To Luo Ji’s surprise, and seemingly apropos of nothing, Ye Wenjie suggests that he become the founder of a new field of study, cosmic sociology, based on the statistical assumptions of the Fermi Paradox:
There he encounters Ye Wenjie, the physicist’s mother, and one of the key characters in The Three-Body Problem. Luo Ji, a young sociology professor and former astronomer, visits the gravesite of a friend, a brilliant physicist who has recently taken her own life. Liu poses Fermi’s question obliquely in the opening pages of The Dark Forest, in a prologue that overlaps the conclusion of the trilogy’s sublime first book, The Three-Body Problem. This is the Fermi Paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who popularized it in the 1950s, famously asking, “Where is everybody?” And yet, from our vantage on Earth, we have so far observed no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life we seem to be alone in the universe.
Even if the frequency of such emergence were infinitesimally small, given the number of stars and planets involved there could be millions, or even billions of intelligent civilizations distributed throughout the universe. There is a paradox at the heart of The Dark Forest, the second novel in Cixin Liu’s bestselling, multi-award-winning science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past: Given the age and vastness of the universe (13.8 billion years and counting, 10 trillion galaxies), mathematical probability suggests that intelligent life should have emerged on many planets throughout the universe.
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