3 Body Problem: a deep dive into the Netflix show
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Hello and welcome to the Physics World Stories podcast. I'm Andrew Glester and in this episode we're going to be exploring the science behind the Netflix series Three-Body Problem, the

The American science fiction television series is created by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Wu and it is based on the Hugo Award winning Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Xixing. If you haven't seen the series there will be some minor spoilers. I do recommend watching the series so if you want to go away and watch maybe you only need to watch the first...

two or three episodes before you can come back to listen to this. Later in the podcast, we'll hear how scientists in today's world are considering how we might communicate with aliens. And we'll hear much more from this man, Matthew Kenzie, the science advisor for the Netflix series The Three-Body Problem Takes Its Name From Something...

from the world of physics. In the same way that in our solar system, we sort of have the sun and Jupiter as our two-body system, and then the Earth is a third body, but it doesn't really exert any influence on the sun or Jupiter because it's too small.

It's not, not massive enough. Uh, and so it's then just a sort of a little particle traveling through the gravitational field of the other two bodies. And so I think that's the parallel being drawn in, in the three body problem is there are, there are three suns, three stars in this system. And the planet is then just a little point, uh, that wanders through the gravitational field. Um, but because there are three bodies, that system is not stable. It's in a chaotic dynamic orbit. Um,

So, I mean, if we talk about what the three-body problem is generally, you know, it refers to any system in which you have three objects, three bodies, which are all exerting a significant gravitational force on each other.

Now, if you have two bodies, they have some center of mass point. So they have some minimum, some stable position because they're then just orbiting around their center of mass. In the three body state, you don't have that same stability. And so you can write down the forces on all of these bodies, but then you can't actually solve their equations of motion.

And what you want to do as a physicist is write down basically the equation of motion for things. It tells you that where they will be after a given amount of time. So you can sort of simulate that in the three body problem. You can write these things down, but you generally don't know where they will be at some future time because their orbits are chaotic and hard to predict.

So, you know, the analogy is like the weather. That's a many body system of these kind of different clouds and structures kind of that exerting influence on each other. But trying to predict their behavior is

impossible on a sort of particle level or individual body level. Yeah, so that's what the three-body problem refers to. And that means that this system, you know, is in a kind of chaotic orbit. And I guess if you run that forever, eventually it will end with one of the bodies being ejected or two of those bodies colliding. And if you live on a planet which is in that system, that's obviously not very...

not very good. And I guess if you're an advanced enough civilisation, you would have to figure out a way of getting off that planet. Jennifer Ouellette is a science writer and a staff writer at Ars Technica in the US. Several years ago now, she wrote a review of the books of The Three-Body Problem for Physics World, and has now watched the series on

on Netflix? The guys who did Game of Thrones, David Benioff and David Weiss, you know, were adapting it. And so I know people got very upset at the finale the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones and, you know, there's some legit criticisms there. But what the Davids are good at is taking a really sprawling, complex novel with multi-layers and adapting it. And especially those big, powerful, you know, showcase scenes. They're wonderful at bringing those to life. And I thought all of that was very, very evident in this film.

I thought it was generally a very, very good adaptation. It's a different medium, so you're not going to get the same depth you're going to get in a novel, and I don't expect that. But I thought, as terms of just sheer entertainment goes, I thought the show was fantastic. It was really, really well done. What was it that you liked about the book? You know, it was such an unusual... First of all, I mean, most of us, you know, Westerners...

What was unusual about the book is that it was purely Chinese and it's just like Chinese culture, past and present. It was there was a history element back into, you know, that we don't know a lot about in terms of most Americans don't know specifically or even Brits know a lot about Chinese history, particularly during that era where you had those struggle sessions. And, you know, Einstein was considered, you know,

evil and off limits and it was blasphemous. We don't know much about that. We don't know much about modern China. So to have this wonderful, sprawling, epic scope novel set entirely in China, and it wasn't even translated until like seven years later,

And it became this global sensation. And that's very unusual. And so I think the Chinese were rightly very proud. But what made it work was the characters and the people. You had a wonderful murder mystery. And it was narratively constructed in a way that there were lots of little flashbacks and things. So it slowly unfolded what was going on. It had...

wonderful scientific characters that I thought were really well drawn and were believable. They seemed like the scientists that you and I would know and interact with. And that's not always the case. A lot of times fictional scientists are fictional scientists.

So, I mean, it had so much going for it in terms of character development, narrative structure. Any kind of mystery element is wonderful. And then this crazy twist at the very end of what was actually going on, that, you know, this was an alien invasion and that this young woman who had grown up during the Cultural Revolution and become embittered from all the trauma actually invited them to take over Earth.

You know, that's just incredible. There's a different set of characters in the TV series, right? Did they work for you as well? Yeah, I know there's some criticism, I think, for that they made a conscious choice to expand the scope beyond China for the novel. And I think some Chinese people were angry about that. And I get it. I get why...

This is, you know, this novel is such an unusual source of pride and to have it be adapted and have it be suddenly westernized. I get it. But also an alien invasion is global in scope. And that was sort of the, the rationale, I think, behind expanding it. And they combined characters, they gender swapped some characters and some I think worked better than others. But in general, I thought they did a pretty good job. I mean, the actors were fantastic. Yeah.

Things that the Davids aren't good at is coming up with their own storyline. They can come up with a broad storyline, but they're not great at developing characters on their own. They're great at broad strokes and they're great at taking complicated material and boiling it down and synthesizing it for television. They're fantastic at that. They're less good at letting a scene unfold, letting characters breathe, getting those like

beats that just don't seem to move the plot forward, but they're there for a reason. They're there to kind of enrich the story. I thought they did a much better job with Three-Body Problem than they did in the latter seasons of Game of Thrones on that. Yeah, it's an interesting one, though, isn't it? Because I'm, you know, I think the series that I would have really loved to see

wouldn't have been very popular, which would be a really hard time. Almost essentially the books turned into the series with much more character development, much more of that side of things. And it's really good television. It's not as good storytelling. And there's moments where the story is the thing that kept me going when I was just feeling a little bit like I was watching

you know, just another piece of television that was being made with that five minutes at the end where everything happens and keeps you going for the next season. But that's a, it's a minor criticism really, because I did really like it, but I just, I would really like it if we could have television series which did show

We've got so much streaming now. Can't we have some real hard sci-fi, really intense conversations, character development of no cliffhangers? I do think that there is some element of that. I mean, by the fifth episode, they have worked through the events in the three body problem novel.

they had time, you know, to develop that a little bit more. The last three episodes are taken from portions that are accepted from the last couple of novels, specifically the third, which jumps around in times a lot. So they're clearly setting up a second season, but I felt that they did have time, you know, if they had wanted to take a little more time. They don't really explain a lot of the science, although they do a great job, I think, summarizing the three body problem for a general audience. And, yeah,

It is, I don't know what it's like if you haven't read the novel. I mean, I had reread the novel before I watched the show. So, I mean, anything, I'm filling in to a certain extent. But the thing I worked, I thought worked best were the big scenes. I thought the VR scenes were really good. And I thought that, oh my God, the scene with the nanofibers cutting through the ship, which, yeah,

Really, it was horrifying in the book and really super horrifying because when it's visualized and you realize just how awful it is. So awful that the woman who designed it ends up using them for water filtration to like assuage in third world countries to assuage her conscience. So things like that I thought worked very, very well. But I agree with you that...

They tend to rush the Davids. They tend to want to like move the story forward all the time and not have those beats. And I think that that's what you're missing. And maybe you and I might want different beats, but you might've wanted more time on the science. You might've wanted more time with, you know, a couple of characters or, or something, but that,

letting it unfold slowly, a slow burn is actually really good. And there are some series out there that do that successfully, but the Davids are not among them. Yeah, yeah. No, completely. I mean, there's certain film directors that I'd like to have seen get... I mean, Denis Villeneuve, I'd like to see making this kind of thing. I think that would be really interesting. He's very good at those beats. That opening scene is so incredibly hard-hitting, right? That is...

just extraordinary and if you don't know the history and then you find out that that sort of thing is real you know that's struggle session yeah probably one of the most real things in the series that is incredibly powerful and I found myself wanting more of that sort of thing it's not quite enough of the China thing for me I think

Right. And that was, again, what I loved most about the book was just how deeply it delved into that era of Chinese history. And you kind of need to understand those things to understand her character. You know, why she does what she does is directly tied to the trauma of watching her father get beaten to death for being a physicist who won't deny Einstein. So, and that's a scary thing and it would be traumatizing. And, you know, again, it's,

It's shortened in the TV, and there's good reasons to do that. It's not a novel, but you could have had a few more beats. You could have spent a little more time there because you have to understand why she did what she did in order to see her as even a remotely sympathetic character. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think in all the science writing that you do, all the explorations that you're doing, do you feel like that's...

That sort of dangerous politicization of science is something that is real today in the world? Well, I live in the US, so yes. Everything is political now. I mean, it's quite distressing and discouraging to see that people put...

It's become – political partisanship has gotten so bad in the U.S. that basically –

Anything that even, you know, you can politicize anything. You can politicize a Tesla truck or car. You can politicize climate change. You can politicize vaccines. You can politicize... So far, they haven't managed to really politicize physics, but it could be coming. You know, they politicized biology and evolution. They politicized genetics, IVF, all these things that should be wonderful advances to human progress. So...

And people's worldviews are just so colored at this point by their politics that it's very distressing.

Thankfully, we're some way away from the beating of scientists on stage as part of a political struggle. But clearly there are some issues still where science and politics collide. Returning to the science of the three-body problem, I wondered what Jennifer Ouellette thought of the concept in the novel and the TV series of sentient protons. Oh, the SOFONs? Yes. I mean, that's, of course, the thing that's purely fictional, but I loved how they took

This idea of extra dimensions from string theory and then designed, you know, what an ingenious concept. It's completely impossible based on our current science, but that's what science fiction is for, to make you dream about what might be possible and...

Oh my God, it was just wonderful to see it. And they did it in the VR game, which was perfect because you could then visualize it beautifully. You know, see it, the computer like spread out in all those dimensions and etched and then boiled back down once it was like sentient into a little proton again. I think that's the most genius aspect, scientific aspect, sci-fi aspect of the novel. And I really thought that they handled it well because that's a very hard thing to convey to an audience who might not be, might not know anything about strength

theory or some of these advanced theoretical physics ideas. Yeah. And is it, does it work for you consistency wise? It works for you as a, as an idea?

It's, it's no, I mean, it's, it's not about that. It's, it works as a good storytelling device is what it is. Um, entanglement is real. Entanglement doesn't quite work the way it does in the series. And that's okay. Um, that's a, there's certain things when, when I used to do, uh, organize, uh, consultations for Hollywood, there's something that all the directors and producers call a buy, right?

You know, there's just like one thing that you're just going to buy into that. And that's just going to be part of the backdrop. And Sophon's is the buy. You're just going to accept that this thing exists and it's capable of doing what it's capable of doing because the plot really does rest on it, you know? So no, it does not make logically consistent sense if you think too much about it, you know? But, and it's not really, they don't spend a ton of time on it. The series, this might be another place where they could have developed that a little bit more rather than just rushing straight to the end as the

you know, the Davids like to do. It makes a certain amount of story sense. It drives the plot forward and it gives, it explains how the aliens can help, can create their hallucinations, how they can mess with our physics experiments and also how they can spy on us and know what we're doing.

It also, the entanglement aspect shows that, you know, because normally a signal would take like years to get back and forth because they're 400 years away. With science being so key to the storytelling in this particular series, I wanted to find out more about what a science advisor does in these big sci-fi series. Here's Matt Kenzie again. I'm an associate professor at the University of Cambridge in physics. I'm a particle physicist.

And I, my team and I basically, we analyze data that comes from the Large Hadron Collider in order to try and unpick some of the secrets of our universe. Have you been part of unpicking any particular secrets?

um well i was in involved in the higgs boson discovery as my phd that was more out of fortune than a particular skill but yeah in the second year of my phd i was sent out to cern for a couple of years and in that time made a discovery that was yes well over 10 years ago now um and so yeah now i work on on sort of matter antimatter asymmetries in heavy heavy flavor decays heavy decays of

of bottom and charm mesons yeah to try and understand this antimatter matter asymmetry problem that we we seem to encounter in the universe but you also are the science advisor for the netflix series three body problem how did that come about that's really not my day job um and um it came about through a serendipitous connection really that my

My father worked in the film industry. He was a director of photography and he was the photographer for Game of Thrones and worked on an early series of Game of Thrones. And so actually during the time of my PhD, it was I think I went to visit him on the set and I met the creators of the show. They sort of indulged me for probably about 15 minutes whilst I was sort of waffling on about the Higgs boson.

And then, yeah, sort of cut forward 12 years or something. I mean, it must be at least that because my dad died in 2012. So it's been a long time since I had any contact with the creators, but they then...

I think were looking for a particle physicist as they were developing this show to ask a couple of questions to and remembered me. And then they reached out and it started like that. And we had a few emails back and forth. And then eventually I was sort of brought on as an advisor for the show. So what does an advisor do for a show like this?

Well, I mean, it was a real variety of things. So when I actually started out, it was really before the scripts had been written. So it was just a few emails back and forth with the creators. And then we, you know, I saw some outlines of the scripts, I gave some comments, I then saw early versions of the scripts. And so it went from sort of

um concept stuff and dialogue stuff um and then as they were shooting the show it was more kind of practical stuff with the art department the props department the the camera department and you know visual effects about how certain things would look so sometimes it could be a visual effect or sometimes it could be something as simple as what uh what what sort of a mug would be in the background or what's on the blackboard in this in this room all kind of

stuff like that. Okay, but do they sort of come to you before and say, okay, we need some equations on this blackboard, what should we put on it? Or do they do something and then ask you if it's correct? No, most of the sort of calculations or science-y bits in it, I...

would have had a hand in writing, I guess, because I saw such early versions that I would, I mean, in the one case, she does this calculation, Jupiter to the earth and Jupiter to the earth via the sun. And so that calculation, I did at some point, and I was quite actually pleased to hear that. I think I did an interview with someone who had actually checked the calculation and it was right.

So, yeah, I was quite pleased that I hadn't made a mistake or at least one that wasn't spotted.

That time. So, yeah, I mean, things like that I would have I would have advised on. And then I do remember, for example, over a period of a month or so, taking various pictures of different people's blackboards in their offices just to send in as kind of, you know, an idea of the sorts of things that are written up in academic offices, which in my case is a lot of jumbled up diagrams and equations and mostly nonsense. Yeah.

And, I mean, presumably they don't need to ask you if a scientist would have Star Wars Lego in the background. I mean, everyone knows that that's the case. Well, exactly. I mean, I think they did think there was going to be some characteristic giveaway, sort of like, you know, tell us what a typical physicist has in their house. Well, I mean, I don't know.

They have some really cool Lego kits of the different LHC experiments. That's cool. You know, they're sort of custom, these sort of custom made things, but you can sort of print the instructions online and order the specific pieces from the, you know, Lego factory or some supplier and build a replica of the Atlas detector and so on. Hey, that's really cool. Yeah, I don't have one of those, unfortunately. No, but I will soon. Now I know about that. I think something that,

the showrunners were asked early on was how plausible the characters are. You know, they're sort of, you know, should they be portrayed as these kind of, you know, how is a genius portrayed in the entertainment and film industry?

you think of beautiful mind or goodwill hunting or something like that. But I think the reality is that most physicists, if they are career physicists like Jin and Solar, for example, they have some kind of ability to communicate because you have to get your research funded somehow and you have to be able to convince other academics of your work and what you're doing. And so you do have an ability, I think, to collaborate in big teams and

also communicate your research outcomes. In those early days, is it anything to do with storytelling? Is it just sort of fact checking? Like, could we get away with this sort of thing? Is that the sort of question? Well, I think that, I mean, the show firstly is, you know, it's based on a book, very, very successful book series. And so, you know, you already have some constraints to go on in particular, the big picture physics stuff. You know, there are some things which are very crucial to the plot line and

And so you can't avoid having these scenarios where you need to think about the science explanation. And also the book does make a very serious attempt to explain lots of the science in it. It tries to, you know, figure out ways that these phenomena can occur. And so you sort of have a basis in that. And yeah, so a lot of the stuff we talked about really early on like that was kind of

trying to find plausible explanations, right? There's a difference between something that's real and plausible and then impossible. And, you know, you can't help straying away from something which is real because of the story. But you try to come up with plausible explanations for various things, even if they're not conveyed necessarily on the screen. But they're discussed in quite a lot of detail underneath it. And I think that's just a real genuine attempt from the showrunners to

you know, get myself and the other advisor was a NASA guy, Bobak Fadowski. And, you know, they really wanted to understand how things would underpin the kind of the universe that's being created in this show. So, I mean, I think one of the really clever things about the show and the book is the fact that this mysterious other world is displayed to you through a virtual reality game. You never actually see it.

you're seeing a representation of it that is put on for the benefit of teaching humankind about this other place. And that gives you some artistic and creative freedom with how you portray things, because you can speed up, slow down time, you can invert gravity, or you can do all sorts of things where gravity is on for some characters and not others.

because it's a game. And so I think that's a really nice thing. You know, that's a really nice creative kind of environment to think about the physics as well. But that scene we're talking about with the gravity being on for some and not others, if you lined up three suns like that, would it start to affect gravity in that way? We're envisaging there is a planet which is somehow involved in a three-star system.

And there is a synergy where the three suns and the planet align all in a single axis. And so for the planet, it feels the stacked gravitational force of three suns. And I think, you know, but this planet is made of something. It's not a perfect sphere of rock. It's probably spinning as are the other three bodies as well. And so I think you would probably have a rip there.

in that situation right but uh certainly you would you would you know rip the planet off with the people but um yes in principle it just depends how big the gravitational force is right and and uh and how close you are to the to the object so that's kind of yeah there's there's artistic license because it's in the video game which is as you say a great bit of storytelling but

Right, but so what you want for the visualisation is that the characters are still and watching this, right? So the actual players of the game observe this happening in the universe in some way. In the video game, all the scientists are played by comedians, right?

So, like, Alan Turing is played by someone from the League of Gentlemen, I think. But you also have to remember it isn't really Alan Turing, right? In the same way that the character Jyn is not really Copernicus. Those are their character names, right? And I guess it's a little kind of...

Easter egg or nod towards the physics community, right? That the people who have actually advanced in the game to level three, I think it is by that point where you kind of work out, you know, it's a three body system and then you have to try and figure out how you can predict its orbits. The people who have got there have decided that,

to call themselves as their characters, Turing, Newton, you know. And of course, Copernicus is also another nice character name because, you know, Copernicus is credited with the discovery that the sun is at the centre of our solar system. I quite like the fact that the sort of comedians were given those roles or several roles in it. I mean, it's a good sort of British cast. The human computer bit is an extraordinary scene to look at. Is that...

it feasible in any way it's one of my favorite scenes i think um and so yeah i mean the the idea is that yes they they figured at least these characters uh turing and and i can't remember who the other one is i think it might be newton they are they are figured out it's a three-body system and now they're trying to simulate it and you can you can do that uh it's actually not you know it's

to a few lines of code, maybe less than 100. The question is how you actually then run that code somehow in this game. They have to then build a computer, but they don't have any electronics in the game, so they try and build it out of human beings. Then it means that each human being just becomes a logic gate in your circuit. And the difficulty then is trying to run an operating system, I think, on that circuit.

circuit. So each human kind of knows what to do. They know if they're a NOT gate, an AND gate or an OR gate, right? And so they either have one input, one output or two inputs and one output. And they're making up the little semi-transistors that are in our modern day computers. And so, yeah, it doesn't have to be particularly

advanced or powerful, I suppose, the computer to run this simulation, depending on how accurately and how quickly, you know, how long you want it to predict for. I think the difficulty is trying to run an operating system on that in which you can run your code and then

You know, there's also this other big dependence in a real circuit, I guess, on the clock frequency. People need to know when they are zeros and when they are ones. You somehow need someone banging out a rhythm to keep them in sync. Otherwise, different bits of your circuit will go out of sync with the others and you'll have these horrible kind of problems. So you need enough people to do it in time. If one of them makes a mistake, I think basically your program crashes.

It's a sort of control alt delete situation, but you would somehow need to know to unravel that because your prediction will be nonsense or your signal will get stuck. But yeah, I think it could be doable if you had enough people doing it in clock. And of course, it's a game again. So the characters who are playing, you know, the real people who are playing these characters are

in the game have convinced this leader to get all of his armies of people together and maybe you know whoever's in control of the game sets the parameters such that you know your human beings do act like a computer the problem is is your simulation is only going to last for some amount of time i mean you know that bit is possible i think making computer running this code

But then you still can't, it still can't work really, because you have to know the exact starting conditions of your three body system to run this simulation. And your simulation is numerical. It's not a perfect solution to this problem. So it will walk over time away from where the real outcome goes. And so, yeah, you have to measure the exact positions of these three suns and their exact velocities.

and then put those as the starting input to your program and then run the simulation. And then in real life, what you were doing, you would try and have a live feedback loop, right, that observed where these bodies were going to then run this back through your simulation again to try and somehow minimize the difference between what you're predicting and what you're observing and then seeing where that goes in the future. You know, so it's like some kind of Hawkeye.

But, you know, that's what you want to run on this computer, right? So you know where your planet's going to be tomorrow in a month and so on. The one other thing that sort of

What confused me slightly was using the sun as an amplifier of the message. Is that feasible? The kind of way that I thought about this, and this is mentioned a bit in the book as well, is the amplifications of signals, right? So, I mean, the sun has layers and it has these convection currents, right, in its different layers. And so you could certainly imagine that for some frequencies of radiation, right,

you know, every time they cross a boundary, basically, where there's a different makeup of the plasma that makes up the sun, you know, there's a transition probability and a reflection probability. They are a wave. And so some of it will reflect off the surface. Some of it will be transmitted. And then if you have another layer behind that of, you know, the right number of wavelengths, if you reflect off that layer, then the two can interfere and they can interfere constructively.

And so whether the actual structure of the sun is symmetric enough and the wavelength of the radiation has to be perfectly tuned somehow, and that might not be then practical for what signals you can produce and so on. But that was kind of the principle of the idea that, you know, just like light traveling through a bubble, I guess you get some kind of interference pattern and that could be constructive. And that's exactly how an amplifier then works.

I mean, it was kind of, I was going to say there was, you know, part of the advising role was a bit of time with the cast whilst they were, and they did this whilst they were going, doing the script read-throughs, which happened through sort of three or four day period. And I was on the set at the time and met some of the cast then and had different conversations with different members of the cast about various different aspects of the show.

the character that plays the young Wenjie in these early scenes, you know, the character that transmits this signal. She was very, very kind of interested in this exact principle and about how this amplification could occur. And I think, you know, I eventually convinced her that, you know, an amplifier, you know, the headphones in your earpiece

ears can amplify a signal so in principle so could the sun but yes the it's not a phenomena that's been observed as far as I'm aware. Yeah that's really nice though that the actor really was interested in that concept. Yeah I mean it was it was really fun and and yeah different members of the cast had different interests in in in different aspects and you know also aspects of what the

what they would be like as day-to-day physicists. The characters, I think, are kind of hopefully well portrayed in terms of their kind of diversity and their backgrounds and, you know, these kind of main characters that are, you know, based in Oxford or they did their PhDs together in Oxford. And I was asked quite a bit about the characters early on and

you know, how plausible is it that, you know, this set of characters is in this situation? And I found it very kind of acceptable. It seemed there were some parallels with

What I'd seen in the sense that they're a bunch of PhD students, they share the same supervisor. So they spend kind of four years, five years of their life together. And, you know, some of them are kind of in love with each other. Some of them are, you know, romantically involved and there's kind of good friends, not so good friends. And it seemed kind of quite a plausible situation. And I think it's nice that several of them are women, right?

as well and sort of diverse ethnic backgrounds gives a nice portrayal of something which I think is quite a realistic

kind of environment that they're in. - Was it a fun experience? Would you be up for being science advisor on something else? - Yeah, it was brilliant. I really enjoyed it. It was great to think about some of this like high concept stuff as well, right? I mean, it's a bit like interacting with students. You know, you really get asked some questions about things that you're like, "Oh, I've never really thought about that."

And so it's kind of really good fun to kind of think about these different physics scenarios. So yeah, I would love to do it again. But yeah,

I probably won't give up the day job. I enjoy the research a little bit too much for that. Well, that's certainly good news for those of us who are interested in scientists unlocking the secrets of the universe and also some good news for anybody making a science fiction series who would like a science advisor like Matt. We can't really talk about three-body problem without considering how we might talk to aliens.

Here's Dr. Hannah Little. I'm a lecturer at the University of Liverpool in the Communication and Media Department, but I'm also a researcher with the UK SETI network and also SETI Post Detection Hub, who are based at the University of St Andrews, and they're specifically interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, but what happens after we make that

first discovery of a signal. So SETI is interested in discovering signals in the universe, evidence for intelligent life, and the post-detection hub then ask what happens next. Do you think that the example of what happens next in the three-body problem is a good one? I mean, the simple answer is no, right? Things don't go well. Because of a lack of processes, Andrew, and because of a lack of...

communication between different humans who make decisions on behalf of humanity about what messages we should be sending out

or how we should be responding to intelligent life forms. And it does actually mirror an ongoing friction within the SETI community, specifically in relationship to METI. So SETI is the Search for Extra Intelligence. METI is the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So there's been a few instances where

in the last few decades since the 1960s of us sending signals out into space and

And there are quite a lot of people who think that's a very bad idea because we don't know how friendly any potential aliens that might be out there might be. That's actually what the follow-on novel to The Three-Body Problem is about. The Dark Forest is this idea that there might be many, many hundreds of advanced alien civilizations out there, but we don't know about them because...

nobody's sending out signals about themselves because that is a foolish thing to do because if you say hi i'm here then that invites potential invaders to come and do an independent stay style massacre we are sort of sending out messages anyway aren't we i mean i've seen contact

And I've read the book of contact. And that suggests that our messages have been going out basically since we've been broadcasting television. But that is not a direct and fast form of communication. So when we transmit things specifically in a deep space using radio channels,

telescopes, those signals are targeted and move much quicker than our normal radio signals. So yes, we kind of are sending signals out all of the time, but they're not being targeted and they're much more slow than some of these more targeted radio messages. Would you send out a message? Do you know, part of me wants to say yes, because the more I think about this,

But I think it's because I'm quite an optimistic person who kind of has a quite positive view of humanity and the direction we're going. But I realise that I am a bit strange in that regard. Because when I think about the history of humans and how we've progressed in our thought, I don't necessarily mean in recent years, but over the course of history, we've progressed more and more towards humanity.

a state of seeing other animals or other races of human as being worthy of respect and worthy of of of being um protected and i think that the environmental movement that we're currently seeing is indicative of a scene of being respectful of other living creatures um but across you know

historical time we've also learned to see other races of human as being equal to us rather than seeing as white western people as being supreme we're progressing towards wanting to protect each other and seeing things like colonialism as bad

And as a result of that, I think that if we were to find intelligent aliens out there, our first instinct would not be, let's destroy them all and live on their planet, right? We'd be curious. We'd want to research. Our scientific ethics would not allow us to do them any harm.

And so I'd like to think that if there's an alien species out there who are technologically advanced to master space travel in order to get to us, that they would also be sufficiently advanced in relationship to their ethics and their abilities.

the way that they think about other living creatures. So if that's the case, I don't think we've got anything to be scared of. But of course, we can never know. And that's the problem. There are people in power in countries around the world today. If we had an alien...

invasion that was a friendly alien invasion, you can sort of imagine that they'd be the wrong people. So how do we go about getting the right people to talk to aliens when they arrive? So in the post-detection help, there's like lawyers and people who specialize in what we call scenario mapping and working out who, you know, the key people

actors are and working out what they do and how it would change perspective and things um but really i'm just a linguist who sits at the corner and thinks about how we'd start talking to them um so i mean the honest answer is that i don't i don't know and that's a problem in itself is is that there's there's no clear hierarchy in who should have who should be in charge in relationship to that communication but that's why we need kind of these processes in place before

before it happens, if it happens. Okay, so I'll let you off the moral dilemma of getting the right people in power and who should talk to the aliens. But in terms of the linguistics, say we've got past that and we are having a conversation, but how do we talk to aliens? Does the series kind of work in that way? So what the series does is actually bypass the problem that I think is the most exciting problem, which is

how do you start communication in the first place? And it seems that the aliens...

in the three body problem the santee they have a very different way of communicating than us but they have mastered how to communicate with us so there's one scene in the in the series where i won't explain the context of this scene because it is a massive spoiler but they send a message that everyone on earth sees and they see it in their own language so in russia it's written in russia and in england it's written in english and in china it's written in chinese and that

That indicates that they've somehow got enough of the evidence from our planet, enough of the communications to perhaps do some statistical learning to work out what all of our languages are, what they're made up of and how we communicate using them to be able to send messages like that.

And that is one way to deal with how to communicate with a new species is to basically work out how they're communicating using computational tools to then just send messages back. And if you're sufficient, if you've got enough data and enough computational power to

You can do that quite easily, I think. But the problem I'm most interested in is if you had an alien in a room with no technology, how would you start that communication? But the series doesn't cover that at all. But there is some really interesting stuff in there about communication because...

And crucially, the thing that results in us falling out with the aliens, and I'm not sure that this is a spoiler, I think it might be, is that the aliens can't lie. And they are very suspicious of humans because we can lie. And this creates quite a large amount of discord. And it seems to be that the reason that they can't lie is because their communication is very much linked to their thought process.

and so there's no filter between them thinking and what they end up speaking out loud and there's one scene where the Santi discover this as a result of one of the humans reading I think it was Little Red Riding Hood and they were really confused about this story and they were asking questions about it and then realized eventually that it was fiction and the notion of fiction meant that

we can lie and that's alarming to them. And in that scene, the human, I think he's called Mike Evans, he expresses that our ability to lie comes from the fact that we are in some way not as advanced as the aliens. So he says that we're like barnyard animals squawking at each other. But I was thinking about this notion that how

Having a filter between our thoughts and what comes out of our mouth, which is necessarily more considered and can be a lie, or we can selectively decide to say some things and not others, is actually what separates us from a lot of animal communication within the world. So animals, animal communication is quite often characterized by the fact that they don't have a filter.

their communication is based in things like them being hungry or them wanting to mate with each other or

something else that's based in their needs and so there's no filter between them expressing a need and needing help with fulfilling that need and producing a signal about it and so in those systems in those animal communication systems it's not possible to lie because it's their signal is very much bound up in their biology and their needs at that time

And we've gone past that and are now at a place where we can lie about being hungry or send out signals about wanting to mate when we might not want to for whatever reason. And we mark that as being progress, right? We are more advanced than animals. We have supremacy over animals. That's how we generally think about ourselves and our human language and our communicative abilities. But it's interesting that

in the show that that's kind of backwards, that we see ourselves as being squawking barnyard animals rather than an advanced species. And it certainly seems that the Santee Sea is potentially advanced because...

then they decide that we are a great danger because of this ability that we have. But what if, maybe in season two, one of these aliens is standing in a room with one of them? How do we communicate in a room with an alien species from another planet? I mean, this is really tricky, and there's no way to answer this question that isn't highly speculative because we don't know how they're going to communicate with each other. We know...

Because all of the scenes of them communicating in the first series is them sending human language messages

that has clearly been translated over radio signals. So we have this problem where we don't know what modality they use to communicate. Maybe they don't open their mouths a lot at all. Maybe it's all telepathic and there's a couple of things that hint at it being telepathic communication in the series. And if it is telepathic and their brains don't necessarily allow them to have that telepathic communication,

with humans, which it's likely not to because we don't have whatever biology they've evolved to allow for that, that there would necessarily be no outward indication that they're trying to communicate in the first place.

But the first thing that a human would do would be to outwardly try and signal that I am trying to communicate with you. And I always said the best way to do that is just to say hello. Because, you know, regardless of species, it's a good bet that the first or, you know, language that anyone speaking across the world is a good indication that the first thing that you say to somebody else is a greeting.

Hello or help, maybe. Depending on the situation. I might not say hello if I was drowning in an alien soup, but I would say hello if I was standing in a room with them. So the first thing I do is try and work out how they take in information. Do they have ears or ability to auditorily process sound? Do they have eyes? Do they have...

smell? Do they have touch? What is it? How do they process information? And once you've established that, you can try and then work out how to send them a signal. And the best way to do that is probably to use iconicity, where there is correlations between signals and what they mean. So

The classic examples from the 1970s of the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record going out, they've got visual images on them that represent what humans look like and where the Earth is on a pulsar map and also a little symbol that demonstrates hydrogen. And the reason we did that is because for us, visual images are highly iconic. There is a strong correlation between

between a picture of a human and what a human looks like. And so that's much more reliable as a communicative signal with someone who doesn't have the same language as you than just using a word because words are mostly quite arbitrary. If I said to you human and you didn't speak English, there's no way that you'd be able to work out that human, it means human. Yes, iconography. There's also maths. Maths seems like it would be universal. Yeah, and maths is quite iconic.

So when we want to kind of send the number one and the number two and the number three, there is a direct correlation between the signals and what they mean. So maths is a very iconic medium. Yeah, and the good thing about maths is it's all about trying to work out common knowledge with the aliens. So what is it that they already know? And if they're an advanced species with advanced technology, they're likely to have nailed maths.

And so we can send them things like in contact. I think it's the frequency of hydrogen and hydrogen is the most abundant chemical element in the universe, which is why it's a really good kind of foundation to say we know about hydrogen. This is hydrogen. Do you want to chat or other kind of universal constants like pi or certain frequencies like the Fibonacci sequence? It feels like to me the best way that we've got of exploring this stuff is probably through science fiction.

We've already talked about Independence Day, contact, there's arrival, there's three-body problems. And quite a lot of the people in the post-detection hub are science fiction authors because they are necessarily the people who've thought about these problems way more than even scientists because scientists are often distracted by problems on Earth before they start worrying about problems in outer space. Dr Hannah Little is currently writing a book titled

exploring communication with aliens through the lens of science fiction. You can't get that just yet. I'd like to thank Hannah, Jennifer and Matt for talking to me for this episode. And I'd like to thank you very much for listening. And next month, we'll be hearing about something else from this wonderful world of physics. And we might just have a new jingle for the podcast.