"The Dark Forest"

[fiefoe]

Never quite found a good opportunity to read this in Chinese, and finally did the audiobook in six days. Despite many grumbles about Liu Cixin's portrayal of an ideal female love interest, I still have to admit that this is a worthy follow-up to his groud-breaking 《三体》.

• “Romance of the Three Kingdoms4. You won’t understand that.”
  I understand a small part, like how an ordinary person who has a hard time understanding a mathematics monograph can make out some of it through enormous mental effort, and by giving full play to the imagination.
  “Indeed, that book lays out the highest levels of human schemes and strategy.”
• “Academics didn’t use to study aliens. They sifted through piles of old paper and become celebrities that way. But later the public got tired of the cultural necrophilia of that old crew, and that’s when I came along.”
• You ever read a book by Liang Xiaosheng called Floating City?”... “Right. I read it when I was a kid. Shanghai’s about to fall into the ocean, and a group of people go house to house seizing life preservers and then destroying them en masse, for the sole purpose of making sure that no one would live if everyone couldn’t.
• He was especially pleased with his control over the pace this time. He had known her for just one week, and the breakup proceeded smoothly, as elegantly as a rocket discarding its booster.
• On the day I can no longer read you or figure you out, but you can easily understand me, that’s when you’ll finally have grown up.” And then I grew up like you said, and you could no longer so easily understand your son. I know you must have felt at least some sorrow at that. But your son is indeed becoming the kind of person you’d hoped for, someone not particularly likeable, but capable of succeeding in the complicated and dangerous realm of the navy.
• She had an elegant style, and a mature lucidity that her peers lacked. But this style was not complemented by the novels’ content. Reading them was like looking at dewdrops on the undergrowth: pure and transparent, but distinguished from each other only by the way the light reflected and refracted through them and how they rolled about on the leaves, fusing together where they met and separating when they fell, until they evaporated entirely within the space of a few minutes after sunrise. Every time he read one of her books, beneath the graceful style he was left with one question: What do these people live on if they spend twenty-four hours a day in love?
• He imagined every one of her favorite foods, the color and style of every item of clothing in her dresser, the decorations on her mobile phone, the books she read, the music on her media player, the Web sites she visited, the movies she liked; but never her makeup, because she didn’t need makeup.… Like a creator outside of time, he wove the different stages of her life together and gradually came to discover the endless pleasure of creation.
• Luo Ji sensed that the man was incredibly experienced. So much was hidden behind his decorum, but the gleam in his eyes betrayed the presence of secrets. Luo Ji was fascinated by the man’s gaze, like a devil and an angel, like an atom bomb and an identical-size precious stone.…
• “The Wallfacers are undertaking the most difficult mission in human history. They will truly be on their own, their souls closed off to the world, to the entire universe. Their only communication partner and sole spiritual support will be themselves. Shouldering this great responsibility, they will pass through the long years alone, so let me speak for all humanity and offer them our deepest respect.
• One thing in particular that struck him was the total absence of landscapes, the mark of a mature aesthetic sensibility: hanging landscape paintings in a house situated in the Garden of Eden would be as pointless as pouring a bucket of water into the ocean.
• In space warfare, nuclear bombs may be low-efficiency weapons, since nuclear explosions produce no shock wave in the vacuum of space and only negligible pressure from the light they generate, so they don’t produce the mechanical impact found in explosions in the atmosphere. All their energy is released in the form of radiation and electromagnetic pulses, and, at least for humans, radiation and EM shielding on spacecraft is a fairly mature technology.”
• A twenty-megaton nuclear explosion, for example, has a fireball that can last for over twenty seconds. The superbomb we’re designing is two hundred megatons, and its fireball will burn for several minutes. Think about that. What will it look like?”
  “A small sun.”
  “Correct! Its fusion structure is very like that of a star, and it reproduces stellar evolution over a very abbreviated period. So the mathematical model we need to construct is essentially the model of a star.”
• “Education: She’s got at least a bachelor’s, but less than a doctorate.”
  Luo Ji nodded. “Yes, yes. She’s knowledgeable, but not to the point where it calcifies her. It only makes her more sensitive to life and to the world.”
• Shi Qiang smiled scornfully. “Dr. Luo, how many people have you seen?”
  “Not as many as you, of course, but I know that there’s no perfect person in the world, much less a perfect woman.”
• “A wide range of time, from perhaps ancient Greece through the Second World War. What’s key is the spiritual commonalities I mentioned: duty and honor above all, and, in time of need, to unhesitatingly lay down one’s life. You may have noticed that after the Second World War, this spirit vanished from the military in democratic and authoritarian countries alike.”
  “The army is drawn from society, so it would mean that the past spirit you speak of would need to be restored throughout society.”
  “Our views agree on this point.”
  “But, Mr. Tyler, that is impossible.”
  “Why? We have four hundred years. In the past, human society used exactly that amount of time to evolve from the era of collective heroism to one of individualism, so why can’t we use the same amount of time to evolve back?”
• Looking at her innocently holding the wineglass stirred the most delicate parts of his mind. She drank when invited. She trusted the world and had no wariness about it at all. Yes, everything in the world was lying in wait to hurt her, except here. She needed to be cared for here.
  You’re like the blank space in a traditional painting: pure, but to a mature appreciation, infinitely appealing, he thought as he looked at her.
• “Yes, if it continues to develop. Let its soul and spirit permeate the space force so that your organization will be part of it forever.”
  “And you value that so highly because?” The sarcasm in the old man’s voice grew stronger.
  “Because it’s one of the few armed forces available to humanity that uses lives as a weapon. You know, fundamental science has been frozen by the sophons, and this imposes corresponding limitations on advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. In the Doomsday Battle, space fighters will still be piloted by humans, and that requires an army who possesses that spirit. Ball lightning requires a close-range attack.”
• “Annihilation. That’s the highest respect a civilization can receive. They would only feel threatened by a civilization they truly respect.”
• When an ordinary person spoke with one of them, they would always be thinking, He’s a Wallfacer, his words can’t be trusted, and those suggestions would present a barrier to communication. But when two Wallfacers spoke with each other, the suggestions that existed in both minds cross-multiplied those communication barriers. Such an exchange, in fact, rendered anything either side said meaningless, so that communication itself lost all significance. This was why there had been no private interaction between Wallfacers.
• The three people he was about to kill were innocent, too. In the years before the Trisolar Crisis, they had made what, looking back now, seemed like particularly meager investments, and had crept carefully over the thin ice toward the dawn of the space age. That experience had imprisoned their thinking. They had to be destroyed for the sake of interstellar-capable spacecraft. Their deaths could be viewed as their final contribution to the cause of humanity’s endeavors in space.
• Through their visors he saw everyone in the crowd screaming in terror, and from the shape of their lips he knew that their words included the ones he was expecting:
  “Meteor shower!”
  Everyone in the photo group turned their thrusters to full power and sped back to the station, trailing tails of white mist behind them,
• The French representative left his seat in his excitement. “Which is more tragic for humanity: the loss of the ability and right to think freely, or defeat in this war?” <> “Of course the latter is more tragic!” Hines retorted, standing up. “Because under the first condition, humanity at least has the chance of regaining independent thought!”
  “Not so. In thought control, there must be a controller and a subject. If someone voluntarily places a seal in their own mind, then tell me, where is the control in that?” <> The assembly fell silent again. Feeling that success was near, Hines went on, “I propose that the mental seal be opened up, like a public facility. It would have but one proposition: belief in a victory in the war. Anyone willing to gain that faith through the use of the seal could, totally voluntarily, take advantage of the facility.
• When the spiral flow of ejected matter expands outward from the sun like an unwound mainspring, its thickness eventually passes Mars’s orbit, at which point a magnificent chain reaction begins.
  “First, three terrestrial planets—Venus, Earth, and Mars—pass through the sun’s spiraling atmosphere, losing speed due to the atmospheric friction and turning into three giant meteors that eventually crash into the sun. But well before this happens, the Earth’s atmosphere is stripped away by the intense friction of the solar matter. The oceans evaporate, and the lost atmosphere and evaporated oceans turn the Earth into a giant comet whose tail extends along its orbit to wrap all the way around the sun. The surface of the Earth returns to the fiery magma sea of its birth, where no life can survive.
  “When Venus, Earth, and Mars crash into the sun, it exacerbates the sun’s ejection of solar matter into space.
• What state the sun will be in and how the Solar System will have been transformed after the chain reaction finishes and the four dense terrestrial planets and four gas giants are consumed is unknowable. But one thing is certain: For life and for civilization, this will be a hell even crueler than attack by Trisolaris...
  “This is your strategy: death for both sides. Once everything is prepared, with all of the stellar hydrogen bombs in place on Mercury, you will use it to coerce Trisolaris to surrender and gain the ultimate victory for humanity.
• “But you had one major slipup. Why did the first test have to be carried out on Mercury? There would have been plenty of time to bring the bombs there in a later phase, but maybe you got impatient and wanted to see the outcome of a stellar hydrogen bomb blast there. You saw it: lots of rock matter blasted to escape velocity, perhaps even exceeding your expectations. You were satisfied. But this provided the final confirmation of my hypothesis.
• But it was grand, and even beautiful. If the chain reaction triggered by Mercury’s fall actually took place, then it would be the most magnificent movement of the entire symphony of the Solar System … although, unfortunately, humanity would only be able to enjoy the first section. Mr. Rey Diaz, you are a Wallfacer with the makings of a god. It is my honor to become your Wallbreaker.”
• The next discovery was an incredible shock to Luo Ji, although the thing itself was still quite plain. The nurse pointed to the cup of milk and told him that it had been put into a heating cup especially for hibernators, because the people of this era generally did not drink hot liquids.
• The woman had her umbrella—or, rather, her bicycle—positioned on her back like a backpack, and then it stood up in back of her and opened overhead to form two coaxial propellers that started up silently, turning in opposition to offset rotational torque. Then she lifted slowly up into the air and hopped over the railing beside her into the abyss that had so dazzled him.
• The speaker was Keiko Yamasuki. She said, “Mr. Chair, I have something to say.”
  The chair said, “Dr. Yamasuki, you are not a Wallfacer. You are allowed to attend today’s meeting due to your special status, but you do not have the right to speak.”
• Keiko Yamasuki smiled derisively, revealing a seldom-seen expression that conjured up for the assembly an ancient picture of moonlight reflecting off the scales of a snake in the grass.
  “You’re being naïve,” she said.
• I used the mental seal to imprint this proposition on myself: Everything about my Wallfacer plan is entirely correct.”
  The assembly exchanged amazed glances, and Yamasuki even turned to her husband with the same expression.
  Hines flashed her a small smile and nodded. “Yes, dear, if you’ll permit me to call you that. Only by doing that could I obtain the spiritual strength necessary to execute the plan. Yes, right now I believe all I’ve done is correct. I absolutely believe it, regardless of what reality says. I used the mental seal to turn myself into my own god, and God can’t repent.”
• But environmental deterioration was also a major factor. The environmental laws were there, but in those pessimistic times, the general attitude was, ‘What the hell is environmental protection for? Even if Earth turns into a garden, isn’t it all going to the Trisolarans anyway?’ Eventually, environmental protection was seen as no less treasonous to humanity than the ETO.
• “When I entered hibernation, desertification was just starting,” another neighbor said. “It’s not what you imagine, like the desert advancing from the Great Wall. No! It was patchwork erosion. Perfectly fine plots of land in the interior began turning to desert simultaneously, and it spread from those points, like how a damp cloth dries in the sun.”
• you could pull up a complete command console, including a captain’s interface, which effectively made the entire ship, even the passageways and bathrooms, a bridge, command module, captain’s room, and operations room! To Zhang Beihai, it felt like the evolution from a client-server model to a browser-server model in late-twentieth-century computer networks.
• Oil film was a substance found in Neptune’s rings. At high temperatures, it turned into a rapidly diffusing gas that then condensed into nanoparticles in space, forming space dust. It was so called because when it evaporated, it became highly diffusive, so a small quantity of the substance could form a large patch of dust, like a tiny droplet of oil spreading into an oil film of molecular thickness across a large area of water. Dust formed from this oil film had another property: Unlike other types of space dust, “oil-film dust” was not easily dispersed by the solar wind.
  It was the discovery of oil film that made the Fog Umbrella Project possible. The plan was to use nuclear blasts in space to evaporate and spread the oil-film substance into a cloud of oil-film dust between the sun and Earth as a means of decreasing the sun’s radiation on Earth and alleviating global warming.
• Powerful radiation from the fusion engines of Natural Selection and the pursuing force had caused atmospheric ionization and lightning. The fleeting lightning strikes illuminated the surrounding atmosphere, visible at this distance as halos in constantly changing locations, turning the surface of Jupiter into a pond spattered with fluorescent rain.
• The fleet accelerated with no disruption to its formation, its huge wall blocking out the sun, and then made a stately advance into space with the force of a thundercloud, declaring to the universe the dignity and invincibility of the human race. The human spirit that had been repressed since the first appearance of the Trisolaran Fleet two centuries ago had finally found total liberation. At this moment, all the stars in the galaxy silently held back their light, and Human and God stepped out proudly into the universe as one.
  The people wept and cheered, and many of them were moved to loud wails. Never before in history had there been such a moment, in which every single person felt fortunate and proud to be a member of the human race.
• When the world saw the probe for the first time, everyone was captivated by its magnificent exterior. The mercury droplet was just so beautiful, so simple in shape yet masterfully styled, with each point on its surface in exactly the right place. It was imbued with a graceful dynamism, as if at every moment it was dripping endlessly in the cosmic night. It inspired the feeling that even if human artists tried out every possible smooth closed shape, they wouldn’t come up with this one. It transcended every possibility. Not even in Plato’s Republic was there such a perfect shape: straighter than the straightest line, more circular than a perfect circle, a mirrored dolphin leaping out of the sea of dreams, a crystallization of all the love in the universe.… Beauty is always paired with good, so if there really existed a demarcation between good and evil in the universe, this object would fall on the good side.
• Now, humanity was facing a far more arrogant display of power.
  “Can an absolutely smooth surface really exist?” Xizi gasped.
  “Yes,” Ding Yi said. “The surface of a neutron star is nearly absolutely smooth.”
• “Who knows? Maybe it really is just a messenger. But it’s here to give humanity a different message,” Ding Yi said, turning his gaze away from the droplet.
  “What?”
  “If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”
• In the roughly two seconds it took to cover that distance, the computer actually dropped its alert from level two back to level three, concluding that the fragment wasn’t actually a physical object due to the fact that its motion was impossible under aerospace mechanics. At twice the third cosmic velocity, executing a sharp turn without a drop in speed was like slamming into an iron wall. If it was a vessel containing a metal block, the change in direction would have exerted such force as to flatten that metal block into a thin film. So the fragment had to be an illusion.
• The region eventually became still, and the metallic cloud lost its luster in the coldness of the cosmos and disappeared into darkness. Over the years, under the pull of the sun’s gravity, the cloud stopped its expansion and began to lengthen, ultimately forming a long strip that turned into an extremely thin metallic belt around the sun, as if a million restless souls were floating endlessly in the cold outer reaches of the Solar System.
• He set the missiles’ warheads to explode at a distance of fifty kilometers from each target. This would avoid causing the targets any internal damage, but an even greater distance would still be within the fatal range for any life aboard the targets. “The birth of a new civilization is the formation of a new morality.”
• Before it was attacked, it had turned its interior into a vacuum and put all personnel in space suits. Because infrasonic waves were impossible in a vacuum, no personnel were injured, and the body of the ship suffered only minimal damage from the electromagnetic pulse.
• Blue Space took pieces of the three derelict warships and set them up in a Stonehenge formation, forming a tomb in outer space. There, they held a funeral for all the victims of the Battle of Darkness.
  Wearing space suits, the 1,273 crew members of Blue Space assembled in a floating formation at the center of the tomb. These were the remaining citizens of Starship Earth. Around them, huge pieces of spaceships towered like a ring of mountains, the gashes cut into the wreckage like enormous mountain caves. The bodies of 4,247 victims remained within this debris, which cast its shadows over all of the living as if they were a mountain valley at midnight. The only light was the iciness of the Milky Way where it shone through the gaps between the wreckage.
• “It looks now like the Battle of Darkness has a lot to teach us.”
  “That’s right. The five ships of Starship Earth formed a quasi-cosmic civilization, not a real one, because they consisted of a single species—humans—who were very close to each other. But even so, when they were dealt that dead hand, the chain of suspicion emerged.
• a large number of astronomers and astrophysicists were of the opinion that the explosion of 187J3X1 was a chance occurrence. Being an astronomer, Luo Ji may have discovered certain signs that the star would explode. The theory was full of holes, but more and more people came to believe it, accelerating Luo Ji’s decline in prestige. In the eyes of the public, his image gradually transitioned from messiah to commoner, and then to fraud.
• The signal is sent once every second to maintain the bombs in a non-triggered state. If I die, the system’s maintenance signal will vanish and all of the bombs will detonate, turning the oil film surrounding the bombs into 3,614 interstellar dust clouds ringing the sun. From a distance, the sun’s visible light and other high-frequency bands will appear to flicker through the dust cloud coverage. The position of every bomb has been precisely arranged in solar orbit so that this flickering will generate a signal transmitting three simple images of the sort I sent out two centuries ago: each image an arrangement of thirty points, with one labeled, for composition into a three-dimensional coordinate diagram. But, unlike last time, the position will contain the transmission of Trisolaris relative to its surrounding twenty-nine stars. The sun will be a galactic lighthouse casting that spell, in the process, of course, also exposing the position of the sun and Earth.
• In the end, strategy was where we failed.
  Luo Ji nodded. “Blocking the sun with dust clouds to send an interstellar message wasn’t my invention. Twentieth-century astronomers had already proposed the idea. And you actually had multiple chances to see through me.
• That did remind us of Rey Diaz, but we did not pursue those thoughts. Two centuries ago, Rey Diaz was not a threat to us, nor were the other two Wallfacers. We transferred our contempt for them onto you.
  “Your contempt for them was unfair. Those three Wallfacers were great strategists. They saw clearly the inevitable fact of humanity’s defeat in the Doomsday Battle.”
• Next they’ll ask us to lift the sophon block and teach science and technology across the board.
  “This is important to you as well. The technology of Trisolaris has developed at a constant speed, and two centuries later, you still haven’t sent a faster follow-up fleet. In order to rescue the diverted Trisolaran Fleet, you have to rely on the future of humanity.”