The problem with The Three Body Problem

The possibility of love in a universe of terror.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

a man leans against one end of a table one another sits against its other end.

Two bodies contemplate a problem.

Netflix.

If you are prone to nightmares or paranoia you might want to steer clear of the first season of Netflix’s sci-fi epic, 3 Body Problem. Adapted from Cixin Liu’s multi award-winning Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, the story starts in the Chinese Cultural revolution of the 1960s and ends twelve million years in the future. Mercifully the narrative is non-linear, so we’re spared a minute-by-minute account. It begins as a global mystery - scientists all over the planet are taking their own lives in mysterious circumstances – and ends with advanced alien weaponry collapsing the universe to a single dimension. All based on a true story, apparently.

Why the paranoia? At the heart of both Liu’s novels and the Netflix adaption, is a particularly terrifying solution to the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi was one of the physicists working on the Manhattan Project (played by Danny Defari in the Christopher Nolan depiction of it in Oppenheimer), who presented his now famous paradox to his colleagues at Los Almos. The paradox goes like this: in a galaxy of billions of stars similar to our sun it is almost certain that advanced alien life is out there, and yet we have not received any convincing evidence of their existence. This, it seems, requires some explanation.

Interestingly, this question was also the starting point of C.S. Lewis’ sci-fi cycle The Cosmic Trilogy, and lies behind the title of its first book, Out of the Silent Planet. According to Lewis, the Earth has been placed under a kind of galactic quarantine, as a result of the fall of humanity, nothing and no-one is allowed in or out. The solar system is teeming with life, but we are partitioned from it. We’ve been blocked from the cosmic WhatsApp group for breaching behaviour standards. The aliens are out there but they’re keeping clear. We are the silent planet.

Cixin Liu however opts for a darker and more disturbing solution to Fermi’s question, which provides the title of the second book in his trilogy, The Dark Forest. The aliens are out there, but it is not we who have been silenced, it is they who are silent. The universe, according to this theory, is like a forest filled with predators and the most sensible thing any intelligent life can do is hide in the undergrowth to avoid attracting attention. Telegraphing our existence into the void by sending signals into space is to naively invite destruction. Alerting the universe to our presence is an act of existential self-harm. The universe is silent because everyone is hiding. For Lewis the universe shone with a love from which we had been excluded, for Liu it is saturated with malice from which we should exclude ourselves.

If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why.

It probably isn’t too much of a spoiler to acknowledge that the inevitable happens. Aliens are contacted. They do make plans to invade. It is arguably a bit more of spoiler to give away exactly how this happens. The distance between them and us is so vast that, even travelling at one percent lightspeed it will take their invasion fleet four hundred years to get here. And in the meantime, just to ensure we can’t mount any meaningful defence against them, they fold a planet-sized computer into a photon-sized particle and send it to earth to sabotage all technological development. They can watch our every movement, overhear every conversation. We know they are coming and can do almost nothing about it. The bodies of suicides hanging in the fog from every lamppost lining the Thames underline the overriding despair. It is deliciously bleak. I did not sleep well after watching it.

Liu’s brilliance is not in doubt. The Netflix adaptation can barely capture the fireworks of creative inventiveness that crowd every page of his books (indeed the producers even dropped the definitive article from the book's title). In China, his fellow science fiction writers simply call him ‘Da Liu’ (Big Liu) in honour of his works of towering imagination. But I can’t help feeling that the overall atmosphere of The Three Body Problem is an example of what the theologian Carver Yu, another Chinese author, claimed characterised our culture: technological optimism and literary despair. Liu’s characters respond to the relentless encroachment of a malevolent universe with endless technological innovation. They possess an inexplicable will to survive in a cosmos where no one would wish to live. If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why. They are thirsting for purpose while drowning in applications.

What struck me most watching the Netflix adaptation was that it seemed to extend the experience of living in a post-industrial society to the whole universe. Our sense that many of the organisations to which we owe our allegiance are clever but inhuman, technologically advanced yet amoral, is expanded to fill the farthest reaches of our imagination. Of course, human beings have always done this. Our ancestors saw faces in the clouds and gods in the constellations. We peer into the emptiness of the skies and populate them with our fears and hopes. Faced with the Copernican revolution and the rise of science, Pascal anticipated the cosmic horror of Liu by nearly four hundred years in confessing, ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’ The Three Body Problem, unlike Lewis who saw planet Earth as an aberration in an otherwise benevolent cosmos, takes our global technological arms-race and makes it the ultimate reality of the entire universe.

The crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal.

The Three Body Problem then, like much science fiction, is a valuable and ingenious thought-experiment, but not one I wish to dwell on for too long. I prefer to contrast it with something closer to the cosmology that informed C.S. Lewis. One in which the core operating principle of everything is not the necessity of violence, but the indispensability of love. Something akin to Teilhard de Chardin’s assertion that in the dreams, wonder, exploration and imagination of love, a thread is woven that reaches the very heart of the universe. Despite all appearances to the contrary, love is the deepest reality of all.

This assertion is problematic in many ways. Not least in the face of the evident brutality and violence that traumatises human life. But even more fundamentally than that, how can we intelligibly assert the primacy of love while gazing out at a vast indifferent universe? What are we to do with those infinite silent spaces that so terrorised Pascal?

Perhaps we can try another thought-experiment. This one is drawn from the work of philosopher Chris Barrigar. He calls it the Agape/Probability account. The full argument is long and detailed, so there is no time to explain it all, but the broad brushstrokes are enough. Here’s the thought. What if we live in exactly the kind of universe required to produce creatures who can freely choose to live with self-giving love? They couldn’t be forced or coerced into it, but the conditions could be set in place that would lead to the emergence of such beings. The principles of ‘asymptotic’ statistics suggest that some things may not be determined but they can be so highly probable as to be inevitable. Barrigar asserts that the appearance of a species with the capacity to love was a cosmic inevitability. What is required to turn this possibility into something pretty much certain? Two things – lots of opportunities and lots of time. In other words, with apologies to Carl Sagan, if we want creatures capable of love, we need to build a universe.

Of course, a universe like that – a universe like ours – will throw up many other things in addition to love: violence, rock music and apples pies. But the crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal. The cold silence of space does not in itself contradict our intuitive sense that the capacity to love is somehow ultimately significant. On the contrary, when we look at the vast distances between the stars, we could be looking at the minimal amount of spaciousness required to bring about beings with the capacity for self-giving love. At the very least, it’s a thought-experiment worth trying.

Essay

Books

Culture

28 May 2024

5 min read

How C.S. Lewis used myth to supercharge storytelling

Great stories allow ideas to be experienced rather than merely thought about.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

Aslan sculpture in Belfast, Lewis' birthplace.

K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.

‘I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading’. That is how C.S. Lewis described himself to a class of Fifth Grade pupils in Maryland who wrote to him in May 1954. An exhibition this summer at Magdalen College, Oxford, entitled C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds, includes this letter along with a variety of personal objects, letters, books, manuscripts and audio materials relating to one of its most famous fellows.

As well as answering questions about plot details and forthcoming books in the series, Lewis corrects their view that everything in the Narnia books represents something in our own world. As he notes, that is indeed how Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress works – a reference which may have been lost on his ten-year-old correspondents – but that’s not what Lewis intended in the Narnia stories. Instead, Lewis explains that he set out to write a ‘supposal’ rather than an allegory. He began by asking himself the question: ‘Suppose there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, what would happen?’

For Lewis, the great value of stories is the way they allow their readers to experience ideas rather than simply think about them. In an essay called ‘Myth Became Fact’ he notes the impossibility of feeling an emotion such as pleasure and simultaneously studying it. But if you aren’t roaring with laughter, how can you genuinely understand humour? If you are suffering from toothache, you will be unable to write. But once the toothache has subsided, how could you write a book about pain? Lewis explains this paradox using the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was permitted to lead his beloved wife out of the underworld, but the moment he looks back at her, she disappears. We can draw an abstract truth from this story about the impossibility of simultaneously seeing and experiencing, but it is not the only truth that this myth can communicate. If it were, it would be an allegory.

Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible

As such, an allegory is like a puzzle that must be solved by the reader to reveal its hidden meaning. Its one-dimensional characters straightforwardly signal the qualities they represent, as in Bunyan’s Mr Despondency, held captive in Doubting Castle by a giant called Despair. Unlike allegory, myths are stories from which numerous truths may be abstracted. Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible – ‘like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place’. Lewis considered allegory to be a limited medium, since authors can only insert ideas that they already know, whereas a myth is of a higher order, since authors can fill it with ideas of which they are not yet conscious.

Lewis was fascinated by myths from his first encounter with the stories of Asgard and the Norse deities as a young man. As an atheist, one of his key objections to the Christian faith was that it was just another version of the myth of a dying god who is resurrected, similar to those he found in the stories of the Norse god Baldr, whose death was brought about by Loki, the trickster god. Following entreaties by Baldr’s mother, the goddess Frigg, Hel agrees to release him from the underworld, on the condition that everything on earth weeps for him. But Baldr’s return is ultimately blocked by one creature, a giantess, presumed to be Loki in disguise, who refuses to mourn him.

Why was Christianity different to this myth, or others, like the Egyptian account of Osiris or the Classical story of Adonis? It was a lengthy night-time conversation with his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien in the grounds of Magdalen College in September 1931 that helped him overcome this objection and embrace Christianity. What Lewis came to recognise is that, when he encountered a god dying and being revived in pagan myths, he found it profoundly moving, suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp. But, when he met a similar concept in the Christian gospels, he was unmoved. What he took from his talk with Tolkien and Dyson was an openness to accepting the Christian story as a myth, with all its mystery and suggestive implications, but with one key difference from the Norse, Egyptian and Classical myths: it really happened. But, by becoming fact, he argued, Christianity did not cease to be a myth: ‘that is the miracle’.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world.

In writing the Narnia stories Lewis was engaged in what he and Tolkien called ‘mythopoeia’ – the act of myth-making – communicating Christian truths in ways that would inspire children to grasp something of its mystical and mythical qualities. As he noted in his essay ‘On Stories’, reading about enchanted woods does not make children despise real woods, but instead makes all real woods a little bit enchanted. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the children meet Ramandu, a retired star who is being restored to his former youth so that he can rejoin the great dance in the sky. ‘In our world’, says Eustace Scrubb, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas’. ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of’, Ramandu retorts. Eustace, we are told at the beginning of the story, had wasted his time at school reading only books of information about exports and imports, so it is no surprise that he can only comprehend a purely materialist definition. If he’d only read more fairy stories, he might have been able to grasp this reality, as well as being better prepared for his adventure on Dragon Island.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world. Since God himself is mythopoeic – after all, isn’t the sky itself a myth? – shouldn’t we therefore be mythopathic, that is, receptive to myths? For Lewis, Christianity offered the marriage of Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact, which should be met not solely by love and obedience, but also by wonder and delight.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University. He is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing, 2024) and co-curator of C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds. The exhibition runs until 11 September 20024, in the Old Library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Check opening times.