyclopedia :

The manosphere generally refers to a vast network of websites and blogs frequented by online misogynist groups, including men’s rights activists (MRAs), pick-up artists (PUAs), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and incels. Many of these groups consider taking the red pill as a key tenet of their journeys and a necessary jumping-off point for these various ideologies. In the manosphere, redpilling refers to embracing the idea that men’s unhappiness and lack of sexual success is the fault of women and feminists. Men who do not accept this reality are referred to as bluepilled.
      The red pill functions similarly in the so-called “manosphere.” The manosphere generally refers to a vast network of websites and blogs frequented by online misogynist groups, including men’s rights activists (MRAs), pick-up artists (PUAs), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and incels. Many of these groups consider taking the red pill as a key tenet of their journeys and a necessary jumping-off point for these various ideologies. In the manosphere, redpilling refers to embracing the idea that men’s unhappiness and lack of sexual success is the fault of women and feminists. Men who do not accept this reality are referred to as bluepilled.
       Other colors of the pills have also emerged in the manosphere. The term black pill, first popularized in the 2010s on the incel blog Omega Virgin Revolt, refers to accepting the futility of fighting against a feminist system. Blackpilled incels are encouraged to either commit suicide or “go ER”/be a “hERo,” referencing Elliot Rodger’s 2014 Isla Vista murder spree that has been called an act of misogynistic terrorism.
      Anarchist podcaster and writer Michael Malice has promoted the idea of the white pill, which expresses hope for a better political future. Less common references include the pink pill, purple pill, and green pill. In recent years the idea of “-pilling” has become a more mainstream online joke and a self-deprecating, ironic way to describe becoming interested in or influenced by something.Other colors of the pills have also emerged in the manosphere. The term black pill, first popularized in the 2010s on the incel blog Omega Virgin Revolt, refers to accepting the futility of fighting against a feminist system. Blackpilled incels are encouraged to either commit suicide or “go ER”/be a “hERo,” referencing Elliot Rodger’s 2014 Isla Vista murder spree that has been called an act of misogynistic terrorism.
      Anarchist podcaster and writer Michael Malice has promoted the idea of the white pill, which expresses hope for a better political future… In recent years the idea of “-pilling” has become a more mainstream online joke and a self-deprecating, ironic way to describe becoming interested in or influenced by something.

Whoa! That’s all nasty stuff. I felt the need to acknowledge this lexicon, because my more casual use of “blackpill” refers merely to general hopelessness and lack of hope for humanity generally, and my usage has nothing to do with misogyny. The point to “pilling” is that it is a conscious free willed choice.

My other point is that if we sanely examine the evidence for and against humanity, there is no reason to become nihilistic. Humans do good things and bad things. We do not have to solve the three body problem for redemption. We only need to treat each other with kindness and forgiveness, but the other side to Justice is to not allow people who wish to do harm to harm others. In other words, becoming a more spiritual person is a process, one that cannot be perfected, but which can be acquired in ever greater measure, and one measure is not to sit idly by while other people inflict needless harm upon others. But also, not to be a dick about this and go all fascist and over-protective of your ideals or children. Kindness and love cannot be imposed by external force. The greater force comes from within, and — call me a wide-eyed optimist — everyone has such capacity. We need to help each other exercise such inner force.

The thing is, this is easy to do. Patience and forbearance are arts for sure, but being able to roughly doodle in this form of art does wonders, you don’t need to be a compassion and mercy Rembrandt to do a lot of good in the world.

Spoiler 1

I was watching the Chinese TV series version parallel to reading the novels. In the TV series you see these little red ants from time to time, with heavy cinematic significance.

Are the Trisolarans the red ant things? You know, I think they are. Or maybe not, a McGuffin?

Have to say of the TV adaptation, the world Central Command gang are freakin’ bad actors. It is pretty hilarious. Oh yeah, Chinese State propaganda! 🤣 (I can believe it in this case.)

On this issue… I’ve watched plenty of action movies, superhero, Marvel, Batman, Superman, stuff in my life to to know “state propaganda” is pervasive and relative.

Half the time Hollywood probably does not know it is doing propaganda, It’s like Noam Chomsky used to say, you do not have to believe you are a propagandists to be doing propaganda, more likely you’re self-selected. Only natural born establishment shills get promoted to high rank in mainstream media.

Still, I kind of preferred the 1960’s era depictions in Three Body.

Modern China is an incredible country, bustling with dynamism (and the pollution it comes with). It is super modern. But there is no excuse for shoddy acting when depicting the international governmental crowd, and what’s with all the military regalia? 🤣 Hilarious stuff. Seriously dude, I honestly think it is for comic effect, could it not be? I guess it might not be, so then it is even more hilarious. Spoils the scifi entertainment aspect though. Pity.

I’m not sure this can be made a critique of Liu Cixin’s literary style, but in fact there are some plot points and dialogues (albeit in English translation) that seem pretty cringe. I skip over that speed-reading if I can. But much the same in Dune and The Expanse novels. You have to know when to speed read and when to slow down to enjoy sub-genius literature.

It’s like in movies, suspension of disbelief. Only in literature I don’t know the analogous phrase. It should not be a thing, but in a lot of scifi literature it is, sadly.

There is a lot of other funny stuff in the TV adaptation that makes it a bit too hilarious to get immersed not as serious scifi. Too many to bother mentioning, use of stock footage, a lot of characters stereotyped, and then the symbol of the ETO — a clear upside down Freemason symbol. What’s that about? The romantic cinematic scenes started to get a bit trite too, although I like the slowish pace they introduce. I’m only watching and reading along because I’m very depressed at the moment. Been a hard few weeks on top of a hard few months on top of a hard five years after five years of bitter-sweet bliss that got surgically removed from my heart with a thousand blunt chainsaws.

Technicomedies

The 2017 TV series is funnier than the books of course,… Chinese state propaganda! No, seriously. It is funny. I liked the way they depicted Ye Wenjie’s discovery of radiation boundaries inside the Sun, these are regions where the frequencies of emission sharply drop, in-between boundaries the fall off in frequency is gradual, a power law presumably.

((There are in fact boundary layers in the Sun and stars, but I believe they are more like conventional magnetohydrodynamic boundaries. In Three Body Problem Liu Cixin has to invent a nice little fantasy physics into the story to get the million-fold magnification of microwave transmissions he needs. But it is a cool soft scifi plot device. J’approuve.))

The comedy angle is the TV series depicts Ye Wenjie’s thesis as a stair case profile of frequencies. They should have used a power law fall off with boundary zones instead. Just for the cool factor. But… ya know… the comedy is only for the learned. Although it’d be a nice little sociological experiment to survey how many ordinary TV watchers realized the staircase profile was a bit fishy. School teachers take note! Try it on your students.

Come to think of it, this is the really serious good of shows like Three Body. They make some excellent school teaching resources for discussion.

From bitter experience I’ve learned the “physics of scifi” lessons are not good in schools that have a national standards examination focus. But for younger and older kids (50 years +, or under 12 years) these fantasy resources make nice motivation for informal discussion and “college dorm room” banter.

Suspended Judgment

There’s little point ruining a fantasy scifi story with realist gripes. However, I can make an exception when you put characters and actors in entertainment jeopardy — by which I mean painting them histrionically. It ruins the pure entertainment experience, at least for us hard scifi art snobs. This is what Liu Cixin seemed to have to contrive.

Here is what I mean. Imagine the scenario of begin confronted with outright miracles was a thing, and was presented only to a few top scientists. What would be their response? It would not be to commit suicide. Did Liu Cixin really need to make the story about physicist suicides? It think that was unnecessary for the plot. Most physicists I know would be intrigued, and first would look to counsel one another to check not everyone was going insane. Science just is not done in such isolation as portrayed in Three Body Problem. And it did not have to be written that way. The crisis could have been instead sheer confusion among the physicists. It’d be far more natural that the physicists would get together. There is the Frontier of Science group in the story, who are a bit mystical — and I think that will be integral to the plot later (probably aliens?). But a more sedate and investigative world committee of physicists exploring the miracles would have been equally as compelling a story, more interesting, and more realistic.

((Note: the Netflix version might be different, I do not know.))

(((I do not yet know if the story is about alien First Contact. Just a third of the way in, but the Red Coast Base satellite must surely become a first contact instrument?)))

Liu Cixin did get it right mostly though, where it mattered, because he had the one anti-hero, Wang Miao, respond to the miracles realistically. That was incredibly important for me to stick with the book. Wang Miao realized the miracle of the countdown was subjective, and that means the laws of physics are not really vamoosed. It allowed the character to find empathy and friendship with the desultory and roughish, but ultimately loveable, detective Shi Qiang.

Yes, the response of a realistic community of physicists would in our real world been more like Wang Maio’s response, but then i guess a few plot turns in Three Body Problem might not be “available”. Too bad I say. Eliminate them! Make the story more believable. It would be a better work of art. As it stands, Remembrance of Earth’s Past is probably a scifi classic, but not reaching the level of literary epic. I will probably still finish the trilogy. Stay tuned then for more on the 3BP allegory.

The real gripe I have here is a very general critique of all literature and movies when it comes to heros. If you have a single character as the hero or anti-hero your story is, I am afraid to say, not realistic. But there is no need to write a novel this way, with a main central protagonist/heroine/hero.

The same trope ruined The Expanse — although I loved those books too, to me, just subjectively, they were epic, although not great literature.

Does Iain Banks write from a more humanistic perspective? Ursula LeGuin? If they have I’ve not heard enough about their novels. (Hey, I can only spare the time to read about one scifi novel a year.)

I’m not deliberately making this article long, but depending upon how much grist there is to chew upon in Remembrance of Earth’s Past it will be as long as that.

Conformal Symmetry

I’d like to tell you something about the opening sequences for the Chinese TV adaptation. It depicts our solar system living within a larger cosmos, as if our entire universe was sitting inside the tip of a piece of carbon nanotube. A similar concept is put to more comedic purposes in the ending sequence of Men in Black if I recall.

The bona fide real physics concept here is called conformal or scale invariance. It is the idea that our laws of physics are not sensitive to the overall scale of things. So we could magnify everything up by a googol-fold and no one should notice the difference. It is an approximate symmetry in some areas of physics, notably electromagnetism and some string theory models.

It also is a symmetry that probably holds for time scales in our universe close to our so-called Big Bang. In fact, some cosmologists — notably Neil Turok and Latham Boyle — believe (and can show with their math) that a whole lot of particle physics makes a whole lot more sense if our universe had an exact conformal symmetry at the Big Bang. If it did, then there is little need to explain where the Big Bang came from, since the supposed singularity at our conformal time $\tau=0$ would not truly exist, it’d be a reflection symmetry boundary. In a 4D Block universe conception of Nature this says that nothing came before the Big Bang, and the origin of our universe is then something more global.

Whatever put us all here, put the whole 4D thing here, all at once, so-to-speak. Or at least implicitly, since nothing exists on the other side of a mirror. Nothing exists on the other side of our Big Bang. (Some people like to think there is an actual Mirror universe on the “other side” — but a reflection reflects, it does not transmit. Just sayin’.)

If you prefer a cosmology where a universe does exist through a conformal symmetry boundary then Roger Penrose has a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology for you to work on, but it is by far the harder physics to get right, and is probably wrong.

There is however a hybrid of Turok–Boyle and Penrose, due to Anthony Lasenby and colleagues, which is that a far future conformal symmetry could possibly be “lived through” (for elementary particles, not biological life) but the universe on the other side would be time reflected with respect to ours. That’s a wild one to wrap your head around, but “follow the math”. It is not illogical nor inconceivable.

Since this is not my physics blog, I think I will leave this topic here. I cannot quite turn it to useful allegory.

Redemptionists versus Adventists

Spoilers: ok, it is about alien first contact.

Oh no! No, no! The story got too stupid for me. The factions loyal to “Lord” (the advanced alien civilization) start doing the whole anti-religious thing (meaning pseudo-religious zealot ideological thing). I thought I’d make it through to the end of Three Body Problem, but it has become too cringe.

However, there is something to be recovered in my allegory. It is true that in MMT circles there are factions. Some MMT advocates are capitalists, some socialist, and a mix in-between, I guess some might be quasi-libertarians, and there are plenty of liberals. However, I do not see Three Body Problem being of more use for my allegory. Using scifi as allegory was a nice game worth paying while it lasted today.

I still do not think the book is Chinese State propaganda, but the TV series has enough weird actors playing the international community (they appear to be amateur actors) that it sort of ruins the feel of the TV series. The cinematography is good for a TV/streaming budget, but I got a bit tired sucking in the cringe on many aspects of the production, eventually.

I am guessing the Netflix version will be cringe in another way, the way Game of Thrones became. But I’ll have a look at it next year maybe, just in case they do something different with the whole aliens as “Lord” plot. Change that up into something realistic and more hard scifi and it could be very good entertainment.

Conflict Theory

OK, I’m being too sensitive. For sure, history teaches us humans tend to get into ideological conflict when there is uncertainty. So it is not at all unrealistic that the ETO in Three Body would splinter into factions. This fits with plenty of allegories, as I just mentioned. I will suck-it-up then and continue reading. (Later on I will get to the spoiler where Cixin Liu paints the Trisolarians motives for wanting to invade the Earth, but I have not read up to it yet in the book.)

However, I do like my scifi more when the super-powerful aliens are ethical. Why would they not be?

The worst dis-analogy people have about this is getting reflected in contemporary society in the form of the fear of Ai superintelligence. The idea is supertintelligent Ai might treat the human species as ants. This is laughable. It is an idea based on a false analogy. (The analogy is how humans treat actual ants.)

There are many flaws in the analogy, but the biggest is that a superintelligence will conform to our pretend analogies! Another is the idea hierarchies of intelligence will recapitulate (a fractal sociology notion). There is no justification for this thesis.

In fact, I am pretty cynical about the Ai tech industry. I think they are capable, even innocently, of drumming up fear of an Ai singularity just to fuel their research. I call it Nerd Capitalism.

But heck, better to fund the nerds than the Military, I say. Although, you’d like to fund the Einstein’s not the Oppenheimer’s and Teller’s’. Not all nerds were compiled equal.

The thing about Nick Bostrom, Connor whatshisname, whatshisname Yudkowsky, and whatshisname Hinton — all the Ai Singularity fear-mongers — is that their inferences are bogus. But why? Can I prove they are wrong?

No, I cannot prove they are wrong. We just cannot well-predict the future. The problem here is one of probability theory. The Ai nerds want you to believe their doom prognostications are 95% confident bands, or whatever.

The truth is, they have no idea what the error bands are for their doom predictions and nightmare scenarios. No one does.

If pressed on this, some of them will say, “Yeah, but prepare for the worst.”

OK.

What is the worst case scenario though?

Once again, they have no idea. They have worst case nightmares and dreams, but so do I, and mine are not the same as theirs. Who is to say whose nightmares are more realistic?

Our biggest closest threat coming from Ai is the powerful and wealthy people seeking to monopolize the technology, not the robots themselves.

What’s more, all the false psychology in macroeconomics — it is equally a threat to human well-being. Robot automation does not take away worker wages. They take away shit jobs. Any useful work an Ai bot can do is by definition a shit job. This does not mean quality control and oversight of the Ai systems — for those are shit jobs that must always be a human worker’s burden. Those people need decent wages, but even more importantly such workers need good healthcare. The Ai system has to have such costs factored in, and if that makes them unprofitable it is then up to government to worry about whether the Ai service is socially necessary and therefore needs to be subsidized or nationalized. Primarily the question for Ai automation is: is it actually reducing human labour burdens and overall increasing human well-being? Such questions can be hard to answer, and we might get them wrong sometimes, but they are not impossible to estimate and we have to do so.

Every shit job removed from a human worker’s daily burden, without introducing more shit jobs or pollution elsewhere, is a win for humanity. Only the MMT aware know this means more cash for worker wages is affordable without inflation risk. Why? Because we aught to be commissioning the Ai robots to produce real output for human and other planetary needs. That means all humans can work fewer hours producing that output. But this also means people can work for higher wages doing more interesting things. Like producing awesome scifi novels, or curing cancer.

The interesting thing is, if we were all content to live humbly, we would have zero need for Ai. Humanity survived for centuries without the robots. But if we collectively desire ever higher standards of living, and the necessary healthcare support is going to consume vast resources, then we will probably need a lot more automation.

My claim would be what we fundamentally have to deal with politically and globally is an ethical macroeconomics, a spiritual economics, and a fair go for all people. It has nothing to do with Ai. Ai can be used as a tool to emancipate the working class, but it is only a tool. This means dismantling old power structures and replacing them with power and authority that serves the interests of the poorest. For the poor did not get a vote in determining their condition.

Spoiler: The Trisolarian need for invasion

Gawd, it was bit disappointing. The Trisolarian militarists are scared of humans. They realize human science advances at a faster pace than Trisolarian. OK. It is a good enough plot device.

They also have not figured out Magneto brain helmets to shield their thoughts. (we will assume humans could figure out how to HUD display a Trisolarian’s brain beamed thought. LOL.)

I dunno though. I am going cold on the whole trilogy. Why do the Aliens always need to be a threat? It’s xenophobic. It is also disgusting, given actual border humanitarian crises on our actual Earth. The heart yearns for a cool scifi novel without xenophobia as the default contact reaction.

The Expanse was such a cool series. Placing the human conflict where it truly is for real. It’s class conflict, it always has been. Racism is a fairly new human invention, and some say (though I am no expert on this) a lot of racism was invented to fuel capitalism. (Liberal meaning of the word “capitalism” — includes slavery of all forms, including tying pencil pushers and paper shufflers to desks, even when they’re not complaining about it. Look-up Bullsh$\ast$t Jobs.)

Nihilism

I do “get” the strong theme of nihilism in Three Body. Humans suck.

But it is a prejudice of our times. It is a jaundiced view of humanity that originates from looking only at the evil people do, and ignoring all the good. To be wise one needs to weight such extremes. Although I’m no anthropologist, I would suspect if we weight the acts people do, and have done, overall the human species is truly marvellous and wonderful.

It is however a fair enough plot device to use. Because a few cynics can certainly spoil things for millions. I’ll thus be interested in reading on to see where Liu Cixin takes this. But it could get boring, and tell us more about Liu Cixin’s blinkered view of humanity than about what he could have learned from life and reflected in his scifi art.

Redemptionists

(Or, anti-puniness.)

Man oh man! The Redemptionists in the story get a terrible treatment. Avoiding spoilers, here I want to comment on the bit of modern fable that Liu Cixin draws upon for his plot. It is the idea that humans are puny, insignificant and un-special.

I actually find this laughable. But understandable. And so also a crux. I’ll try to explain.

Firstly the capacity we have to see ourselves as either special or insignificant is pretty significant. It’s not a paradox, since the “out” is clearly that we are special. Any creature that gains sentient subjective consciousness knows it is special, and it is ignorance of physics to fail to see this. People who think humans are just highly evolved apes are missing… everything… or shall I be fair and say they are missing nearly everything.

Secondly, I take the Copernican Principle seriously: this is the idea that it’s not a good idea to think you are the centre of the universe. Clearly humans are not centres of the universe. However, this does not logically lead to the conclusion we are insignificant. It just means we are not the centre. Of course “centre” here means the “be all and end all” as well as the scientific notion that the cosmos does not have a privileged status for any one observer or plant. It is a key principle of modern science. As I explained before, it’s about symmetry principles and invariants, these are what define physics.

But again, this refutes the nihilist thesis, because the very fact human civilization has proven capable of discovering the principles of physics (and so much more at higher levels of organization) implies again, we are highly significant creatures. Don’t write us off you mad Adventists!

I don’t want to write an essay on this, so I’ll mention just a third and fourth point for now (I can think of many more). The third is the simplistic idea the universe is so damn vast, and the Earth is so damn small, so we literally are insignificant. This is the most laughable. It does not even bare a mention, but I feel I must mention it for some weaker minds. The point is, ruler and clock scale is not a great metric for “significance”.

There is no telling what human civilization will become capable of, and so concluding right now that we are puny and insignificant is pretty insane.

Lastly, the fourth: you should consider that humans on Earth might in fact advance in future to something like the fictional Trisolarian technical advancement. We’d be the “Lords” perhaps to some other “backwards” planetary civilization. This despite not having the harshness of Trisolaris to cut our technological teeth upon — and that’s a fantastical plot device to be sure — ultracapitalism or ultradarwinism! 🤣)

There is more to say on this fourth principle of non-significance. It has relevance to current debates about Ai Singularity. The idea is we’d better be careful in developing Ai because it might over-run us and treat humans like we treat ants. This is laughable. It is a false inference and a terribly childish dis-analogy. For one thing, humans do not have to go around treading on ants and digging up insects with no concern or compassion. We mess with the Earth knowing the insects are likely not conscious. Whereas a hypothetical Trisolarian civilization would damn well for sure know humans were sentient. Would you believe an advanced alien race would treat humans like ants? No! They’d treat us like… humans. What that means is impossible for us to say, because we have nothing relevant to infer from, except how we treat each other.

Again, how we treat each other could be a cause for a touch of nihilism, but… hardly! I’ve never been treated anything but kindly to indifferent by every person on Earth I have ever met. The sockcuckers were all hiding online. Actually, I was a victim of crime, a couple of times, but I did not know it at the time. OK, case closed I guess, all humans suck and are irredeemable! ‘cos’, ya know… if one person can be criminal, well hell Cleetus, we all are capable dognabit. 🤣 Send us all to hell Cleetus, be quick about it thanks.

((I know, it’s only a story, by so disappointing the gentle scientist Ye Wenjie goes all Cleetus’ Dad on all of humanity. Faaarrrk.))

Continuing ignoring it is only a story…

The idea humans are to ants as Trisolarians are to humans is a false analogy. It applies only in some intellectual sense, not in a spiritual sense. Certainly not in a political or colonialist/imperialist sense. Ants do not have any politics, and have no companions they love and are willing to die for, they just die for their colony by instinct. Their sociology is also blind and instinctual, and we talk about “ant society” by imposing our language on the situation, but it is a very different category to human society. Any analogies here are highly fraught with ample scope for error and stupid reasoning (lobster hierarchy!). This topic is probably worth an essay for idiot philosophers, if I had nothing better to do, but I do, so no essay.

Why is this making Three Body Problem a sucky story? It is because even though it is only a story, the authorial “god” for a good scifi story cannot use false analogies. Characters can. Authors not.

Oh damn… I cannot resist a fifth: another source of nihilism and feelings of insignificance is the individualistic mindset. Sure my friend, You might be insignificant, but human civilization need not be so. But I would go further. But only because I have a few other metaphysical suspensions (did I mean to write “suspicions”?). I am one of those who think consciousness indicates we are not physical creatures. But we live in a physical world. If you can put those two thoughts together in a constructive way then you will get the idea, I won’t need to elaborate. In any case, it is the most powerful sort of evidence that we are not insignificant puny creatures, but rather in some sense the cosmos was made for us (and any other sentient civilizations). Being dropped into such a vast cosmos is of course humbling, but I think that is entirely part of the point of it! If only you can understand!

Puniness is contextual.

You hopefully can see where I am going with my macroeconomics and political economy allegory!

We cannot say the past understanding of neoclassical macroeconomics means doom for socialism or a decent society. We would need to know what an advanced level of political comprehension will do for humanity, and you never know, in 15 or 20 years we might be doing wonders. Or maybe it’ll take great catastrophe, so a century or more outlook. In any case, we today cannot comprehend how political economy will evolve, and there is thus no cause for doom and gloom. There is incredible cause for fear and regret, but not for doom and gloom. In fact does it not imply the eternal optimist is the preferred stance? The wiser stance? I think so.

Doom and gloom are in fact neoclassical attitudes themselves. Stuck-in-a-rut attitudes. No capacity to think dynamically. There is a big irony there, since aren’t neoclassicals the big boosters of the dynamo of capitalism?’

Listen you guys, a dynamo that can only swirl about an equilibrium is no creative thing. You shouldn’t want neoclassical economics even if it were true.

Authorial Insertion

About two-third the way through the first book. I find myself caring about the author now, which is a bad sign for enjoying the story. I don’t want the story going down the paternal Alien overlord route. Not only is it sucky scifi, it starts to seem like betraying the author’s motives.

Spoiler:
It is quite an audacious piece of writing to have the main character, Ye Wenjie, push a button on the microwave transmitter to send a message of “Come please rule over us!” just after reading the first ever alien contact message: “Please do not communicate! I’m a pacifist among my people and we will invade you. Please do not communicate!”

Cixin tries to motivate this via an alienation among humans, and the loneliness of Ye Wenjie. But I find that character sketch unbelievable. A real life Ye Wenjie would probably not betray the entire human race like that! The plot seems far more symptomatic of Liu Cixin’s pessimism than of a good well written story. I know I’m only reading a translation… but still!!

Also… I know it is pointless critiquing fiction, … but I can’t help myself. Call it post Twitter withdrawal syndrome. (Yeah, I gave up that gaping hole of enshittification.)

Let me emphasize, it is not a bad scifi fantasy to read, it gives me this grist to write! I just wish it were not so cringe.

I’ll tell you one of the arts of genius writing: you don’t need a terrific vocabulary nor amazing descriptive prowess, but you do need sympathy for your reader. (Unless you are James Joyce — genius by an entirely other means, such a galaxy brained genius I can’t get through one of his books, I’d rather spend time reading mathematical physics. 🤣)

The Crud of Advanced Aliens

It’s the same trouble with superheros. If you do not build-in flaws and fallibility, then your advanced alien species that regards humans as puny insects is an unbelievable story. Lower than soft scifi, it becomes just fantasy novel. I have no time for reading fantasy novels. But I also have no time to write this blog post either. Amazing what you can do stealing time spaghetti.

The Trisolarians have no need to invade the Earth. They’d be a spiritual species. To write the story as if they want to wipe out humanity because to them we are insects is thoroughly unbelievable, and it seriously gives me the urge to quit reading the book. It’s Liu Cixin now who needs to redeem himself. I hate it when books turn this way onto the author’s view. But in this case, it is so bad, ‘cos I wanted it to be harder scifi, so what am I gonna do? (I know, I know, I should not want so much.)

Such superpower stories lean on the fallacy I mentioned previously: namely that social hierarchy scales to sentient species hierarchy.

Wrong! So badly wrong. It cannot scale.

Once a civilization is at a human level of advancement, it is capable of regarding and recognizing other intelligent species as worthy of giving care. It is not even that it is irrational not to assume a higher species would recognize a lesser sentient species, but that the spiritual faculty we know we all have would be somehow less advanced in the powerful alien species? Why would that be so? The far more realistic case would be the opposite. They’d be more peaceful and spiritual than us, not less, and by a long way.

Pre-22nd Century Scifi writers are not “getting” this. I mean, the whole dystopian thing and space war thing is a terrible prejudice of our times. Star Wars is literally children’s entertainment fodder. Yeah, I loved Star Wars as a kid, it was our generation’s The Matrix. But a grown-up can be a little more mature and learn to respect more serious scifi space opera, which is incredibly rare, and so all the more delicious when found.

Even the Red Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson was a bit too militaristic for my taste. OK, it was clearly allegory and cautionary tale but it still could have been more spiritual. To write of the future in a spiritual way is tough, I “get” that! But I wish more scifi authors would try.

It is a greater art to write tension and intrigue without prepubescent man-baby militarism. But let’s face it, humanity is at an adolescent stage in history, so most people cannot see what the adult futuristic scifi could be. If I wrote the novel of this kind it would likely flop (I mean even if I was a genius writer). Maybe Ursula LeGuin wrote a few of the kind I would admire, but so far I’ve only read a couple of her books, and they seemed to me to have a bit of a “humans are stupid” and “war is inevitable” vibe to them too. 🤣

Two Proton Theory

Spoiler:
The fun stuff blogging about scifi in real-time. How are the Trisolarians using two protons to “shut down human science”? I am guessing it’ll be entanglement, so quantum teleportation. It’s soft scifi because you cannot exploit teleportation without first going to the other end of your entangled system at conventional sub-luminal speed. I guess the 6/7-dimensional string theory space, the Calabi-Yau manifold, will come into play too, but I cannot see how that swings the plot to permit a disruption of human science over 400 years!

Trouble is, for a physicist, this is enough of a carrot to keep you reading a bad novel.

Spoilers:
OK, I read through to where the sophons are explained. Superstring theory it is! 🤣 Protons being “unfolded” so that one of the 6 Calabi-Yau compactified dimensions becomes macroscopic. It was disappointing that this plot device was used to then etch computer logic arrays onto the enlarged dimension, turning the single proton into a supercomputer. Once a Calibi-Yau dimension is enlarged there is nothing but vacuum to “write” or “etch” upon. If you engineer some other actual membrane to write information on then it will no longer be a proton, by definition. In particular it could not then be recompressed back down to small superstring dimensions. Besides which, the proton is not a compactified object, it is a composite of strings (three constantly mixing quarks and an ephemeral sea of gluons — these far more unstable critters are all you could “unpack” into large extra dimensions). So this was highly cringe for a reading physicist wanting some decent entertainment.

There have to be dozens of better ways to scifi imagine a stealth supercomputer carrying an Ai program as a weapon against Earth. I would probably go for nanobots that can assemble to mimic a natural biological species, like an ant. The processing could be done partly remote, using entangled Bell pairs, and all the ant would need to do would be to receive radio signals for the quantum teleportation decoding. (A quantum teleport is not possible at faster-than-light speed. The receiver needs to be sent an instruction via normal space channels.) Having such realistic constraints is good for a scifi writer.

Though, I admit, to the fantacists these would be nowhere near as “cool” as Liu Cixin’s sophons. The sophon is an incredibly scary scifi invention, one of my favourite horrors now (if we are talking pure fantasy, I can appreciate good fantasy, I just do not like it inserted into scifi).

I am not so sure about the Trisolarians having brains that emit electromagnetic waves that betray all their thoughts, so they cannot lie or deceive. That one came as a shock. I am sure Liu Cixin thought he needs it for novelty or some plot turn, but again, it is too big a stretch for scifi. Why not stick a Magneto (Erik Lehnsherr) helmet on to shield your thinking? You cannot write serious scifi and tell me no Trisolarian would think of this. Nor that their evolution would not have had to go through a period where their brains were not so luminous. As I said, cringe.

Worrisome, since as goes the scifi cringe, so probably goes the sociology and political cringe. I cannot see the second novel, The Dark Forest going well for a reader like myself.

However, I did like the way detective Shi Qiang ended the first novel (not the horrific nano flying knife slicing of the oil tanker, but the “bugs” bit). Some hope for the optimistic reader, reading scifi for imagination and creative reflection upon our future, amidst too much stupid nihilism.

But… you know I’m going to be a nerd about it. The ““we’re bugs” speech is pure bullshit motivation, zero reality. why? because of biological scaling laws. bugs can survive and “outwit” humans because (a) we are truly intent on eliminating them entirely, (b) smaller means faster breeding, vaster numbers, superior robustness. so the analogy of “Bugs to Humans” as “Humans to Trisolarians” does not hold, it does not scale. The larger metabolism the organism, the easier it is to extinct the species.

It was interesting Cixin wrote the character Ye Wenjie as one who thought advanced aliens would almost surely have to be spiritual (kind, compassionate, peaceful). In the afterword it seems clear Liu Cixin himself thinks the opposite, so he has a terrible sense of social consciousness I feel. What a dick. (Hey… my informed opinion is all!) He should not have written the afterword, it ruined the whole reading experience. The author sometimes needs to stfu. Same problem with Frank Herbert. A good example of an author who stays quiet better would be William Gibson. I don’t quite know why, but for me, subjectively, it should be the same problem for Ursula LeGuin, but I don’t always get the same cringe from her books. I’m not saying authors cannot have afterwords for their novels, I am just saying I was unfortunate to bother reading this one. However, it is not all bad, Liu Cixin seems to be sympathetic to environmentalism and greater unity among the people of the Earth. His atrocious political beliefs are concerning non-existent aliens. Not that I think extraterrestrials do not exist, I think they do, but it is childish to believe in the Mathers theory (the fictional RAND author character) that they’d be hostile or would be a source of conflict among humans simply by the symbolic event of a First Contact, or monopolization of knowledge potentially gained from an advanced alien species.

(Kind of makes you hope the other guys had Star Trek and the Prime Directive.)

There is a more balanced view of CETI (communication with extraterrestiral intelligence) in a Cold War context you can get here: “Mixed Signals Communication with the Alien in Cold War Radio Astronomy” by Rebecca Charbonneau. She actually discusses Three Body Problem. I did not read it all, since it is irrelevant now the Cold War is over, her thesis mostly concerned historical analysis of the Cold War politics, not future ET contact.

I suspect some of the fictional BIll Mather theory might be applicable should ET contact just one person or nation tomorrow. (Why would they?)

OK, Liu Cixin portrays a scenario why they might! That’s the fun of the scifi.

((Also, who knows, maybe Liu Cixin was influenced by some RAND lunatic. A lot of stuff that came out of RAND was laughable Neocon foolery, unfortunately cloaked in a lot of serious intent and taken seriously by the neoliberals and, it seems, by Liu Cixin. RAND also had plenty of intellectual firepower to lend the air of distinguished scholarship. A lot of what came out of RAND was also very good analysis. But if you are a reader of RAND reports, and a user, it is your duty to conduct due diligence and weed out the wheat from the chaff.))

Fans of Liu Cixin should not be upset and flame me, these are just my personal opinions, so don’t hate me for them. I am not saying he wrote Chinese State propaganda material! 🤣

Critical Non-criticism

I have repeatedly stated, at least four times now I think, that I am not really interested in too much literary criticism. The story is what it is. In fact if I came across a blog like this without the context I would also be pretty disgusted with myself — it is not my place to criticize Liu Cixin’s story-telling.

As I said, I merely found the need to read a novel to get over a bout of depression, and since The Three Body Problem became incredibly annoying I felt I had to release some frustrations. I have tried the next best thing, which is to use 3BP as an allegory for my macroeconomic justice activism. And a chance to indulge in a bit of sociological futurology. I think I might continue as I go through the 2nd and 3rd books of the trilogy, as my the mood takes me.

Also I will admit, this blog post is not for my readers, it is just for me. If you are enjoying it so far, that’s a bonus. I had finished the first novel by the end of the next section, and have decided to keep reading the 2nd, but will not promise more commentary. There is a slim chance the trilogy will become more hopeful, by which I mean more realistic. This probably runs counter to the cultural milieu in contemporary society, where climate change and pollution and endless wars have become a source of deep cynicism and nihilism. “Don’t bring a baby into this world!”’ But I simply don’t share such hopelessness. If for no other reason than hopelessness does our more optimistic scenario chances no good. Also, my particular babies, now young adults, are going to do a lot more good for our society than I ever can.

Preliminary — 90% through

I think The Expanse is the 2020’s best scifi on the small screen so far.

I often stray in my thoughts to think about why, and it was not because it was militaristic, nor great literature. The answer, for me, is that The Expanse had the heroes and heroine’s, and collective insanity (the Martian faction) but overall it portrayed humans as decent, united when they realized they needed to be, including most Martians, and it this was good. But also it was a detective story which stayed true to the genre to the end. SciFi was essentially (or at least subjectively to me) the McGuffin of The Expanse. The greatest McGuffin I’ve ever witnessed so far.

I tolerated a few others, there was a Starz series, “Counterpart” based around a parallel world tunnel, and the German production “Dark” with a nuclear power station mishap turned time travel portal (a German series based around a fictional town of Winden). They were watchable. Today I am having more fun writing this article than reading the novel, so another red flag.

In my old age I’ve learned to dismiss time travel stories, they don’t work for me, unless used for comedy. Parallel Worlds are no good either, but that’s a bias I have from my own physics research preferences. So if anyone thinks there is scifi entertainment better than The Expanse please tell me. The good stuff is good for me when I am low and depressed.

I will probably persist with Remembrance of Earth’s Past, but now I think it’s going to be more a chore than for entertainment. (Curiosity can do that, kills the catch).

Yang Dong

I did make it to the end of Three Body. Damn.

Spoilers: diabolical is not even the harshest word. What happened to Yang Dong was a piece of scifi writing to be sure, that I’d never really read before. I will relate the story in case you do not like reading epic tragedy.

So Ye Wenjie contacts aliens using the Sun as a million-fold amplifier, and asks them to invade the Earth. Her motive is to unifying humanity. (She may yet get her wish, since humans can unify all right, in the face of a common enemy.) She recognizes she “betrayed” all humankind.

Worse to come. Mike Evans, an eco-extremist, co-opts Ye Wenjie’s ideals and monopolizes contact with the Trisolarians. He plans to destroy the human species, entirely, no jokes, totally serious. His Adventist faction of the ETO has this as their explicit goal. Ye Wenjie has Redemptionist sympathy, those who worship the Trisolarians as potential benevolent overlords. (A whole kettle of fishy fish I won’t get into, but you probably know my views by now.)

The Trisolarians can only send radio message or a couple of protons to Earth, they do so, takes only a 40 years. The protons arrive by around 2020. They have been crafted to store an advanced AI, using unfolded Calabi-Yau manifold dimensions. Trekkies would call this “subspace”. They cannot unfold near Earth because they could be nuked. But they can alter microscopic events, and they proceed to mes up fundamental physics experiments, like the LHC stuff and quantum computers. The purpose is to freeze human scientific knowledge, so human cannot ever understand the subspace physics. This will ensure when the Trisolaran space fleet arrives in about 400 years, human technology will still be relatively primitive.

Plot future? This should not freeze applied physics, so the nanotech developed by the character Wang Maio will be a key thing in any defeat of Trisolaris invasion, one presumes, or part of a defeat. It is shaping up as David vs Goliath. Or Guerilla war more precisely. (War of the Worlds a bit too, but with humans the bugs.) Did I mention the Trisolarians are really friggin mean, nasty and paranoid! But you might be too if your planet was going to dive into your Sun.

The Trisolarians have learned (from Evans) that human science advances rapidly, so would overtake the Trisolarians in that time span.

Have not got to the kicker yet!

Ye Wenjie’s daughter, Yang Dong, becomes a theoretical physicist working on String Theory, and doing experimental investigations. This would be a major area of science humans would defeat the Trisolarans with (we presume — in our real world… nah!).

She becomes a target of the AI sophons (the sentient protons). They mess up her experiments. She concludes, “Physics does not exist.” And nihilistically gives up science. Except not so nihilistically. She retires form science and starts to enjoy nature, living without watching new media and doing peaceful things with her husband.

Trouble is, she logs onto her computer and comes across an old file saved by her mother, which details Ye Wenjie’s plans to allow the Trisolarians to invade the Earth. She recognizes the betrayal of her mother. Not only against all humankind, whatever her “good” motives, but also against her own daughter. It is due to the Trisolarians that she could not pursue her first love, theoretical physics.

We learn that her suicide note had deeper meaning. She wrote,

“Physics does not exist, and never will exist.

She realized the Trisolarians were going to destroy humanity, and stopping physics progress was their first strike method. This is what sent Yang Dong into the deeper depression — that her mother was responsible (at least for lighting a fire she could not control) was the last fatal straw. She was resigned to physics not existing at the Planck scale, but to now learn that was only because of the Trisolarian attack, instigated by her mother,…

… well… maybe most people cannot appreciate the depravity of it, but any scientist could empathize with Yang Dong. She was the first human outside the ETO factions who realized the despair and utter hopelessness of the situation for future humankind.

So… whoa!

I am not sure if this was magnificent scfi-fantasy story-telling, or completely depraved by Liu Cixin? The physics module in my brain says “depraved”.

The Dark Forest

Wallfacers

The 2nd novel, The Dark Forest hints at some incipient human fight-back, using a plot device of a Wallfacer. These are chosen humans, just a hand-full, who will be given unparalleled resource access do do whatever the hell they want, with minimalist UN oversight. Their only brief is they cannot communicate with anyone what their strategy is, since the sophons can see and hear and read all. The sophons however cannot read human thought.

Thought-based warfare basically.

The term “Wallfacer” comes from meditation against a blank wall.

Trouble is, only one of the Wallfacers, Luo Ji, seems to know they’re not supposed to blab or reveal their plans.

(Major plot failure here, since they were all sternly briefed on the entire modus operandi of the Wallfacers, which was to make sure no one has an inkling of what they are up to. You might think the “Let’s nuke ’em!” pair are bluffing? But then, what a waste of resource (they are each commissioning ultra-fission bombs, small stars. The sophons can halt nuclear reactions bros.)

But young Luo Ji, he’s taking it easy, giving up, black-pilling, choosing instead to craft the perfect woman lover and live a Bohemian lifestyle in a paradise. (His is the cheapest Wallfacer strategy so far.)

Or is he?

Hence some mystery and intrigue, just enough to keep me reading. No longer for the sci of the scifi, but for the mystery novel aspect. The character Luo Ji seems like a real dick, but you have to think his strategy is to look like a dick.

All the other Wallfacers have a nemesis in the ETO, a Wallbreaker, who is there own personal assassin (or disruptor, whichever I guess works.) If nothing else, this is a novel scifi device I think. So, semi-cool I guess.

Continued Militarism

It is clear Lui Cixin has a pretty warped view of humanity, or at least has chosen that for his portrayals. Too much aggression and militarism. So he gets a lot in Tom Clancy sort of writing, the Generals are dominant, the Civilian leadership muted — except for UN Sec.Gen Ms Say. (Does the author give her a first name?)

While the Wallfacers and Wallbreakers are terrific new (I think) scifi plot devices, I found them to degenerate into comedy. In this context “comedy” means too cartoonish to be hard scifi respectable. While fantasy scifi does not have to be hard, the literature is superior when it is hard when it is not necessary to be soft.”

All such literary critique should be taken in stride. I cannot write a single novel, I’m too lazy, and if I did, because I am lazy, it’d probably read even more cartoonish. But I will not stfu. As I noted before, I am writing this mediation on Three Body Problem for my own depression alleviation. Why are you still reading this?

Anyhow, it was gratifying the Rumsfeld figure “Tyler” got suicided. LOL.

You can see Wallfacer Bill Hine’s hair-brained scheme of mind control is going to turn out a bunch of pseudo-religious (meaning anti-religious) nutters. (Guessing the plot is a fun game.)

I would not write such a plot. The UN would not be so stupid. They had a veto over hair-brained Wallfacer strategies. the fudge was to make the mind control voluntary. But any decent UN committee would realize that is going to create violent extremists, who might win the war? But more likely will do more harm than good. But in a fantasy story, this could be a funky bit of story-telling. I will not say it will be fun to read, because I find it repugnant (also disrespectful to the actual UN and Its ideals), but how the story deals with the problem could be redeeming.

You do not need faith in the face of infinite odds against you, you need courage. For it does not matter if you win, what matters is doing the right thing.

When people think “God is dead,” it is not even defeatism. It is moral decay. But, anti Liu Cixin, just because “society” has morally decayed does not mean all humans are bad. It’s the Collectivist fallacy. Sure, humanity is analogous to a superorganism, but not equivalent: humanity has no soul or moral conscience. People do. You have to respect all levels.

Glimpses of Humanity

First: what am I still doing here? Answer: I am still under a pretty big shadow of anxiety and depression. But I got all the way through The Dark Forest. Some nice scifi plot devices, sort of cool, healthy doses of both wild optimism plus nihilism, which made a good contrast (though way to extreme to by serious, it was a comedy novel).

Black Humour that is.

Referring first to Bill Hines (the biotech Wallfacer), who hair-brain engineers a “mind seal” system. Brain washes people into a bio hard-coded simple belief. He uses it on himself to convince himself his strategy is correct. LOL. It takes balls to write in a character like that into your novel.

Some of the other wild optimism of humanity (once they realize they can propel a spaceship faster than the Trisolarians) is too comical, but suppress your incredulity and it makes a good story. The trouble is, it was layered on a bit too thick in the English translation, which partly spoiled the big surprise reveal when the small perfectly mirrored, strong force hardened Trisolaran probe obliterated all the human space force within minutes, some hundred or thousand of battle ships armed with The Expanse level Rosinante weapons and higher. The description of the massacre was a bit thickly laid on too, but I guess justified.

The Black Comedy in outer space with the escaping Fleet was also too heavily laid on tragedy. The reader sympathetic to humanity wants at least some of them to make the voluntary sacrifice and negotiate, to avoid leaving the survivors with the dark guilt trip. But, c’est la vie I guess. It’s only a damn scifi fantasy story. Author is entitled to rank cynicism.

The coup de grâce? I was almost expecting it, but is did mildly surprise me, Luo Ji turns out to defeat the Trisolarians with M.A.D. — mutually assured destruction — using the greatest gamble ever. (A half-baked theory of cosmic sociology.) Took balls to write that one too. Far too mush Asimov insanity there. But it was residual cool. At least it was not Harry Seldon level incredulity.

I was worth the reading, because at the very end the pacifist from Trisolaris reaches out to Luo Ji and understands both species have spiritual capacity for love, it was simply suppressed among Trisolarans.Understnadbly — who has time to go mad with love when the next second you might have to dehydrate? I hope the third novel Deaths End does not cynically ruin this, for on Earth a Trisolarian need dehydrate no more. Amen.

My biggest fear: friggin’ time travel will ruin the story. Once a scifi author allows time travel, well… it loses appeal for me, it’s like Parallel Worlds stuff. Belongs only in glossy colourful; Marvel comics.

The Most Horrific Cautionary Tale?

On way I appreciated the first two novels is as parody. They paint a grime portrait of the stupidity of humanity, but one might say suitably caricatured into hyperbole. I no longer think this is Liu Cixin’s politics being projected into the reader, it is more a cautionary tale. I still think Cixin’s politics are a bit heavy handed and smack of neoconservatism, but they are what they are. I don’t let them get in the way of the other lessons one can glean.

In this respect, Remembrance of Earth’s Past is not adding anything new to our view of ourselves reflected in the mirror of scifi fantasy. But it is a new horror story.

This idea the universe is full of life, so full it is competitive and hyper-darwinistic, is what I would say can be an allegory for our life here on Earth. Bloody social darminwists. It’s insane how their kind infiltrated popular culture so deeply. Only the Lorde Taylor Swift can save us, and the great philosopher Miley Cyrus.

But I choose for us — if I had the proverbial magic wand — to take the higher road of defying a M.A.D. option, and going all out for altruism and peace. Humanity can do it. My optimism exceed Cixin’s pessimism and neoconservatism. Moreover, if given the magic wand I would not wave it, I would burn it and let everyone know the greater thing is to forge peace ourselves, everyone in it together. No Lord savior. I would say this even knowing there is a God. A true God, not an alien overlord, put us here to solve our own problems, both individually and socially. A magic wand would be redundant and stupid, defeating the entire purpose of human existence.

And… no! … it is not only because I know MMT. LOL.

I’ve known in my life more betrayal than Ye Wenjie in the story. I’ve wanted to die so many times, just to be rid of the suffering. I still would not betray humanity like she did. I would rather suffer alone than betray anyone. Applying the Copernican Principle, I think most people would be more like myself than they’d be like Ye Wenjie.

You can take your own lessons from the cautionary tale. What I take is that some scifi fantasy stories can distort the mirror they portend to hold in front of collective humanity, and in that distortion you can see how we should not behave, and how we will not behave. First of all, let’s just Kill All Neoliberals though.

Why the Horror?

Just my reading ok, it is a horror story.

Another terrific more hard scifi read qas Greg Egan’s Diaspora. It was also horror. In the end… meaningless. Or as next to it. But it’s from a materialist worldview, so in the end a comedy for someone like me. It was a good journey of a read though, as are most Egan novels.

The last novel in the Liu Cixin trilogy, Death’s End,’ seems to get even more horrific, after the tense peaceful stand-off of The Dark Forest with the craziest mad M.A.D.

I do believe in the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence under some conditions, but I think it is a horror that we are born to surpass. It is not supposed to be forever. The Dark Forests ultra-dariwninst cosmic sociology M.A.D is next level horror though. I found it disappointing as a scifi vision, which is why I am reclassifying Remembrance of Earth’s Past as horror genre. But a lot of popular scifi is horror, more than it is scifi.

Death’s End does not seem to be changing course.

But it raises a very interesting issue that I am sure we here in the real world will be contemplating and debating, and some already do, which is cheating death.

In Deaths’ End cryogenic revival is the chosen method, rather than upload into silicon minds. But I guess being a computer nerd Liu Cixin might yet pull that one out too. That’s be ultra disappointing. But that’s just me.

I find it horrific that we’d even get the choice to continue living in the physical realm. But if you are pseudo-religious and have utter faith in physical materialism I guess you’d leap at the chance to live in this world forever. Eating up finite resources that might otherwise nourish a soul who now will never be born because of your vanity.

if humans ever did for real manage to cheat death, we’d be destroying life, and on an epic tragic unseen cosmic scale, and in more ways than one.

This is the ultimate horror show. I cannot imagine worse.

Death’s Ending

Well, whaddya know? I liked the way Remembrance of Earth’s Past concluded. But I lost the macroeconomics & MMT analogy game! The story got too fantastical. I have not thought too much about MMT recently to bother with keeping up my analogy within an analogy.

It is, after all, much better to take only a first level metaphorical lessons from Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Here are my take-aways.

• Cautionary Tale — let’s not keep being resource hoarders and fascists in our own homes. Human civilization can surely overcome the adolescent stage of internecine conflict. Liu Cixin needs to assume not for a long arc storyline of endless fighting and conflict. (Boring!!!)
• SciFi is Open — … to better stories. There is a spiritual SciFi novel yet to be written. It would have a completely different plot structure, and would introduce an entirely new trope. (What’s a “new trope” called before it is a trope?)
• SciFi is Open — if you understand MMT then you can write SciFi stories like Kim Stanley Robinson. But if you know just a little about the spiritual aspects to human beings (or other sentient aliens) you’d know conscious sentience is non-physical in origin, and this opens up non-fantastical but spiritual hard SciFi stories. Just ask: what if in the not-so-distant future most human beings realize our existence is in a physical universe, but not entirely? To write great hard SciFi you need believability and plausibility, or conceivability. Lui Cixin did not have all that.
• Pocket universes — great metaphor for resource hoarding and selfishness. But it probably worked out in the end ok for Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan. Trouble is, Cixin has not encountered Neil Turok and Latham Boyle, nor considered Sir Roger Penrose’s cosmological models. Our universe probably is open (positive cosmological constant), and that is probably a very good thing! Because that is the way information could cross a cosmic aeon boundary. (Both the Turok & Boyle/Lasenby or the Penrose conformal futures, either of these three should work out for our descendants, one or the other).
• Anti-Cixin — my summary quote from the literature would be from
  Bahá‘u‘lláh‘s Hidden Words : “O ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease.”
• Spiritual Macronomics is Inverse Microeconomics — Mosler’s aphorism: “Economics is the opposite of religion; it is better to receive than to give.” Ah, yes! But that’s microeconomics. There is also the MMT aphorism borrowed from convention and Keynes: One of the fallacies of composition, or the Paradox of Thrift. Net savers are the enemy of macroeconomics, net spenders are the life-blood of an economic system.

(If anyone needs to know, the voice in The Hidden Words is not that of Bahá’u’lláh here, it is a meditation from Words allegorically uttered to Muhammad’s daughter Fatima — probably in a dream — after Muhammad’s passing, to console her. Full title of the Tablet is “The Hidden Words of Fatima”.)

When you know a Baháʼí allegory or Hidden Word you know “wealth” does not mean financial or material wealth! What is the Tree of Wealth? It is the source of spiritual virtue, not the source of food & beverage yo’!

If there is a better quotation then it is also from The Hidden Words:

O children of dust! Tell the rich of the midnight sighing of the poor, lest heedlessness lead them into the path of destruction, and deprive them of the Tree of Wealth. To give and to be generous are attributes of Mine; well is it with him that adorneth himself with My virtues.