Three-Body Episode 30 (Ending) Recap
> Three-Body Recap
A pacifist monitor in the Trisolaran world intercepted Earth's message, warning the human sender not to reply to prevent Earth's location from being locked by Trisolaris. Meanwhile, the Trisolaran leadership, having established a policy where Earthlings could continue to live as before but with procreation permanently forbidden after their fleet occupied the solar system, ordered the fleet to launch. This launch occurred 20,000 Trisolaran hours (approximately 4. 5 million Earth hours) before Earth's message was widely received by their civilization.
They understood that if they waited, Earth civilization's technology would far surpass their own, rendering their fleet vulnerable. Furthermore, Trisolaris's location had already been exposed, risking their extinction by Earthlings before their sun consumed their planet. To prevent this, they decided the only way to disarm Earth was to kill its science. It became clear from the game that Trisolaris had never imparted any technology more advanced than Earth's.
Their communication method, electromagnetic waves, was similar to Earth's, though their science was far superior. Earth's researchers were baffled why they had received no prior messages from Trisolaris, despite the Trisolarans' desperate search for new homes. It was revealed that the three suns of Centaurus were shrouded by a colossal plasmatic atmosphere, creating a high threshold for electromagnetic waves and making direct solar transmission impossible.
All the details witnessed in the Trisolaran game were, at that point, based on the Earth-Trisolaran Organization members' imagination, requiring careful verification. Ding Yi speculated that Trisolarans lacked emotions like fear, sorrow, happiness, and beauty appreciation, as these elements would destabilize their spiritual world. He deduced that only civilizations rooted in calmness and numbness could survive the relentless cycles of destruction their world endured.
This made the enemy as cold and ruthless as steel, capable of devising plans such as forbidding human procreation and, more critically, locking down humanity's scientific progress. To achieve this, the Trisolarans formulated three plans. The first, code-named "Coloring," aimed to generate public aversion and fear towards science by highlighting its negative side effects, a strategy implemented on Earth by Pan Han.
The second plan, "Miracle," involved demonstrating supernatural phenomena to make unscientific thinking dominate, thus collapsing Earth's entire scientific framework. However, these two plans could only interfere with Earth's scientific development. The decisive action to utterly suffocate Earth's science involved preventing humanity from exploring the deep structure of matter, thereby halting fundamental science and any major technological breakthroughs.
This ambitious undertaking, known as Project Sophon, required the cancellation of their second space fleet construction to divert all resources to building a massive particle accelerator. Within the game, Wang Miao and Shi Qiang observed the Sophon's construction. The Trisolaran scientists, capable of manipulating nine of eleven micro-scale dimensions, proceeded with the two-dimensional unfolding of a proton.
Despite an initial failed attempt that resulted in the destruction of an entire micro-universe within the proton—an event the Trisolaran leader viewed as commonplace in the universe's history of scientific progress—the unfolding succeeded, creating a vast, geometrically flat mirror that enveloped their entire planet. This "gargantuan membrane" reflected all sunlight back into space, plunging Trisolaris into its darkest night and forcing its inhabitants to dehydrate and be stored to endure the plummeting temperatures.
On this colossal two-dimensional proton surface, spaceships began etching integrated circuits, transforming it into Sophon, a superintelligent computer. Four Sophons were constructed. Sophons One and Two were launched towards Earth, traveling as high-energy particles at near light speed. Upon arrival, their primary mission was to locate and infiltrate high-energy particle accelerators used for physics research, sabotaging experiments by replacing target particles and yielding incorrect and chaotic results.
This was the reason for the lack of breakthroughs in fundamental physics on Earth in recent years, including Yang Dong's experiments failing to produce any reasonable results. Humanity's science was completely locked down, destined to remain in a primitive state. Sophons also possessed the terrifying ability to project information directly onto films or even human retinas, causing the cosmic background radiation in their eyes to flicker.
Sophons Three and Four remained on Trisolaris, receiving real-time information from their counterparts on Earth, thus enabling constant, live monitoring of humanity. The Trisolarans, who feared Earth's humanistic ideas as a dangerous, potentially destructive force to their own civilization, strictly controlled the flow of information from Earth to their populace, especially cultural content. This starkly revealed that while humans feared them, the Trisolarans were equally, if not more, afraid of humanity.
During a meeting, General Chang Weisi warned his comrades that their every action was likely being monitored by Sophons, meaning no secrets could exist anymore. Suddenly, the words "You are bugs" appeared floating in the air, a persistent and unnerving presence to all. Even after reviewing all twenty-eight gigabytes of data retrieved from the "Judgment Day" vessel, Ye Wenjie remained calm, only requesting to revisit the Red Coast Base.
The reality of Trisolaran technology, particularly the Sophons' ability to unfold and re-contract dimensions, was incomprehensible to human science, which could not reverse the low-dimensional unfolding of atoms. Wang Miao and Ding Yi, frustrated by their inability to advance science due to the Sophons' interference, drank heavily. Ding Yi lamented that while an ancient kingdom might invent sharper blades or better crossbows, they could never build satellites or missiles without understanding matter's deep structure, a pursuit now impossible for humanity.
Shi Qiang, disgusted by their despair, pulled them up, declaring that they were acting like "cowards" and dragging them to a place that was "lively." Ye Wenjie, sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, returned to the Red Coast Base under escort. Standing atop the mountain, she observed the sunset, her final judgment on humanity. Shi Qiang took Wang Miao and Ding Yi to a field plagued by locusts.
He challenged them to consider which technological gap was greater: between humans and Trisolarans, or between humans and these insects. He pointed out humanity's relentless, ages-long war against bugs, using every means from poisons and aerial sprays to genetic modification and fire, yet the bugs had never been truly eradicated. They still thrived, their numbers undiminished. He concluded that the Trisolarans, who saw humans as mere bugs, had forgotten a crucial fact: bugs have never truly been defeated.
