AAAAHH

HUGE SPOILERS for the entire Three Body Problem trilogy contained within!

You have been warned…

Cixin Liu’s final book in the Three Body trilogy, Death’s End, is a marvelous adventure into the deep future of mankind as it grasps for the stars. Though the novel begins relative to our own time (the Crisis Era of the previous novels) the reader quickly realizes that they are reading a time travel novel. The implications of the “hibernation” technology discovered in the previous book begin to unfold, and the novel’s protagonist, Cheng Xin, uses hibernation to skip across dramatic swathes of time, making great ripples in human society with each leap through history. We get to follow Cheng Xin through a breathtaking panorama of human culture as it swings into territories both alien and familiar.

There are so many fantastic chapters in this novel. A woman flash freeze’s a terminally ill man’s brain and launches it into space on the off chance that aliens might revive it. A scientist falls in love with a black hole and falls into it, living forever in a state of infinite free fall (life insurance won’t pay out because he never technically died from our perspective). Aliens attempt to Hunger Games humankind in Australia. There is an incredibly long interlude about a fairy tale that contains the secrets of FTL. Astronauts discover what it is like to view their three dimensional plane from a fourth dimensional perspective. And so on.

My favorite chapters, of course, relate to Trisolaris. Even in this final segment of the story, we get to see so little of Trisolaris and its inhabitants. In this novel, we learn that after Luo Ji successfully deters the Trisolaran invasion, a period of peace and collaboration ensues. Cheng Xin awakens in the Deterrence Era and is taken to see a movie. The film, which won Best Picture at the Oscars, is beautiful to her, depicting a romance between lovers in some medieval Chinese past.

"I love your era," said Cheng Xin. "I'm surprised."

"You'd be even more surprised if you knew the artists behind these films, paintings, and music. They're all Trisolarans from four light-years away." AA laughed uproariously as she observed Cheng Xin's stunned gape.
(136, Tor Books hardcover)

Yes, in the Deterrence Era, Trisolarans have begun to create art and share it with Earth. They are sharing science too– so much science that humanity is overwhelmed and must create international bodies to study it all!

After the creation of deterrence, the World Academy of Sciences--an international organization at the same level as the UN--was founded to receive and digest the scientific and technical information transmitted to Earth from Trisolaris.

People first predicted that Trisolaris would only provide knowledge to Earth in sporadic, disconnected fragments after much pressure, and sprinkle deliberate falsehoods and misleading ideas into what little they chose to share, so the scientists of Earth would have to sift through them carefully for nuggets of truth. But Trisolaris defied those expectations. Within a brief period of time, they systematically transmitted an enormous amount of knowledge. The treasure trove mainly consisted of basic scientific information, including mathematics, physics, cosmology, and molecular biology of Trisolaran life forms, and so on. Every subject was a complete system.

There was so much knowledge, in fact, that it completely overwhelmed the scientific community on Earth. Trisolaris then provided ongoing guidance for the study and absorption of the knowledge. For a while, the whole world resembled a giant university. [...] The Trisolarans even complained multiple times that humanity was absorbing the new knowledge too slowly. The aliens seemed eager for Earth to catch up to Trisolaris in scientific understanding--at least in the basic sciences.

The scenario floored me as a reader. The Dark Forest ends on a note of hope: Luo Ji speaks to a Trisolaran about love and expresses a desire for peace to win out in the universe. Here, we see a vision of a future in which aliens estranged by light years can collaborate with one another.

Humanity is cautious of course and speculates as to why Trisolaris would be so forthcoming in sharing information after nearly going to war with Earth, but Trisolaris provides its own answer:

Their generous gift of knowledge was done out of respect for Earth civilization. They claimed that Trisolaris had received even more benefits from Earth. Human culture gave Trisolaris new eyes, allowed Trisolarans to see deeper meanings in life and civilization and appreciate the beauty of nature and human nature in ways they had not understood. Human culture was widely disseminated on Trisolaris, and was rapidly and profoundly transforming Trisolaran society, leading to multiple revolutions in half a century and changing the social structure and political system on Trisolaris to be similar to Earth's. Human values were accepted and respected in that distant world, and all Trisolarans were in love with human culture.

This information is likely true, even in light of later negatives developments in Human-Trisolaran relations. In the first book, the supreme leader of Trisolaris limits access to cultural information from Earth because of its power to captivate Trisolarans. The original Trisolaran defector that tried to warn Earth against contacting Trisolaris in the first book is eventually freed and allowed to speak to Luo Ji in the second book. That said, just as Earth society is composed of many different types of people, Trisolaran society has its conservatives and its liberals–its hawks and its doves. Pointedly in this chapter, a note is made that, though Trisolaran art shared with Earth readily depicts human subjects… the physical appearance of the Trisolarans themselves and their environment are still not known to humanity.

At the same time, Trisolaris itself remained shrouded in mystery, with almost no details about the world itself being transmitted. The Trisolarans explained this by saying that their own crude native culture was not ready to be shown to humans. Given the vast gap in biology and natural environment between the two worlds, such displays may erect unexpected barriers in the valuable exchange that was taking place.

Humanity was glad to see everything developing in a positive direction. A ray of sunlight lit up this corner of the dark forest.

In light of later events in the book, when this era of collaboration inevitably collapses back into war and genocide, it is easy to see this chapter in a sardonic light. Clearly, Trisolaris was merely flattering Earth society, just as they had tried to manipulate humans with the Three Body game back in the original novel. Trisolaran artists are extremely adept at manipulating humanity, and there is no reason to think that they would stop doing this during the Deterrence Era. By making humanity love Trisolaris through art, culture, and even a cute robot maid that rebrands the terrifying Zophons into a love-able animatronic woman named Zophon, Trisolaris is able to once again lower humanity’s guard over the long term and break the deterrence model established in the previous age.

Yet, I believe that Trisolaris really did respect Earth. Just as Americans opposed to the invasion of Iran were ultimately overridden by their own government’s desire for real politics, I think the hawks in the Trisolaran military were always ready to attack Earth in the event that deterrence failed. When [SPOILERS] happens and the Trisolaran bluff fails, Trisolaris ultimately spares humanity even when it could have wiped us out in an instant out of spite and revenge. Trisolaris keeps tabs on humanity throughout the long years that follow, and when the time comes to say goodbye… Trisolaris returns to help humanity endure to the end of the universe itself. Trisolaris allows us to discover the secrets of FTL! They didn’t have to do that at all, but they do, because we gave them a cultural power to love themselves and others.

Even the greater aliens [giga spoilers LOL] pause when viewing Earth and Trisolaris from a distance. The high dimensional alien, called a “singer,” tasked with destroying any and all civilizations detectable through radio or other short membrane communications, sees the strange pattern of communication between the two worlds and glimpses something of love in it.

Remember when I said that a woman ships a man’s brain into space so aliens will maybe find it and revive it? Well, they do. Of course they do. In a Dark Forest universe where life is so expansive that it competes for resources with life from other stars, there was no possibility that the brain would not be discovered. The Trisolaran finds the brain and succeeds in awakening it. This ultimate act of species exchange has a human being actually living among Trisolarans in one of their ships. This one weird act may have been what allowed humanity ultimately to survive.

So, when Trisolarans refuse to share their own visage with Earth civilization, is it out of a simple, childlike fear of judgement? Throughout the series (even in this book), Trisolaran communications scorn humanity for being “bugs.” And yet, knowing Earth culture and our incredible capacity for hatred and genocide, perhaps Trisolarans, buglike and strange themselves, were not willing to hold that mirror to themselves. They did not want to see hatred reflected in the cultural exchange of their bodies.

Or maybe Cixin Liu is a bastard and didn’t want to give us the satisfaction of truly knowing the Trisolarans. So much excitement from the series comes from the gap in information present between the human perspective and the aliens they communicate with across many millions of miles of space. Perhaps Cixin Liu knew that no description of them could live up to the mystery, nor can a human writer from Earth truly be capable of describing an alien from another world. All we have is comparison to our own culture and our own world that we have never truly stepped more than a few hundred thousand miles from. Spitting distance in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

We do, however, get some information about what Trisolaran culture may have looked like. Near the very end of the book, when Cheng Xin witnesses the dismantling of her bubble universe, readers finally get a look at objects made by Trisolarans explicitly NOT manicured to appeal to a human gaze.

As the rest of the floor tiles were removed, they also revealed more machinery beneath. These were the first objects Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan had seen n the mini-universe that bore obvious signs of being of Trisolaran origin. Like Cheng Xin had suspected, the design of these machines evinced an aesthetic completely different from human ideals. Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan couldn't even tell at first that they were looking at machinery; rather, the objects resembled strange sculptures or natural geologic formations.
(599, Tor Book hardcover)

After three novels worth of build up, I guess it would be difficult to describe the aliens in a satisfying way. Ultimately, the description would probably be undesirable. We get enough information throughout the series to come up with our own idea of what a Trisolaran might look like. They probably look like bugs to us, or something unseemly that we would instinctively detest, just like we appear primitive and bug-like to them. And yet, it is revealed in the first book that they have retinas similar to ours, and so we know that they see what we see. They too are a witness to God’s beautiful creation!

Patrick 2, a gnome wizard, second in a line of Irishmen destined to conquer the Mazes of Menace, delved deeper than any before or after him. Through the blind caverns of the Gnomish Mines he stumbled until he came upon a stair descending to a lit space hallway.

Patrick 2 pushed ahead through the hall of stone, opening a door into an intersection with many unseen paths before and behind him. Immediately from two directions, monkeys began to wheel down the hall toward Patrick. Patrick hefted his staff and swung at the first monkey to reach him, but it didn’t attack. Instead, it dodged Patrick’s swing and, grasping nimbly, slipped a ring from Patty’s finger. It began to run away, and before Patrick could even realize what was taken from him, the other monkeys leapt on him and stole more– his cloak, his gold. One of them even tried to make off with the shoes on his feet! The monkeys flew in every direction down different hallways.

All hell broke loose. Patrick noticed that his precious ring of teleport control was taken, but he didn’t know which monkey took it. Without hesitating further, he dashed north after a pair of monkeys. Throwing caution to the wind, he chased the monkeys past monsters, rooms, and strange watchmen. Patrick left his cat behind, who began immediately killing and eating gnomes, rats, and the human watchmen that prowled this level of the dungeon.

Patrick chased and slew monkeys with abandon. He followed one into a lit open space and found his cat, busy devouring a watchman. Patrick continued his chase into a shopkeeper’s chamber and finally cornered what appeared to be the last monkey. He slew it with a dagger, and the dead monkey dropped Patrick’s precious teleportation control ring on the ground of the store. The shopkeeper smiled.

“For you, esteemed sir; only 400 zorkmids for this ring of teleport control.”

Izchak, the purveyor of Minetown’s lighting shop, took the ring and offered to sell it back to Patrick for a hefty price. Patrick was rich, of course, somehow amassing over 900 zorkmids during the early days of his quest, but the thought of buying his own ring made him uneasy. Noises outside indicated that the cat was still fighting and murdering outside. Patrick considered throwing some paralysis potions at Izchak. Then he considered trying to fight him outright, but he had a feeling the shopkeeper was used to rabble and wouldn’t go down easy. Suddenly, an imp appeared at the door of the shop.

“I would fart in thy direction, but it would improve thy smell!”

Patrick and the Imp did battle for a time, and Patrick was wounded deeply. Feeling desperate, he finally began to loose all of his magical power upon the imp. He fired volley after volley of wizard blast at the imp until it exploded and died. Patrick promptly paid the shopkeeper for his ring and stepped outside and reunited with his cat. With the ring of teleport control coupled with his ring of teleportation, Patrick could instantly travel to any location on the dungeon floor. He thought this was a pretty important ability and didn’t want to lose it. It could save his life in a pinch!

A strange yellow slime mold approached Patrick and his cat slew it. He decided to eat the mold to try and absorb its intrinsic characteristics and become more powerful.

Wow! Great stuff!

A demilich, a really terrifying indescribable demon, suddenly appeared before Patrick. He freaked out and blinked. A unicorn’s horn appeared, and the demon was replaced with a cave man. Weird stuff started happening all around Patrick, like the whole world was flickering around him.

A frog creature appeared and Patrick decided to battle it. It became a killer bee and bit him. Patrick swung at it with his staff and a dragon appeared before him. Patrick somehow missed it. The shifting form bit him and Patrick sickened and died on the spot.

Yeah, Patrick was hallucinating from eating a yellow slime mold. The demilich was actually his cat, and the ferocious killer bee dragon shaman was actually a rabid rat. The rat bit Patrick and he contracted rabies and died.

Darn! My best run yet, by far!

~ ~ ~

That, my friends, is NetHack. It was released in the 1980s, but the interactions of all the different elements of the game engine are so open ended that emergent gameplay narratives arise naturally throughout the game world. The monkeys made off with Patrick 2’s valuables, were chased through Minetown, and dropped their stolen goods inside a shop. The shopkeeper claimed the items for himself and would not let Patrick leave without paying the price. Meanwhile, chaos from Patrick’s cat outside and the constant flow of monsters through the town added to the confusion of the moment, giving me as the player less time to think all of my decisions through.

I was deeply riveted! And I was also really sad that I died. It was a funny death, but I would have liked to keep playing.

I have played many lives since, probably 20+, but none have made it back to Minetown. Many of my deaths are more mundane: starving to death while stumbling through barren caverns, or being attacked by water moccasins because I quaffed from a well, or dying from a cave in because I read an evil scroll.

Basically, taking risks in NetHack can result in instant death. But sometimes the risks are hilarious and need to be taken! Hopefully I will improve with time and be able to tell which risks are worth taking and when..?

PS:

hungers not I
darts I let fly
for sport I hunt thee
till sun end my spree

I went on a date with a pretty Mexican lass recently, and the experience pumped new life into my withering heart. We ate plantains and fried goat at a local Caribbean restaurant. We got some fancy drinks and talked long into the evening. It was really refreshing!

The next day at work, still smiling, I pulled out this classic:

El Paso is a ballad originally written by Marty Robins. It tells the story of a man smitten with a Mexican lass at the local bar. One day, he catches her sharing a drink with a dashing young cowboy. The narrator shoots the cowboy dead in a duel and flees the scene. His love for the maiden is so strong that he eventually returns to El Paso to see her and dies in the attempt.

I didn’t know that Grateful Dead covered the song live! The entire Red Rock set is so amazing, but their cover of El Paso is especially great because it takes Marty Robins’s slow, repetitive ballad and speeds the adventure along with plenty of flourishes and pretty guitar noises.

Of course, the original is an absolute classic:

We love a good storytelling western song. The climax of the story is such an upswell of drama as the singer comes under fire by mounted cowboys.

Something is dreadfully wrong, for I feel
A deep burning pain in my side
Though I am trying to stay in the saddle
I'm getting weary, unable to ride

But my love for Feleena is strong, and I rise where I've fallen
Though I am weary, I can't stop to rest
I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle
I feel the bullet go deep in my chest

The Marty Robbins version does the climax better, I’d say, even if the Grateful Dead version is faster and more pleasing to the ear throughout.

O! To die for a woman! A few years ago I would have wanted nothing to do with any girl ever, but time revolves the heart and now I want some drama and romance in my life.

I haven’t played NetHack since college. For those unaware, NetHack is a dungeon crawling adventure game originally released in 1987. Can you tell?

These are the windows graphics. More hardcore players will play with text-based graphics that use letters and numbers to represent the dungeon and its contents on the screen. I prefer to play with the sprites… this game is esoteric enough in my opinion. Arcane, even. NetHack originates from text-based adventure games of old, where there is no graphical interface at all. In older text-based games, the player reads descriptions of scenes on a screen and “plays” the game by typing commands into the interface and seeing how the game responds. In this way, NetHack is actually a huge accessibility boost to the genre!

I died because my character fainted from hunger. While unconscious, a rat found my corpse and killed me. I didn’t know I was hungry, of course, because the game doesn’t really notify you of your status beyond some lines of text. A giant flashing warning on the screen would have been appreciated.

Alas, NetHack is not that kind of game! Death comes swiftly! In some cases, instantly!

The Supreme Court struck down this congressional map today:

What do these lines mean? What do the boundaries represent in the people that live there?

How do you describe this era? It is like post-modernism weaponized. It is like surrealism. Guerrnica but evil. Or maybe guernnica described exactly this sort of time

The town of Guerrnica was a real place. Before WWII, Hitler sent his bombers to the Spanish city of Guerrnica and burned it to the ground after hours of continuous bombing.

The city was carpet bombed. Some consider this the first carpet bombing in history via warplane.

This month, a number of robots made headlines competing in human sports.

In China, robots competed to complete half marathons alongside humans:

This event marks the first time robots have outpaced humans in a race. The race started at the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, with human runners and robots having their own tracks. Someday, maybe they will run side by side?

Robots are also competing against humans in tennis:

Ace, a tennis robot created by Sony, beat professional tennis players under competitive rules. Of course, the tennis robot requires a massive installation surrounding the table with cameras pointed every which way. As per the Guardian: “Ace sidesteps some tricky aspects of table tennis by having an eight-jointed arm on a movable base that does not have to stand on two legs. And instead of seeing the ball with two eyes, it draws on images from multiple cameras that view the entire court from different angles and track the position and spin of the ball.” I’ll be more impressed when a humanoid robot with a single perspective can beat a human competitor.

Still, I am floored by these developments. The robots are starting to look like the ones out of science fiction! Scifi is a form of prophecy, I am realizing.

Recently at a conference called FII in Miami held by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Investment, the Saudi state-owned chemical company Aramco, and the Saudi PIF investment company, President Donald Trump had this to say about China:

"I must say, I respect China greatly. Because it's amazing that with a system that in theory shouldn't work-- you know we go to school and we go to the best business schools, and we do well in those schools, and we read about free-entrepreneurship and we read about all these, uh, different things, but.. you look at China and how well they do, how well they manufacture-- I mean, they manufacture cars, so many that they actually have a contest for who can manufacture the least cars because they have so many cars. You have to have great respect for China for the job they do. Like them or not like them, you have to respect them."

For context, Trump said this as a non-sequitur to speaking about how “America is the hottest country anywhere in the world.” The question he was asked was “The world is entering a new economic era. Who do you think are the winners and who do you think would be the losers?” Let me respond by hearkening to the recent past.

In 2023, I wrote this short piece about the Chinese Spy Balloon and Attack on Titan:

https://www.aaaahh.net/a-frustrating-balloon/

This particular moment in time (January 2023) filled me with dread, because when this balloon started making headlines, all my previously liberal friends immediately turned into China hawks. Like, all of our discourse became anti-Chinese propaganda, feeding into the growing political current that Biden was an ineffectual commander-in-chief (probably true, as will be discussed below) that was not strong enough to fight the forces of this “axis of resistance” forming on the other side of the planet. Politically, America soured on Biden’s covid-recovery era progressivism and became war hungry. We needed to project power against China, apparently. You know, despite the fact that almost every single object you can observe and touch is made in China and shipped across the world for your convenience.

Well, that same year of our lord 2023 saw Oct. 7th happen in Israel. Biden abandoned his domestic messaging pretty much entirely to become a war president. He was fighting for Ukraine, he was fighting for Israel. He was building forces in the Pacific to counter China. Jingoism was IN! War was exciting again! Yahoo! We ended our occupation of Afghanistan under Biden, but we started two new proxy wars to make up for it. What are we as a nation if we are not constantly burning precious metals and fuel on foreign conflicts?

For obvious reasons, Biden would go on to lose catastrophically to Trump in the next election. Trump somehow simultaneously promised to both end “forever wars” and “finish the job” in Israel and Ukraine. He would talk about expanding the military to one crowd while pandering to anti-war hippies at the very next rally. The actual track record shows that Trump made war in the Middle East constantly throughout his first presidency, including working directly with Netanyahu to try and start an Iran war back in 2019 just before Covid erupted and shut down everything. How could Biden have ever hoped to top that pedigree? Republicans LOVE war. They make a new one in the Middle East every presidential cycle. Yes, that’s right, every single Republican president since the 90s has started a new war. Yes. Yes! Every single one! Look it up. So yeah, if WAR is the MESSAGE, then Republicans are going to beat you in the election. Biden couldn’t even stop Putin from invading Ukraine with a WWII level army. Biden was so weak that Putin could rattle his nuclear saber and just march right in to Ukraine ground-war style, starting a conflict that has continued well into 2026 and could endure “forever.” A forever war. Biden lost hugely to Trump, and the progressive policies he campaigned on all those years ago are now dreams on the wind.

So look where our hawkish tendencies got us this time. We went from expediently loathing China during the Biden era in order to usher in a president that would be “tough” on China. The new Republican administration went in and shuttered hundreds of thousands of government jobs, cut state funding for healthcare across the board, and now actively makes war in Iran. Gas prices have exceeded the very worst of the covid-recovery era. Inflation has not reversed and only increases in growth. And now, Trump is speaking at Saudi state-backed investment conferences where he is declaring that China “must be respected” because its socialism that shouldn’t work “in theory” actually works amazing in practice and has allowed China to become the industrial powerhouse of the world.

In all honesty, I knew almost nothing about China is 2023. I had one Chinese friend, that’s it. Since then, I have come to learn a lot more… and I must say this is one of those areas where I do agree with Donald Trump. Yes, we should respect China! What an amazing, massive place. What a history! What an incredible recovery! From being literally raped, pillaged, and murdered on Holocaust scales during WWII to a thriving country in 2026. The propaganda that China is some backwards evil 1984 dictatorship is falling away before our very eyes. It is being replaced by a new propaganda of optimism for Chinese success. And you know what? I’m all for it. I wish OUR country was producing propaganda about how great it is to live here. Unfortunately, Trump has recently stated that America is so busy making war that it cannot even afford to fund daycare for children:

"The United States can't take care of daycare. We're a big country, we have 50 states, we have all these other people, we are fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. We got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. They should pay for it too-- they have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. [...] It's not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis, you can't do it on a federal basis. We have to take care of one thing-- military protection."

And it makes me sick to my stomach because it was so obvious this is the direction we would go in 2023. As soon as Biden began to lose the thread of why he got elected, the slide back into war and austerity began. Biden campaigned on reinvesting in America. He didn’t spout “America-First,” but his message was essentially that we, as the wealthiest country on the planet, should be able to improve the lives of our own citizens. We were going to manufacture our own solar panels and semiconductors. And that was while we were dying en-masse to a pandemic. The world became real for a second, but the moment of clarity brought on by the pandemic has passed. Can we find that progressive optimism again? Or has American Fascism finally stamped the life out of hope? Are we doomed to wage war forever, always navigating some great power struggle between nations on the other side of this fragile little planet we all call home?

If Iran obtained nuclear capability, the Whole of the Middle East would be under threat and being blackmailed, and petrol and oil prices would soar!. You seem to forget that for 47 years this evil regime has murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people, maybe millions of people!. President Trump has done the World a great favour by being the only one to take on this evil regime!. Only other evil countries would support them!. Even Russia and China should see this!. They will benefit from this regime being removed!. We need stability in this World. A stable and just oil price will bring down the cost of living for everyone on our Planet!

This post is about the second book in Cixin Liu’s Three Body series, “The Dark Forest.” If you are familiar with the theoretical concept of a “Dark Forest” universe, then you already have a sense of what the book is about… but only a sense.

Caution: SPOILERS!

In this book, man finally makes first contact with a probe from another world. The object that reaches our own solar system is small, no larger than a truck, and it is shaped like a droplet of mercury. The following passage describes the moment in which a man-made probe touches the droplet for the first time.

“It was at this point that people noticed a strange contrast: The mechanical arm was obviously designed purely as a functional object, with a rugged steel frame and exposed hydraulics that that felt complicatedly technological and crudely industrial. But the droplet was perfect in shape, a smoothly gleaming, solid drop of liquid whose exquisite beauty erased all functional and technical meaning and expressed the lightness and detachment of philosophy and art. The steel claw of the robot arm clutched the droplet like the hairy hand of Australopithecus clutching a pearl. The droplet looked so fragile, like a glass thermos liner in space, that everyone was afraid it would shatter in the claw. But that did not occur, and the robot arm began to retract” (407, Liu).

This is man’s first physical contact with an extraterrestrial, and humanity is indeed transfixed like a cave man gazing for the first time into the heart of a gem. Up to this point, the alien fleet had seemed to be decelerating while humanity’s new space fleet could reach 15% the speed of light and was growing rapidly. Man was arrogant, riding high on his own progress.

I love the strangeness of the Trisolarin probe. I was absolutely transfixed reading the build up to first contact! As the human probe approaches the alien one, and docks, and latches on… it is so exciting and wonderful! The first humans to physically approach the probe with space suits were amazed to find that its surface gave almost no friction. Under a microscope, they see that its surface is like that of a mirror, with almost no space at all between the atoms that make it up. Doctor Ding Yi finally grabs a rock pick hits the droplet directly. Not a scratch.

“The fact that the droplet did not self-destruct was final proof of what people had guessed: If it was a military prove, it surely would have self destructed after falling into enemy hands. It was now certain that this was a gift from Trisolaris to humanity, a sign of peace sent in that civilization’s baffling mode of expression” (408, Liu).

Cixin Liu sets up a fall so dramatic and obvious. The ensuing fallout is almost hard to read. And yet, the literal melting of the Earth fleet in the open space beyond Neptune is beautiful in its own horrifying way. Humanity was transfixed like fry before an angler fish’s lure, and we paid the price of an entire space fleet for our wonder.

This outcome was foreshadowed, of course. The very beginning of the book starts with a depiction of an ant crawling through the impressions of a tombstone. Despite our hubris, we were only ants to Trisolaris, and our greatest show of force was crushed beneath the abstract boot of a strange space object from 4 light years away. Humanity was simply on another level. It is like a man with a bow-and-arrow trying to take down a tank. The bow user cannot even scratch the surface of the tank, let alone apply any force strong enough to slow its advance.

All told, “The Dark Forest” follows in Three Body’s footsteps in setting up a mysterious alien threat throughout the story and then dropping an awesome alien reveal right at the end. The first book did this too, slowly intimating the existence of the aliens without giving us concrete physical details about their life and culture until the last few chapters. The anticipation of discovery is sublime!

I have already started the third book, and the direction it seems to be going is already so bizarre. Humanity has shipped a frozen human brain into deep space…

No matter how many thousands of years we put between ourselves and our cave dwelling ancestors, some things do not change!

Here is a photograph posted by the news outlet Reuters back in 2023 about Israel’s war in Gaza:

The caption reads:

A Palestinian man reacts as he carries a casualty at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Rafah, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

The wording here doesn’t describe the picture very well. Instead of describing the man as crying, he simply “reacts.” Instead of carrying the body of a baby, the man only carries “a casualty.” This baby is not a casualty of a war, but a casualty of “the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.”

Here is another photograph:

The caption reads:

Women mourn holding the body of a Palestinian killed in Israeli strikes on houses, at Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Again, the women aren’t described as holding a baby. They are holding “the body of a Palestinian.” The woman holding the dead baby might very well be the child’s mother. And the strikes are “on houses.” We don’t know if it was these women’s homes that were targeted specifically, despite the fact that they are surrounded by the casualties of these strikes.

I suspect these captions were written intentionally to avoid emotional language. Since the images are indexed online by the text surrounding them, then it is easier to obscure Israel’s guilt in all of this by keeping sensitive images away from damning keywords like “dead baby” or “crying man holding a slain child” or “casualty of Israel’s WAR in Gaza!”

Two years have passed now since these images were taken. Here is Gaza now:

Desolation as far as the eye can see. Gaza is just gone. This was predicted as soon as Oct. 7th occurred, but very little public pressure was applied. These things can just happen, and America, the producer of the munitions that caused this as well as the ultimate defender of Israel against its enemies, will not stop it.

I ate pork, I am screwed.

You know what this means, right? People with Netflix will need to buy a different subscription to watch a lot of movies now. Big wigs with lots of money are carving up the world’s movies and shows, really valuable cultural media from across the decades, and charging a monthly fee for the right to access them.

It is a digital toll road between great movies.

In good faith, will Paramount share with Netflix the right to stream content that they own?

It is embarassing because Paramount’s IP is not even the best of the best. They just happen to be rich, so they can buy up truly great works of art and charge the price of a delicious meal to view them! In an age of infinite light and data moving through the air!

Mike Huckabee is the ambassador to Israel appointed by President Donald Trump. He recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show where he bumbled, shrugged, and IDK’d his way through tough questions about Israel and Jeffery Epstein.

MIKE HUCKABEE: How many boots on the ground do you think the US has supplied for Israel over the course of its life? How many times have we put soldiers on the ground for Israel?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we had the Iraq War, which was for Israel.
MIKE HUCKABEE: No — not for Israel.
TUCKER CARLSON: How was it for us?
MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, because it was retribution against 9/11. Now, was it the best idea?
TUCKER CARLSON: Was Iraq involved in 9/11?
MIKE HUCKABEE: Our government thought so.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why are 9/11 documents still classified?
MIKE HUCKABEE: I have no idea.

In the year of our lord 2026, members of the US government still use 9/11 to justify the Iraq war, even though former president George Bush has himself called the war a mistake. Ultimately, the government of Iraq had no direct connection to Al Qaeda. While 9/11 was used to justify the start of the war, no concrete evidence has ever surfaced to explain why Bush’s government so adamantly wanted to pursue war in Iraq. In truth, the Bush administration wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein’s government for its own purposes, and the anti-Islamic sentiments of the USA after 9/11 provided fertile ground to justify war.

Now, as the Trump administration builds military pressure around Iran and threatens to commit acts of war against it, we find there is no justification at all. It turns out, you don’t need a grand ideal to make war in the middle east. You can just sort of do it, and leave the fallout to future generations to sort out.