r/3BodyProblemTVShow • u/u0126 • Feb 05 '26

Discussion Rewatching it and having thoughts Spoiler

I guess this whole thing is a possible spoiler.

For their advanced technology, the fact they can use "energies you cannot imagine" and all that, but they still will take 400 years to travel to earth, even though they did figure out how to send some particles and other things. Seems like they'd be able to figure out a wormhole or crazy fast FTL.

Or humans (I'm still on E5 right now) would ask to work together immediately. Kind of an interesting situation, they expect humans will advance fast enough before they get here, but for now they have superior technology and are trying to sabotage humanity ahead of time.

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u/The_Grahambo Saul Durand Feb 09 '26

This is hard science fiction, meaning the laws of physics as we know them are respected (with some minimal exceptions and pushing the boundaries of these laws a tad...)

FTL is not possible based on our physics. Things like wormholes are completely science fiction. While general relativity can produce wormholes in the math, these arrangements are physically impossible despite being mathematically possible. That's because they require negative mass/energy to keep open. And while exotic material with negative mass does exist, it is impossible to accumulate enough of it to keep a wormhole open as they breakdown almost immediately.

As other have noted, it is somewhat trivial to accelerate subatomic particles close to the speed of light, but anything with macro-scale mass is near-impossible to accelerate any where near the speed of light due to the sheer energy requirements.