The Frustrating Science Surrounding Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’
Image; BLB, The Three Body Universe, T-Street, Plan B Entertainment, Primitive Streak, & Netflix
(Note: spoilers for the 3 Body Problem.)
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (2024-present) is based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (2008–2010) by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, about the Earth responding to an alien invasion en route at a distance approximately 400 years away. The show carries through many (though not all) of the book’s themes, depicting how societies respond to rapid technological and social transitions.
Much ink has been spilled about its critique of the Chinese Communist Party, with the inciting incident for the invasion being tied to a struggle student session where the character Ye Wenjie (played by Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng) witnesses the death of her father for teaching the “imperialist” Albert Einstein. It’s this tragedy that prompts her to contact aliens, creating a moving commentary about how trauma can lead people to support misanthropic positions.
I want to focus on the text’s more “scientific” elements—i.e., the fictional theorems, equations, and paradoxes that make the logic of its world work. The 3 Body Problem is a fun thought experiment that uses the veneer of science to tell a particular story.
In fact, Liu Cixin’s “Dark Forest Hypothesis” — a subset of the “Fermi Paradox” (more on this later) — falls in line with a long list of fictional theorems and hypotheses that aren’t scientific at all.
Any sufficiently advanced technology…
The 3 Body Problem does base a lot of its story on actual science. The most obvious is its namesake, which describes a system with three different bodies that all exhibit gravitational force on one another. This makes such systems notoriously unstable, as is the case with our main antagonist’s home system, which is subjected to unpredictable gravitational forces.
However, the 3 Body Problem series also relies on fictitious equations, theorems, and hypotheses to build its world. The most obvious of them is Clarke’s Third Law (i.e., “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) or its derivative, Shermer’s Last Law (i.e., “any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God”), as the alien San-Ti are treated as God-like entities by their human worshippers. As one human devotee named Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) says in season one:
“Unlike the mythical Gods our species has conjured up, our Lord [i.e. the San-Ti] truly watches over us.”
Shermer’s law is front and center here as these humans see this advanced technology and, in their ignorance, deify the San-Ti for being “better” than them.
For a series that prides itself on grounding its sci-fi technology on actual science, that is quite a departure from how humans have reacted to technological differences before this moment. In their criticism of Clarke’s Third Law in Gizmodo, Esther Inglis-Arkell uses the example of television. Most people do not understand the science that is fundamental to how a television works, and even if they do, few can build one, but that ignorance does not cause us to think of TVs as magic. In Inglis-Arkells words:
“…no matter what wonders scientists produce in a lab, from an electronic limb that amputees move using their thoughts to animal-less meat, we don’t point at them and shout, “Sorcerers!” We have no idea how it’s done but we sense that, given time and teaching, we could do it, too. Even the most extraordinary feats, which we are entirely ignorant about, we write off as science and technology.”
Furthermore, I would argue that there is a supremacist mentality underbidding our love for these laws in popular culture, as it assumes that people will encounter something they do not understand and react to it with fear, awe, and worship. As Inglis-Arkell goes on to argue:
“There have been plenty of crossovers between different cultures before now, and although people have been fooled briefly by technology, they generally [have caught] on pretty quickly.”
In truth, Clarke’s and Shermer’s laws rely on the old racist trope of militarily advanced people coming to a new land and being treated as Gods by those they violently conquered, as the Spanish are famously claimed to have been treated by the Aztecs.
Yet the idea that Cortés and other conquering Spaniards were worshiped as Gods was an ahistorical myth used to convert indigenous people to Christianity (as well as to retrospectively justify the invasion). The reality is more complicated. The Aztecs were an imperialist empire in their own right, and several polities sided with the Spanish expedition because they wanted a regime change, not out of a sense of worship.
In the show, many people supporting the alien San-Ti are nihilists who believe humanity is not worth saving. And so you can argue that some of them are more misanthropic than devout, but true believers are common among their ranks. “…you call them my superiors, but they’re your superiors too,” monologues one assassin with a zealotry that could rival any real religion. “… I’ve gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord.”
It’s this sense of devotion that I find strange. The West did not merely drop their ships on foreign shores and win through awe. There was no natural deification from the natives. It took in-person missionaries, violent conquest, and the destructive crackdown on native languages and practices to force cultures all over the world to adopt Western Imperialist values. Because of distance, the San-Ti are limited in the tactics they can use. Violence is possible but curtailed to covert actions.
Somehow, we have this entire religious movement prop up based on a largely ahistorical phenomenon. We have no evidence that people would worship technological superiors because they haven’t really in the past. It makes for good fiction (and that’s fine), but it’s not aligned with our current understanding of the social sciences and a storytelling beat that’s arguably rooted in racist tropes.
And that’s before even getting into one of the show’s other “scientific” foundations—the Fermi Paradox.
The Fermi Paradox and The Dark Forest
Another unscientific concept often framed scientifically, both in this narrative and outside of it, is the Fermi Paradox, or the idea that some factor or confluence of factors is limiting the development of advanced extraterrestrial life. This concept is accredited to scientist Enrico Fermi, despite little evidence that he proposed it. It appears to conflate a future author’s response to an inquiry Fermi famously made on a lunch break.
The Fermi Paradox has profoundly impacted science fiction (and real science research), and it’s arguably a core element of this entire show. Not only do we see a character reference it directly by reading Michael Bodin’s Fermi’s Paradox: Cosmology and Life, but the plot rests on this “paradox’s” existence.
In the 3 Body Problem, the Fermi Paradox is not only real but the result of interstellar aliens. The reason why the universe seems so devoid of life is that the moment a species reveals itself, another will come to conquer or destroy it to prevent being surpassed by it in the future. As written in the English translation of the 3 Body Problem’s sequel, The Dark Forest:
“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.”
This creates an incentive to destroy any life you come across in the universe, even innocent, fragile life, for the fear that given enough time, they might surpass you and come to pose a significant threat.
This is a fine premise for a book or show (media does not have to have realistic logic), but it’s not scientific. We have no idea how the mechanics of interstellar space travel would work in reality. Nor do we know how the many iterations of sentient life would behave or even really have a good conception of consciousness or intelligence. In the words of Robert H. Gray in a piece ultimately sympathetic to the search for extraterrestrial life:
“As for the paradox, there is none…There is no logical contradiction between the statement “E.T. might exist elsewhere” and the statement “E.T. is not here” because nobody knows that travel between the stars is possible in the first place.”
Furthermore, it should be noted that much of the discussion around this trope is arguably rooted in the same flawed cultural assumptions as Clarke’s Third Law and Shermer’s Law. The Dark Forest Hypothesis, at its core, assumes that alien life will embody the same imperialism of Earth to expand across the stars. Stories of non-human interstellar expansion use a data point of one—i.e., Earth, particularly the recent history of colonial expansion—and assume there will be a natural propensity for all intelligent life not only to expand but to react to difference with fear.
Yet the idea that even a single other species, let alone the vast majority of species, would react to different intelligent life so vastly far apart from them in space with genocide is something we have no way of validating.
It’s also one that is not backed up by current history and anthropology. Not even on Earth has every civilization reacted to cultural differences with an exterminationist response. Genocides and war do happen, but they are currently framed in negative terms, and we have plenty of examples of cross-cultural cooperation.
The Dark Forest Hypothesis is a fun fictional framing — but that’s all it is — and one that draws on our flawed cultural assumptions. It extrapolates the current philosophies of imperialism, colonialism, and supremacy — ones that are not even consistent across the planet, let alone all of human history — and generalizes them to explain life we have not even met yet (assuming it exists in the first place).
A spaced-out conclusion
Again, science fiction does not need to be realistic. Many times, writers use the flavor of science to tell a particular cultural narrative. Whether the story is about FTL, time travel, or space aliens, things like the Fermi paradox, wormholes, and nanobots are great ways to make those narrative points.
The 3 Body Problem is one of these stories, drawing heavily on pseudo-scientific social theories that reflect modern cultural assumptions more than innate aspects of the universe. It uses the veneer of science—as all good science fiction tends to do—to flesh out the perceived authenticity of a story.
Yet that does not mean these story tropes (and again, that is what the Fermi Paradox and Clarke’s Law are) are not the product of harmful biases. In the same way that the ancient aliens myth reflects a deep-seated racism that tries to downplay the accomplishments of Browner people (i.e., ancient aliens are always coming to Eygpt and Polynesia, rarely Rome), the Dark Forest Hypothesis takes the imperialism of the current era, and makes it “natural.”
If we do not make this fact explicit, the cultural assumptions embedded in works like the 3 Body Problem—i.e., that aliens might be as brutish, expansionist, and cruel as the current empires of the modern era — will be ones we do not think to question.
And if humanity is ever to reach for the stars, that would create one scary universe.