re: 3 Body Problem - Netflix

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What exactly is the issue they are facing? Is the chaotic gravity going to eventually rip their planet apart?

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So the issue is that their planet’s “orbit” (if you can really call it that) around the 3-star system is chaotic. The stars are moving chaotically relative to each other, which causes the planet to wander somewhat randomly through the stars’ gravitational fields.

This presents two major problems:

1. Their civilization keeps getting wiped out due to the unstable orbit - in one era the entire planet freezes because it’s too far from the stars, while in another era the planet gets covered in firestorms because it’s too close. Then there’s my personal favorite, the situation where gravity inverts due to a syzygy (the three stars align, causing their combined gravitational pull to exceed the normal gravity at the planet’s surface). Every time they get wiped out, they have to rebuild their civilization. Hence the slow rate of technological progress that they mentioned. Colonizing a habitable world in a stable orbit will allow their civilization to thrive without the constant resets.

2. At some point, the chaotic orbit will cause their planet to crash directly into one of the three stars. This will wipe them out for good. Since the movements of the stars/planet are unsolvable, they don’t know whether it will be next week or a a billion years, but they know it will happen.