If anyone is interested, the book that Catherine mentioned on Tucker, is a show on Netflix. 3 Body Problem. I haven’t watched it yet, but it was strange to hear her talk about the book. I’d just had the show mentioned to me over the weekend. Now that she has advocated for the book, the show has perked my interest. So, it’s on my list to watch very soon.
3 Likes
I found Archive.org has a post for the movie and am in the midst of watching…interesting.
Here’s the link.
4 Likes
I watched season 1 of this show some time ago on Netflix and found it fascinating. It was the first time I had heard that mathematicians and others were working on such a problem and at first it struck me as weird and pointless. Why would people who do not have a three-body problem want to solve it? Although there is plenty of evidence for periodic cataclysms on Earth, at the moment our sun seems to be the only one in our solar system.
So, in the manner of many a mathematician (which I am not) who becomes enmeshed in an esoteric problem that seems to have no real-world application, I wondered about this one whenever I had nothing else to ruminate about.
Here are my conclusions as to the reason scientists (or pips) on Earth might be interested in this problem:
-
It is preparation for a control narrative. If the psychopaths in power could convince people that Earth has a three-body problem that causes devastating, worldwide, periodic cataclysms, it would give the people of Earth a very compelling reason to band together under one totalitarian leader in order to stay alive/perpetuate the species.
-
The pips are smarter than they appear and are actually looking for a bolthole in case the things they are doing here go pear-shaped and make this planet uninhabitable, and the only other viable planet(s) they have found has/have a three-body problem.
-
This is actually a chemical problem, not necessarily a problem for a particular planet in a solar system with multiple suns. In this scenario, someone wants to create a chemical compound with multiple nuclei for some (most likely nefarious) reason and needs to understand the forces that would be in play to keep the element/compound stable and preserve its properties. This is a common problem that has been solved with heat, cold, and/or pressure, etc., for many chemical elements and compounds, but perhaps the element/compound they have in mind is does not exist naturally on Earth, or does so for only brief flashes of time. The best way to solve the problem might be to have many minds thinking about it as part of a game, which, without giving too much away, is what the show was about.
-
It is pointless and actually just bubblegum for the mind, a la QAnon.
It strikes me, however, that a planet with a three-body problem would make a perfect prison planet or farm planet because the inhabitants might be so consumed with the difficulty of staying alive or keeping their species alive between cataclysms that any technological advancements they came up with are likely to be to that end. They may not have time between cataclysms to rebuild their civilization and also do much toward developing space flight to escape.
As I wrote the last paragraph, the planet Saturn came to mind, and I was reminded of Bergrum’s humongous machines circling in its rings, and the many legends that say Saturn used to be the Sun, and as Cronus, was overthrown and murdered by his son, Zeus or Jupiter. I’m not sure what this means, but it was a related but half-formed thought I can’t make sense of.
4 Likes
I just finished watching the series. My take away was the surveillance capabilities in the movie was sort of predictive programming for how information technology is currently being used, especially for narratives and propaganda. The human race is only shown and allowed to know what is determined for us to know. Where do the ideas in consciousness originate? We don’t know now, maybe in four hundred years we will. How the human brain works and where ideas originate is still pretty much a mystery.
1 Like
Actually, I have a theory about where ideas in consciousness arise: Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenic fields. He outlines numerous experiments that were done on rodents that showed that once one rat had figured out a maze, rats that were put through it subsequently go through faster than the first one…even if the second rat(s) were in a lab hundreds of miles away. A third group solved the maze in even less time. This isn’t necessarily proof. Something else could be happening, but until another explanation is found, morphogenic fields, where all information about a species is posited to be located, is a good explanation.
If that’s true for all species, it might explain the proliferation of people knowing about the pips’ playbook and talking about their actions with a considerable degree of consistency. Bad news for the pips, who would, no doubt, like to keep their plans secret. No wonder there’s such a push to disseminate narratives that have nothing to do with reality, to create propaganda, and to sensor truth.
2 Likes
Yes I’m familiar with his work. But where did the original idea come from for the first rat?
A bit of humor here, I hope. I don’t know if the maze is true for all species. Some are smarter than others. I once got one of those large round doughnut things with the ball enclosed in the inside rim of the ring. Object was for the cat to chase the ball through a slat. Well, I had a cat that spent days prying that thing apart. Once day he succeeded and the ball was released. I put it back together but he would never touch it again. His mission was complete. And the other cats refused to play with it. The puzzle had been solved.
1 Like
Presumably the first rat figured out the maze the usual way: trial and error and/or a good sense of smell. Sheldrake doesn’t say.
I think, though, that what you’re really saying is where did the first idea originate. You’re thinking about the ideas that come to someone ‘out of the blue’, are you not?
As a writer, this is something I’ve wondered about, too. Are ALL ideas etc., in the morphogenic field? Is there truly nothing new under the sun? I once read where Mozart claimed his music came to him from ‘beyond’ or something like that. Apparently his handwritten manuscripts reflect that, because there are very few crossings-out and insertions on them. Of course, that could also be because he copied other people’s work, but there’s no proof of that. A few years ago there was a guy on U Tub who claimed that many pieces of music written by other people were simply attributed to Mozart. But I, too, have had story and other ideas that just come to me out of the blue. Some of them can be seen later to be forgotten ideas that have resurfaced, or old ideas recombined, but not all.
I think it is impossible to answer your question without having more knowledge about reality than is currently available to human beings. Sorry.
1 Like
I have read the book series twice. The series on Amazon, called Three Body, is much closer to the books, while the Netflix version has incorporated diversity and inclusion and is otherwise leftified.