Netflix series '3 Body Problem' poses some big sci-fi questions

I recently finished the first book of Liu Cixin’s science-fiction trilogy, which shares its title, “The 3 Body Problem,” with the Netflix sci-fi series that debuted last week.

And while this is only the first season, and I can’t say with certainty that the show will go where the books go, I feel confident saying it’s a series well worth watching.

There are some big ideas at work here, and the story has some heavy lifting to do when it comes to getting those concepts across in a suitably dramatic way.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Liu’s story about humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial life presents a couple of questions/concepts that combine to create the tense, frightening sense of creeping dread that both the book and show (so far) have done very well.

The first is Fermi’s Paradox, a question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi while working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos: If there are billions of stars in our galaxy, and millions of planets with the potential to support life, mathematical probability tells us that some form of intelligent life is out there.

Fermi’s question: So where is everybody?

If there’s a fair probability of other advanced life in the galaxy, why wouldn’t they reach out in curiosity, the same way humanity has done on several occasions during the space age?

One reason could be the difficulty of communicating on an interstellar scale, even if that distance is small in universal terms, like the handful of light years to our next closest star, Alpha Centauri.

If you make a mistake this afternoon when sending an email, you can send a follow-up email right way to fix it. Or you could make a phone call and correct it even more quickly. But if that email took years to reach its destination, all of a sudden effective communication gets much, much more difficult.

On top of that, no one can know an alien civilization’s intentions. By reaching out, you could simply be exposing yourself as a target for any civilization more advanced than humanity.

This leads to a second, and to me, more existentially terrifying concept — the “dark forest” theory.

If you imagine the universe as a dark forest, every civilization within the forest is essentially a hunter, making its way through the woods and trying its best to not be noticed. The hunter is armed, but has no way of knowing what weapons other hunters might possess. Within this framework, the difficulty of intergalactic communication means that anytime one hunter detects another hunter, the most practical choice is to simply destroy it before it notices you.

There is a whole lot more going on in “3 Body Problem,” and as I said, I don’t want to give it way. But these two concepts alone offer a literal universe of interesting sci-fi possibilities.

It also will make you think a lot harder about whether or not we actually want an alien civilization to read and decipher the messages on the gold-plated record hurtling through the darkness with the Voyager spacecraft.

The “3 Body Problem” series is available on Netflix.