You might be familiar with a new Netflix TV series called the 3 Body Problem, which I have watched twice and even purchased the audiobook because I loved it so much. I will try not to spoil it too much here, instead focusing exclusively on the parts of the story related to happiness and unhappiness.
In this story, people are dissatisfied with human nature and how everything seems to go downhill in terms of what we are doing to ourselves, the environment, and our planet overall. After all, today we face a massive amount of problems, including (a very short list) racism, sexism, discrimination, human trafficking, pollution, wars, unprecedented extinction of species, and overpopulation.
These facts lead the protagonists of this book/series to conclude that human beings are no longer able to make their own decisions, preferring to invite a more advanced alien species into our world to save us from ourselves.
We are faced with a lengthy and thought-provoking moral debate about “human nature” and the question of whether we are on a path towards self-destruction, harming not only ourselves but also our environment and future generations that will live on our planet, and whether we can save ourselves from ourselves, dividing the world into two fronts: those who want an alien species to save us and those who want to fight back against this invasion.
3 Body Problem Applied to Real World
Interestingly, I have already found a few people in the real world who would likely support the alien species I mentioned above entering our world, as they proclaim that we are doing an extremely poor job managing ourselves, our human civilization, and ecosystem.
I myself agree that we have a lot of problems. While I don’t necessarily say that it is a problem of the whole species, but of a few individuals who are corrupted by power, desire for wealth, and disregard for morality overall that lead us to our current situation. Here, I’m not sure if people are betraying the system or if the system is creating these negative individuals, as I’m unsure whether most people given access to power would behave in any different way. One thing is for certain: as always, we would need to address the problem from both sides.
Still, it seems too simple to think that people who are receiving massive profits would willingly give up their wealth, as arguably they know that they are doing something wrong and they don’t care.
Here, we don’t have any easy solutions because the people in charge are usually the ones who are creating the problem in the first place. After all, as John Emerich Edward Dahlberg Acton once said, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” so while there might be some good apples out there, I question how many good apples there really are.
In this way, there are many initiatives out there to address the issues that exist in our society today. While we are told that things are generally moving forward in the right direction, there are still many powerful forces pushing us backwards.
So:
– Would an alien race make everything better?
– Are we able to solve our own issues? or
– Are we ultimately going to destroy ourselves?
The 3 Body Problem offers a dystopian perspective on this, and it is interesting to watch/listen/read, as it touches on a real issue of general mass dissatisfaction with the state of the world today.
So while I wouldn’t necessarily want an alien species to make our planet their new home, I vote that we should address some of the issues that exist in the world today.
Problem with The 3 Body Problem
In the 3 Body Problem, human beings decide to fight back by dedicating numerous resources, manpower, and scientific advancements towards war.
However, what will it really take for people to change our ways so we don’t spend as much on war, but instead focus these resources on solving the problems we have on earth today so we never have to rely on aliens to save us in the first place?
Furthermore, do we really need an external villain or will we continue to destroy ourselves?
These are big questions to consider, and I hope it doesn’t take an alien invasion for us to start addressing these issues.
3 thoughts on “The Case Against Mass Unhappiness: The 3 Body Problem”
Interesting. I wonder do the aliens have more of a conscience than us? What makes them different from us? Perhaps not driven by money and resources or greed? What governs their being?
In this book/series, aliens were united by the collective need to survive, which is something akin to having a common enemy. They had something similar to either a dictatorship or overseeing elite that made all decisions, so there was no need for money (and maybe not greed). To them, coming to Earth was the solution for survival, but they wanted to conquer us, which wasn’t good for humies. We don’t know how they looked, but their actions weren’t particularly nice as they sabotaged human science, suggesting ill intentions. On our side, some humans who wanted the aliens to come argued that if they had superior technology, like the ability to space travel, they would also have superior values. Even if they didn’t, humans were incapable of making their own decisions and were likely to self-destruct anyway. So, even if we were killed by the aliens in the end, Gaia (the spirit of Earth) might still survive, implying that we don’t deserve to be here. Lastly, on the grand scale of the cosmos, it doesn’t matter anyway :)
Also, I was thinking, as far as utopian or dystopian works of fiction are concerned, there is often something we can learn from them. They often consider questions that we never think to ask in our daily lives and therefore explore ideas that might not be intuitive. In this way, personally I love sci-fi because it makes me think about what’s possible, about what’s wrong or right, and how we should actually live our lives if we could do it correctly from the start or change what we have today to have a better life tomorrow. In the case of the 3 Body Problem, I actually found a lot of interesting insights that I might not have considered in the past, but they are just well-formulated in this book/series. So I guess this is also why I love this book/series.