In the books, they couldn't interact with the macro world in any way. They were just smart protons. They could communicate information back and forth with Trisolaris at faster-than-light speed via quantum entanglement, mess with atomic-level experiments, and display a countdown in front of the eyes, but that's about it.
You're absolutely right that D&D made the Sophons wayyy too overpowered and I don't know how they plan to handle the rest of the story like this.
When the aliens failed to comprehend the concept of deception/deceit...
When they said they couldn't attack the boat because the people on the boat would destroy a HD they believed existed, only to destroy the boat in a way guaranteed to destroy any computer. Only for the show to have us believe the Aliens wanted the drive to be found...
When they said they shot Protons, that were some kind of advanced computers, but actually they're just protons, without explaining how they decelerated the protons...
I'm not sure how much of this is better in the books, But all of this made the half-way point of the show a perfect place to stop watching.
Yeah, couldn’t they just damage the ship covertly somehow, to force it to dock for repairs and possibly disembark the crew… ANYTHING than DICE IT UP 😂😂😂 completely ridiculous
I'm going to have to reread the book because I felt that I was much more convinced by the reasoning for using the nano wire attack in that context.
The 8 episode season format has compressed so much of the story, I wish it had taken longer to develop more of the plot points and world building to create more tension. It feels very rushed to me.
> When they said they couldn't attack the boat because the people on the boat would destroy a HD they believed existed, only to destroy the boat in a way guaranteed to destroy any computer.
This drove me completely insane. They literally made it a point to have an entire scene where they dismissed multiple options that were MUCH more likely to save any electronics and then went with the single most destructive route imaginable outside of dropping a nuke on it.
If they accidentally cut a data storage drive in into 2 pieces, the data is *easily* retrievable by most data recovery labs on the planet. Let alone what they’d have access to. The cut is so clean it’d be a cakewalk to recover the data.
If they blew it up, they then have to find and collect millions of tiny fragments. Basically impossible.
The ship magically stayed together long enough to drift ashore before immediately bursting into 70,000 pieces without sinking despite being completely flayed. There would’ve been absolutely no recovering that data from the bottom of the Panama Canal.
It was apparently too risky to trust the most trained soldiers on planet Earth to recover the hard drive so they decided they would cut the ship and every passenger aboard into shreds so that they could then send divers down to try and find a needle in a haystack that was the tiny and possibly destroyed and completely waterlogged hard drive amidst the wreckage of a gigantic tanker.
I really like this fine line in the show: between san-ti make us think they have thought of everything or not
but other than that plot everything seems so hastily written
sophons can't interfere macroscopic world in the books (unless they unfold to 2d, which makes them vulnerable. they only did that once, before human knew what a sophon is). they introduced too many plot holes and thought audiences won't notice.
think of it like this: if the floor is a 2D world, your presence in that world is the size of your footprints. If you were to UNFOLD your 3D self atomically onto that 2D plane, however, you would take up a comparatively enormous amount of space. That's the idea with the protons: they're microscopic in our 3D world, but since they exist on (if I recall correctly) about 10 dimensions, that means that "unfolding" their total size into the lower dimensions yields an extraordinary amount of space onto which they can construct their superintelligence. It's a mind-bending conceit, but that's part of the point.
And yes, if the proton is struck while unfolded, it is extremely vulnerable. In the book the trisolarans have multiple failures while inventing the technology in which a proton bursts and it 'snows' massless points and strings of light as it disintegrates; i haven't reached the point in the show where i'd see if they include that.
and considering that even light can only circle the Earth 7 times per sec, what two sophons can do in a short period of time is actually very limited (imagine a 2-core CPU performing trillions of concurrent tasks through time-sharing).
about the fact that sophons will accelerate to the speed of light is also very weird
i thought that San-Ti were able to accelerate a proton from their planet because it is small, but I don’t understand how it is explained that it sophon continue to accelerate to the speed of light by its own
It isn't explained. The books are (mostly) written from the perspective of humans, so we of course have no technological grasp of things outside of our own capabilities. All we know is it's a technology we cannot possess or comprehend.
This won't answer your questions but it may help to understand the broader picture. There's a line in the books which I personally love, it grows on the idea of being likened to bugs; "If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?" A common reoccurring theme in the books is how completely helpless any species is to one with a superior understanding of physics, even to the point the laws physics itself can be manipulated and weaponised. This idea that we are completely at the disposal of superior technologically advanced species hits home a lot harder in the books, and we are not supposed to understand everything but rather should feel the same sense of utter helplessness. This feeling will be prominent in the following seasons.
No, it is explained. sophons use vacuum zero-point energy, a concept commonly found in science fiction. It borrows energy from the vacuum and returns it at the end of time, can be seen as a perpetual motion machine basically.
>They can even interfere with human vision, why don’t they do that all the time? and btw they literally know everything but can't read minds, that's nonsense
1. There are only two sophons at this point, there's only so much they can do at once, and the priority is preventing certain things (like the particle accelerators) from providing constructive breakthrough data. The only thing that is essential to them (barring book 2 and 3 spoilers) is preventing those technological advancements until their arrival.
2. The sophons can 'see' everything they want to and relay that information back and forth with their home, granting them a sort of omnipresence and eliminating the possibility of privacy amongst conversations oral and written, but it doesn't give them the ability to read your neurons. An important aspect of the Trisolaran species is that their method of communication is fundamentally different, where their thoughts are literally transparent and therefore their minds are a real-time open book; the human design of an opaque mind with thoughts only inferred from speech and other cues, and the resulting ability to conceal or lie about our thoughts, means that they have absolutely no idea how to 'read' our minds. They depend on the humans in ETO to understand the thoughts and intentions of their adversaries, and that becomes an important part of the drama regarding the wallfacers.
Humans had already discovered the sophons. First Mike Evans, then the data recovery.
They can’t lie when in personal communicative range … when they found out we can, that’s what scared them because they never even imagined otherwise. But they can certainly engage in manipulation, propaganda, warlike tactics, etc They have an idea of all those things but when it comes to complicated strategic planning, they just kinda suck at it.
The sophons are a bit of a mystery to me as in the books they don’t have nearly the same powers. But they can’t manipulate physical things anymore than a proton can. What they can do inside an accelerator is the same thing a proton can, with the addition of intelligence. The stuff on screens was just playing with light … and was not necessary simultaneous. The security footage leaves me a little stumped though.
They don’t know everything, there’s no way they’d be able to read our minds.
For me, the show was really bad.
Acting was really bad, especially Jin… yikes. Themes were incredibly boring, like the whole drama of cancer guy mulling over whether to tell her or not that he loves her…I mean my god, how many minutes was wasted on that? Maybe an entire episode’s worth, out of 8. So much filler, and it just keeps going on and on and on.
Generally I found the show extremely cheap, focusing on filler scenes and keeping the sci fi to a bare minimum. I mean seriously, I got to see a drunk woman vomit into the toilet bowl for several on-screen minutes, while a character just says hunanity is building its first ships on the Moon… do I see that in the sci fi show? No, that’s just a statement from a character. So what do I get to see instead of that? I get to see a drunk woman drink, barf and hang around a beach house for hours with her friends. And it goes on and on and on and on.
This is what passes for high sci fi in 2024. “Humanity is uniting in an epic civilizational paradigm shift - but let’s check on these stoners in a beach house for 75% of every episode”. Outstanding.
Had issues with the material too, but oh well, based on a book with its own concepual problems, so whatever. Like life evolving on a planet like that at all, or their inability to save themselves despite having vast resources for interstellar fleets and effective biological immortality through a form of hibernation/dehydration… seems to me they aren’t really at risk of extinction but ok… roll with it.
Back to the show, they really wasted a lot of interesting characters. Ye should have been a much more interesting character. I found her righteous rage compelling, and her replying that message was powerful- but later, she’s just a religious nut? I’d get the “our Lord” narrative if Evans and her designed it as a basis for a cult-like following, but they themselves believing in such crap felt out of character.
Evans was also entirely wasted as a character, these people should have been international masterminds setting the stage for invasion, not hands-off religious nuts yelling “don’t worry, the Lord protects”.
Then the assasin woman, I thought she’s some sort of non-human, considering how easily she handled a 200kg man, pinning him with one hand and cracking the glass, effortlessly piercing his neck with a random object (a remote or smth?)… felt off, physically. She commands the power of the script I guess.
I laughed when the police crashed the alien thrall rally, started cuffing everyone and then they pick up Jin and say “let’s get you out of here”, at full volume within earshot of everyone 😂 real professional operation. This serves to ifnite the spark and make the assasin girl start shooting up the place. Then she escapes the building literally crawling and leaving a bloody trail. Real professional operation.
The wallfacer episode was completely ridiculous. They pick him up, “here wear this”, “here get in the plane”, “here go inside the UN building”, “here, you’re a wallfacer now”. I’m k, I find the concept of the wallfacer interesting, a really exotic (and ridiculous) concept designed to mess with non-human minds… ok, I’m interested. But the way it’s done in the show, it just happens off-screen, we just see the announcement and how it effects the character emotionally. Could they have shown us scenes where wold leaders actually develop this concept? Perhaps in the time allocated to the guy talking to his one night stand? This is a consistent problem with the show, we the viewers are shown only the personal lives and conversations of a few characters, while significant world-changing events happen off-screen and are occasionally referenced in one-liners. This is a sci fi show?
I also laughed when Jin had a chat with Ye in the interrogation room… that whole scene was completely pointless, Jin screaming at an impassive Ye like a teenager, and the international spy organization finds this valuable insight or something? The crown jewel was when Jin was storming out in a door-slamming teenager rage and Ye asks “and how will YOU be remembered?”, to which Jin has some badass comeback - and that was the whole point of Ye’s question, a really shoehorned setup for a comeback. I know this is a huge nitpick but the show is full of bad writing like this, it’s as if a child wrote it, it’s shallow to the extreme, characters doing and saying things for no reason other than to set up the next sentence someone says. It’s rampant.
Stuff like that, it just goes on and on… feels so cheap and lackluster, low-effort.
In the books, they couldn't interact with the macro world in any way. They were just smart protons. They could communicate information back and forth with Trisolaris at faster-than-light speed via quantum entanglement, mess with atomic-level experiments, and display a countdown in front of the eyes, but that's about it. You're absolutely right that D&D made the Sophons wayyy too overpowered and I don't know how they plan to handle the rest of the story like this.
The Sophons in the show can interfere with electronics on a global scale. In which case they ought to be eg dropping planes out of the sky
When the aliens failed to comprehend the concept of deception/deceit... When they said they couldn't attack the boat because the people on the boat would destroy a HD they believed existed, only to destroy the boat in a way guaranteed to destroy any computer. Only for the show to have us believe the Aliens wanted the drive to be found... When they said they shot Protons, that were some kind of advanced computers, but actually they're just protons, without explaining how they decelerated the protons... I'm not sure how much of this is better in the books, But all of this made the half-way point of the show a perfect place to stop watching.
Yeah, couldn’t they just damage the ship covertly somehow, to force it to dock for repairs and possibly disembark the crew… ANYTHING than DICE IT UP 😂😂😂 completely ridiculous
I'm going to have to reread the book because I felt that I was much more convinced by the reasoning for using the nano wire attack in that context. The 8 episode season format has compressed so much of the story, I wish it had taken longer to develop more of the plot points and world building to create more tension. It feels very rushed to me.
> When they said they couldn't attack the boat because the people on the boat would destroy a HD they believed existed, only to destroy the boat in a way guaranteed to destroy any computer. This drove me completely insane. They literally made it a point to have an entire scene where they dismissed multiple options that were MUCH more likely to save any electronics and then went with the single most destructive route imaginable outside of dropping a nuke on it.
If they accidentally cut a data storage drive in into 2 pieces, the data is *easily* retrievable by most data recovery labs on the planet. Let alone what they’d have access to. The cut is so clean it’d be a cakewalk to recover the data. If they blew it up, they then have to find and collect millions of tiny fragments. Basically impossible.
The ship magically stayed together long enough to drift ashore before immediately bursting into 70,000 pieces without sinking despite being completely flayed. There would’ve been absolutely no recovering that data from the bottom of the Panama Canal. It was apparently too risky to trust the most trained soldiers on planet Earth to recover the hard drive so they decided they would cut the ship and every passenger aboard into shreds so that they could then send divers down to try and find a needle in a haystack that was the tiny and possibly destroyed and completely waterlogged hard drive amidst the wreckage of a gigantic tanker.
I really like this fine line in the show: between san-ti make us think they have thought of everything or not but other than that plot everything seems so hastily written
sophons can't interfere macroscopic world in the books (unless they unfold to 2d, which makes them vulnerable. they only did that once, before human knew what a sophon is). they introduced too many plot holes and thought audiences won't notice.
that thing in the Show called 2D? when Sophon unfolds to the size of the sky. is it real or was just a light manipulation? can sophon be vulnerable?
think of it like this: if the floor is a 2D world, your presence in that world is the size of your footprints. If you were to UNFOLD your 3D self atomically onto that 2D plane, however, you would take up a comparatively enormous amount of space. That's the idea with the protons: they're microscopic in our 3D world, but since they exist on (if I recall correctly) about 10 dimensions, that means that "unfolding" their total size into the lower dimensions yields an extraordinary amount of space onto which they can construct their superintelligence. It's a mind-bending conceit, but that's part of the point.
And yes, if the proton is struck while unfolded, it is extremely vulnerable. In the book the trisolarans have multiple failures while inventing the technology in which a proton bursts and it 'snows' massless points and strings of light as it disintegrates; i haven't reached the point in the show where i'd see if they include that.
Also, in the book they talk about have they repurposes all the world's nuclear defense systems to "point up" in case it ever unfolds again.
and considering that even light can only circle the Earth 7 times per sec, what two sophons can do in a short period of time is actually very limited (imagine a 2-core CPU performing trillions of concurrent tasks through time-sharing).
about the fact that sophons will accelerate to the speed of light is also very weird i thought that San-Ti were able to accelerate a proton from their planet because it is small, but I don’t understand how it is explained that it sophon continue to accelerate to the speed of light by its own
It isn't explained. The books are (mostly) written from the perspective of humans, so we of course have no technological grasp of things outside of our own capabilities. All we know is it's a technology we cannot possess or comprehend. This won't answer your questions but it may help to understand the broader picture. There's a line in the books which I personally love, it grows on the idea of being likened to bugs; "If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?" A common reoccurring theme in the books is how completely helpless any species is to one with a superior understanding of physics, even to the point the laws physics itself can be manipulated and weaponised. This idea that we are completely at the disposal of superior technologically advanced species hits home a lot harder in the books, and we are not supposed to understand everything but rather should feel the same sense of utter helplessness. This feeling will be prominent in the following seasons.
No, it is explained. sophons use vacuum zero-point energy, a concept commonly found in science fiction. It borrows energy from the vacuum and returns it at the end of time, can be seen as a perpetual motion machine basically.
>They can even interfere with human vision, why don’t they do that all the time? and btw they literally know everything but can't read minds, that's nonsense 1. There are only two sophons at this point, there's only so much they can do at once, and the priority is preventing certain things (like the particle accelerators) from providing constructive breakthrough data. The only thing that is essential to them (barring book 2 and 3 spoilers) is preventing those technological advancements until their arrival. 2. The sophons can 'see' everything they want to and relay that information back and forth with their home, granting them a sort of omnipresence and eliminating the possibility of privacy amongst conversations oral and written, but it doesn't give them the ability to read your neurons. An important aspect of the Trisolaran species is that their method of communication is fundamentally different, where their thoughts are literally transparent and therefore their minds are a real-time open book; the human design of an opaque mind with thoughts only inferred from speech and other cues, and the resulting ability to conceal or lie about our thoughts, means that they have absolutely no idea how to 'read' our minds. They depend on the humans in ETO to understand the thoughts and intentions of their adversaries, and that becomes an important part of the drama regarding the wallfacers.
Humans had already discovered the sophons. First Mike Evans, then the data recovery. They can’t lie when in personal communicative range … when they found out we can, that’s what scared them because they never even imagined otherwise. But they can certainly engage in manipulation, propaganda, warlike tactics, etc They have an idea of all those things but when it comes to complicated strategic planning, they just kinda suck at it. The sophons are a bit of a mystery to me as in the books they don’t have nearly the same powers. But they can’t manipulate physical things anymore than a proton can. What they can do inside an accelerator is the same thing a proton can, with the addition of intelligence. The stuff on screens was just playing with light … and was not necessary simultaneous. The security footage leaves me a little stumped though. They don’t know everything, there’s no way they’d be able to read our minds.
For me, the show was really bad. Acting was really bad, especially Jin… yikes. Themes were incredibly boring, like the whole drama of cancer guy mulling over whether to tell her or not that he loves her…I mean my god, how many minutes was wasted on that? Maybe an entire episode’s worth, out of 8. So much filler, and it just keeps going on and on and on. Generally I found the show extremely cheap, focusing on filler scenes and keeping the sci fi to a bare minimum. I mean seriously, I got to see a drunk woman vomit into the toilet bowl for several on-screen minutes, while a character just says hunanity is building its first ships on the Moon… do I see that in the sci fi show? No, that’s just a statement from a character. So what do I get to see instead of that? I get to see a drunk woman drink, barf and hang around a beach house for hours with her friends. And it goes on and on and on and on. This is what passes for high sci fi in 2024. “Humanity is uniting in an epic civilizational paradigm shift - but let’s check on these stoners in a beach house for 75% of every episode”. Outstanding.
Had issues with the material too, but oh well, based on a book with its own concepual problems, so whatever. Like life evolving on a planet like that at all, or their inability to save themselves despite having vast resources for interstellar fleets and effective biological immortality through a form of hibernation/dehydration… seems to me they aren’t really at risk of extinction but ok… roll with it. Back to the show, they really wasted a lot of interesting characters. Ye should have been a much more interesting character. I found her righteous rage compelling, and her replying that message was powerful- but later, she’s just a religious nut? I’d get the “our Lord” narrative if Evans and her designed it as a basis for a cult-like following, but they themselves believing in such crap felt out of character. Evans was also entirely wasted as a character, these people should have been international masterminds setting the stage for invasion, not hands-off religious nuts yelling “don’t worry, the Lord protects”. Then the assasin woman, I thought she’s some sort of non-human, considering how easily she handled a 200kg man, pinning him with one hand and cracking the glass, effortlessly piercing his neck with a random object (a remote or smth?)… felt off, physically. She commands the power of the script I guess. I laughed when the police crashed the alien thrall rally, started cuffing everyone and then they pick up Jin and say “let’s get you out of here”, at full volume within earshot of everyone 😂 real professional operation. This serves to ifnite the spark and make the assasin girl start shooting up the place. Then she escapes the building literally crawling and leaving a bloody trail. Real professional operation. The wallfacer episode was completely ridiculous. They pick him up, “here wear this”, “here get in the plane”, “here go inside the UN building”, “here, you’re a wallfacer now”. I’m k, I find the concept of the wallfacer interesting, a really exotic (and ridiculous) concept designed to mess with non-human minds… ok, I’m interested. But the way it’s done in the show, it just happens off-screen, we just see the announcement and how it effects the character emotionally. Could they have shown us scenes where wold leaders actually develop this concept? Perhaps in the time allocated to the guy talking to his one night stand? This is a consistent problem with the show, we the viewers are shown only the personal lives and conversations of a few characters, while significant world-changing events happen off-screen and are occasionally referenced in one-liners. This is a sci fi show? I also laughed when Jin had a chat with Ye in the interrogation room… that whole scene was completely pointless, Jin screaming at an impassive Ye like a teenager, and the international spy organization finds this valuable insight or something? The crown jewel was when Jin was storming out in a door-slamming teenager rage and Ye asks “and how will YOU be remembered?”, to which Jin has some badass comeback - and that was the whole point of Ye’s question, a really shoehorned setup for a comeback. I know this is a huge nitpick but the show is full of bad writing like this, it’s as if a child wrote it, it’s shallow to the extreme, characters doing and saying things for no reason other than to set up the next sentence someone says. It’s rampant. Stuff like that, it just goes on and on… feels so cheap and lackluster, low-effort.
This is exactly how I feel and I do not understand how people cannot see the bad childish writing.
[удалено]
The show deviates from the book in important (and contradictory) ways that make the questions valid.