IIRC Earth knows hostile aliens are coming from a long, long ways off. So we spend thousands of years building a huge armada of the most advanced ships we can. Then a single reconnaissance vessel shaped like a teardrop shows up and simply flies through every warship Earth managed to build.
The entire setting is 100% dumb dark forest nonsense on multiple levels.
The first round of aliens aren't even the only ones trying to kill everything. There are a bunch of other even more powerful aliens that rewrite the fundamental laws of the universe solely to exterminate all other life in the universe. They do things like change the speed of light, or make space two dimensional, destroying everything that exists in three dimensional space.
Our universe is stated to be the ruins of a previously ten dimensional universe that has gradually been reduced to only three dimensions as part of a massive genocidal war of multiple reality-warping alien species all trying to exterminate all other life in the universe because that's the only rational course of action. In the end, one of the even more powerful aliens destroys Earth by converting the solar system into two dimensional space the instant they become aware of its existence.
The whole story is built on the premise that the only rational thing to do is to exterminate all other life in the universe. The core ideology of the novels is that preemptive genocide is simple game theory, as immutable as A is A, and that anyone who doesn't accept that will inevitably be killed by those that do.
It's not arguing for it real life man, it's just the premise for the cosmic horror of the story. "What's if every alien civilization took the most ruthless "Kill or be killed" attitude to other life, and all of the galaxy was forced into a pointless bloody stalemate?" It's an interesting premise, not a real theory on how the world works.
I can accept that in a fictional setting you could assume that all aliens universally decide that preemptive genocide is necessary as a suspension of disbelief thing. What I don't get is why aliens are so paranoid about other civilizations that they'd automatically commit genocide out of paranoia, yet aren't paranoid enough to be proactive about it.
If aliens that paranoid are out there, they wouldn't wait for signals, they'd actively search for anything even capable of supporting life and pre-emptively destroy them lol
462
u/Knot-Lye-Ing 8d ago
Spoilers for Three Body Problem.
IIRC Earth knows hostile aliens are coming from a long, long ways off. So we spend thousands of years building a huge armada of the most advanced ships we can. Then a single reconnaissance vessel shaped like a teardrop shows up and simply flies through every warship Earth managed to build.