[COLUMN] In 3 Body Problem, Unknowability is a Nightmare - and a Weapon | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This article contains spoilers for the first season of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. However, if you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, you can bookmark it and come back to it when you finish.

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem is an interesting take on the classic alien invasion narrative. Adapted from the first book in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, the show finds humanity under attack by visitors from a distant solar system with three stars, the eponymous mathematical dilemma. These “trisolarans” are planning to take Earth for themselves, and humanity has only a few centuries to prepare for their arrival.

In popular mainstream science-fiction, particular in film and television, there is a tendency to assume that aliens will be mostly human-like in appearance. In popular franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars, they tend to have two arms, two legs and a head. They speak verbally, and clear communication is possible. In some cases, the aliens are so similar to humanity that it’s possible for human beings to play them with minimal make-up or augmentation.

There are reasons why aliens tend to look at least human-adjacent. Part of this is a reflection of the limitations of the form of film and television; the actors playing these aliens tend to have two arms, two legs and a head. Part of it is narrative clarity, in that it is easier for audiences to understand body language from a body that looks vaguely human. Part of it is also that aliens are often metaphors, expressions of ideas or stand-ins for concepts, so they are just a thin layer of abstraction on top of it.

In contrast, 3 Body Problem embraces the idea of the trisolarans as truly and meaningfully alien. They never appear directly on screen. They occasionally communicate through virtual reality, in which their ambassador manifests as Sophon (Sea Shimooka). However, that virtual reality is not standardized. It’s tailored to individual users. Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) is presented with iconography from Chinese history, while Jack Rooney (John Bradley) sees a version of “Merry Old England.”

Fans are already speculating on what these aliens might actually look like, with the consensus being that they are unlikely to appear meaningfully human-like. This approach is carried over from the source material, which also avoids directly describing the trisolarans, although fans like to speculate based on the evidence provided that they might resemble “banana slugs” or even tardigrades. These are not the sorts of aliens that audiences are used to seeing on screen.

Part of this is just fun science-fiction. Why should humanity’s conception of alien biology be so limited? However, it’s also a reflection of one of the show’s central themes. The aliens aren’t just physiologically different from human beings, they are also psychologically different. Even beyond the idea that their consciousness might be wired differently, they developed on a different planet, under different circumstances, and so have developed a different way of looking at the universe.

This is obvious in the way that they communicate to human beings. They scheme with eccentric billionaire Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) to help prepare the planet for colonization, but there is a very fundamental gulf between Evans and the disembodied voice with which he communicates. As he narrates the story of Hansel and Gretel to them, they are confused that the two main characters can have a different emotional reaction to the same event.

“But why is one afraid while the other is not?” the voice asks. “Do individuals experience fear on their own?” Evans explains, “It’s an individual emotion, yes.” The voice cannot conceive of such a concept. “For us, fear is something we experience as one,” it explains. Later during their exchanges, the trisolarans seem confused by the idea of metaphor and deception. To them, “What is known is communicated as soon as communication takes place.” The idea of untruth confounds them.

However, 3 Body Problem suggests that it isn’t just these aliens that are fundamentally unknowable. The series repeatedly circles back to the idea that human beings are all closed circuits, and so are fundamentally unknowable to one another. At one point, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) and Augustina "Auggie" Salazar (Eiza González) argue over the motivations of Will Downing (Alex Sharp), who volunteers to make contact with the alien fleet on its way to Earth.

To save mass, Downing’s brain will have to be separated from his body. He will, in a very real sense, be reduced to the idea of Will Downing. Auggie protests that Wade cannot know her friend. “Who knows what’s going on in that svelte three-pound brain of his?” Wade asks, rhetorically. “Not you,” Auggie responds. “You don’t know him.” Wade agrees with Auggie’s point, “That’s right. Neither do you. Only Will Downing truly knows Will Downing.”

Downing will become a brain in a jar, evoking that old philosophical thought experiment about each individual’s uncertainty about their own reality. Perhaps building off their communications with Evans, the aliens decide to attack humanity’s shared sense of what is real. “The universe will remain a mystery to you forever,” they warn humanity in their first broadcast. “In place of truth, we give you miracles. We wrap your world in illusions. We make you see what we want you to see.”

This difficulty communicating and sharing reality extends beyond alien invasions and even to the most mundane aspects of life. Late in the premiere, Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) contemplates a toy that he recovered from a pack of “Toasty-O-Sters”, a breakfast cereal. However, Durand laments that the name doesn’t give him a sense of what the foodstuff is actually like. “The name should reflect and support what it feels like to eat the cereal,” he opines. The only way he can know is to taste it.

Durand and Downing contemplate their opponents. “We don’t know what they are,” Durand admits. “Maybe we can’t know what they are.” He elaborates on the unknowability of the cosmic order. “Bugs don’t know why terrible things happen to them,” he argues. “They’re bugs.” Maybe the problem isn’t with the information being broadcast, but the brains receiving it. “Higher dimensions exist, but we can’t perceive them because we’re three dimensional creatures,” Jin states at one point.

To a certain extent, this is reflected in the story’s title. The problem with a three-body star system is that it is fundamentally chaotic, that it is volatile and unpredictable. It is impossible to know with any certainty how long a period of stability or instability will last. No matter how advanced the computers used to model such a system, they inevitably fall apart. The show argues that life itself is a similarly unstable and chaotic concept, with human beings as capable of understanding one another as they are of modeling the three-star system.

Of course, these are all big ideas that philosophers have been debating and discussing for centuries. However, it is also a very timely theme. It resonates at a moment when it seems like there is no longer a shared reality and where advances in technology have largely served to demonstrate how irreconcilable people’s perceptions of the world truly are. It makes sense that this idea is bubbling through contemporary pop culture, even in depictions of intimate relationships.

However, there is perhaps a more specific context for this anxiety in 3 Body Problem. The source material is part of a wave of Chinese science-fiction, and this theme of difficulty communicating across a cultural divide might resonate with the sense that nations like China and the United States perceive reality in fundamentally and irreconcilably different ways. They have different ways of understanding the larger world and their place in it, and trouble articulating that to each other.

This isn’t an abstract generalization. In July 2019, Jiayang Fan interviewed author Liu Cixin for The New Yorker. Liu argued a system akin to western democracy could never work in China and Fan would never understand why, even though she had been born in China. “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this,” Liu explained. “The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He argued, “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?”

In 3 Body Problem, this difficulty communicating across boundaries inevitably leads to conflicts. When the trisolarans first discover the concept of deception, and that Evans could speak mistruth to them, they dismiss any possibility of meaningful cooperation. “A liar is someone whose words are false,” they tell Evans. “A liar cannot be trusted. We cannot coexist with liars.” In such circumstances, where intentions cannot be communicated, understood and trusted, war is unavoidable.

Perhaps a more fundamental logic underpins all this: the logic of survival. In the show’s third episode, Ranjit Varma (Nitin Ganatra) relates his experiences in the Kargil War, fought between India and Pakistan. He recalls being trapped on a mountain without oxygen, and so he had to sneak into the enemy camp. “I killed them all,” he recalls. “And I took the oxygen and supplies from their camp back to my men. And we all survived.” For that, he received “the highest military honor in India.”

The younger characters understand this. Just a few scenes later, Downing grapples with a terminal diagnosis. “It turns out that the cancer’s not inherently evil, right?” he muses, high on painkillers. “It’s actually just looking for a place to live – we all are, I suppose – with its children.” This is perhaps the closest that any character comes to understanding and empathizing with the trisolarans, who want the same thing. It’s a very Hobbesian view of the universe as a “war of all against all.”

In these terms, unknowability is not a tragedy or a horror. It is a tactical advantage. Realizing that these aliens have tapped into all of their electronics and communications technology, humanity decides to weaponize the black box of the human brain. They employ several “wallfacers”, individuals tasked with mounting a defense of the planet without ever offering explanations or justifications. The hope is that humanity can be as unknowable to the trisolarans as those extraterrestrials are to them.

Once again, this is an idea that feels somewhat tied to the source material’s cultural origins. For years, military strategists like Commander Mark Metcalf have argued that deception is “the Chinese Way of War.” While such a framing can be reductive and even exoticize an opponent, it is worth acknowledging cultural differences. 3 Body Problem imagines humanity waging an asymmetrical war in which deception and unknowability are vital weapons that may afford humanity a fighting chance.

3 Body Problem offers a fascinating – if somewhat bleak – view of the nature of human existence. The show doesn’t just argue that individual experiences are fundamentally unique and cannot be clearly communicated between people, but that this might be the key to humanity’s survival.