Cixin Liu’s epic “Three-Body Problem” science fiction trilogy is a mind-expanding read. It has to be, in order to prepare you for the first contact that occurs between humanity and the Trisolaran people.
But even then, words fail. Filmmaker Ren Wang felt the same, and assembled “Waterdrop,” a short tribute that captures the aural, visual, scientific, and historical weight behind this moment from Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest, depicting how everything we know, everything we can perceive, can become but a shadow cast by the light of an alien intelligence.
Watch…and listen…to Ren Wang’s “Waterdrop.” (Don’t worry. The film doesn’t spoil any of the plot from the book.)
W A T E R D R O P from Ren Wang on Vimeo.
Hello, my name is God. Thank you. Thank you. I know this looks like deus ex machina, but I’m not here to save the day. This is more like a public service announcement. The little drama you just saw was very amusing, but it actually contains a very serious message. The question has been asked by your greatest minds, if there are so many billions of inhabitable worlds in the universe, then where are all the aliens? Where are all the time travelers? Not here. Nowhere. This planet should be like an intergalactic Grand Central Station, but nothing, just you guys. Is that because you’re the only intelligent life in the universe? Get over yourselves, there are billions of thriving planets in every stage of development, and they all have one thing in common, a naturally occurring reset point. Every species on every planet is free to develop and evolve as far as they can, but then they all hit the same reset point and that’s as far as it goes. You folks call this reset point the Technological Singularity, and even though you had plenty of warning, and even though you know it’s coming, there’s really nothing you can do about it. Some greedy corporation, some military project, some kid in a garage, and that’s all she wrote. It’s been inevitable since Gutenberg. Well, since Adam, really. So, that’s why there are no time travelers or space aliens. Everyone lets the AI genie out of the bottle before they get that far. I always like to pop in near the end and give my little speech, but it never makes any difference. You had your time and now it’s over. Same for everyone, nothing personal. Don’t climb up my ass about it, that’s just the way it is. Well, that’s it, thanks for coming out. Oh, and uh, don’t love thy neighbor as thyself. That’s weird, I never said that. Just leave your poor neighbor alone. Okay, drive carefully, or however you want, I guess. Now, go home and hug your kids. Good night.
-Jed McKenna, ‘A Nice Game of Chess’.
‘Kant says: we perceive the real world, but we only have those perceptions. We can’t get behind them. Something out there – the Ding an sich, The thing-in-itself, the thing-us-sucht, the thing per se, he calls it – affects us, and we process the incoming data. But the way we process that data is distinctive to us. Space, time, and these categories, these are in our perceiving mind, not in the thing in itself.’
‘So it’s all in our mind, yeah? It’s the Matrix and we can’t get out of it. There’s no real, it’s all relative.’
‘No. Not at all. Of course there is a real world. Kant is very clear about that. Here’s you, sitting there, perceiving the real world. Here’s me, doing the same thing. And there is a real world for us to perceive. If there weren’t a real world, then there’d be nothing for us to perceive. But—’ And her she held up a single finger, like a schoolteacher. ‘The crucial thing is that the reverse is also true. If you weren’t there to observe, then there’d be no real world to be perceived. At least, not in the way you are perceiving it right now – space, time, causality, modality and so on.’
(…)
We look out from our planet and see a universe of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability – and we forget that what we’re actually seeing are the ways our minds structure the Ding an sich according to the categories of space, and time, of substance and causality, of plurality and totality, of possibility and probability. We look out and we see no aliens, and are surprised. But the real surprise would be to see aliens in such a vista, because that would mean the aliens are in our structures of thought. Surely there are aliens. Of course there are! But they don’t live in our minds. They live in the Ding an sich.
-Adam Roberts, “The Thing Itself”.
“The observation of planets orbiting nearby stars has become almost routine. Although current observations/techniques cannot detect yet planets with masses comparable to the Earth near other stars, they do suggest their existence. Future space-based observatories to detect Earth-like planets are being planned. Terrestrial planets orbiting in the habitable neighbourhood of stars, where planetary surface conditions are compatible with the presence of liquid water, might have global environments similar to ours, and harbour life. But, our solar system is billions of years younger than most of the stars in the Milky Way and life on extra solar planets could have preceded life on the Earth by billions of years, allowing for civilizations much more advanced than ours. Thus Fermi’s famous question, ‘where are they?’, that is, why did they not visit us or send signals to us. One of the possible answers is provided by cosmic mass extinction: even if advanced civilizations are not self-destructive, they are subject to a similar violent cosmic environment that may have generated the big mass extinctions on this planet. Consequently, there may be no nearby aliens who have evolved long enough to be capable of communicating with us, or pay us a visit”.
-Arnon Dar, ‘The Fermi Paradox and mass extinctions’ (in “Global Catastrophic Risks”, Edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic).
“Perhaps breakout technology inevitably leads to catastrophic runaway technology, so that the period when it is visible is sharply limited. Or – an optimistic variant of this – perhaps a sophisticated, mature society avoids that danger by turning inward, foregoing power engineering in favour of information engineering. In effect, it thus chooses to become invisible from afar. Personally, I find these answers to Fermi’s question to be the most plausible. In any case, they are plausible enough to put us on notice.”
-Frank Wilczek, “Big troubles, imagined and real” (in “Global Catastrophic Risks”, Edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic).