The Three-Body Problem

As soon as Ye learned of the true mission of Red Coast, she devoted herself entirely to the base. Because of what she had studied in college, she was put in charge of minimizing the solar outages that plagued the base’s monitoring operations. Though Ye made little progress on this front, she quickly stumbled on an unusual fact—every so often, the radio activity on the sun would pause and the surface of the sun would get completely calm. This strange fact caught Ye’s attention, but try as she might, she could not explain it.

Even though Ye was discouraged, she did not want to quit her research; she knew that if she did, she might lose access to some of the many foreign books she so enjoyed. Instead, she continued to spend time in the base library, going there late at night when no one else was around. One night, she stumbled on a journal article that referenced two moments of strong electromagnetic radiation on Jupiter. The dates seemed familiar to Ye, so she cross-referenced them with the Red Coast operations diary. 

Sure enough, Ye realized that each time there was a flare on Jupiter, 16 minutes and 42 seconds later, there was a similar flare on the earth. After doing some quick calculations, Ye began to understand that the sun was acting as a mirror—and thus as an amplifier—for radio waves. In other words, a radio transmitter as strong as the one at Red Coast Base could make itself stronger by using the sun as a super-antenna. Humans could then send radio signals beyond the power capacity they currently had as a Type I civilization.

To test her idea, Ye had to go through a great deal of red tape, including getting scientific files from the US that would normally be banned and appeasing Commissar Lei, who feared that Ye’s work was veering too far from theory. Worst of all, Lei worried that pointing a “superpowerful radio beam at the red sun” would have unintended “political symbolism.” Still, Ye refused to give up on her mission.

One day in the fall of 1971, Ye decided to try out her idea on her own. Nobody else in the room was paying any attention to her; either they were shutting down for the day or taking a break, so “no matter how historians and writers later tried to portray the scene, the reality at the time was completely prosaic.” With maximum power turned on, Ye transmitted a signal to the sun.

As soon as she sent the signal, Ye rushed to Yang’s office to ask him to monitor any return signals. Yang quickly realized what Ye had done and was amazed by her discovery—in their excitement, the two shared a rare moment of tenderness. Twenty minutes later, however, no signal had echoed back to them. Depressed by her failure, Ye grabbed some cold leftovers and sat on the edge of Radar Peak. Her eyes welled with tears. Little did Ye know that while she wept, the signal she had sent out was already crossing Jupiter’s orbit. Though she wouldn’t learn it for years, Ye had successfully sent a message into space.