The Three-Body Problem

Accompanied by the sound of crashing waves and the wind howling against the antenna, the ETO fighters shouted as one, “The world belongs to Trisolaris!”

This was the day that the Earth-Trisolaris Movement formally began.

29

The Earth-Trisolaris Movement

The most surprising aspect of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement was that so many people had abandoned all hope in human civilization, hated and were willing to betray their own species, and even cherished as their highest ideal the elimination of the entire human race, including themselves and their children.

The ETO was called an organization of spiritual nobles. Most members came from the highly educated classes, and many were elites of the political and financial spheres. The ETO had once tried to develop membership among the common people, but these efforts all failed. The ETO concluded that the common people did not seem to have the comprehensive and deep understanding of the highly educated about the dark side of humanity. More importantly, because their thoughts were not as deeply influenced by modern science and philosophy, they still felt an overwhelming, instinctual identification with their own species. To betray the human race as a whole was unimaginable for them. But intellectual elites were different: Most of them had already begun to consider issues from a perspective outside the human race. Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.

As astounding as the speed of the ETO’s growth had been, the number of members did not tell the whole story of the ETO’s strength. Because most of its members had high social status, they held a lot of power and influence.

As commander in chief of the ETO rebels, Ye was only their spiritual leader. She did not participate in the details of the organization’s operation, didn’t know how the ETO grew so large, and wasn’t even aware of the exact number of members.

In order to grow fast, the organization operated semi-openly, but the governments of the world never paid much attention to the ETO. The ETO knew that they would be protected by the governments’ conservatism and lack of imagination. In those organs wielding the powers of the state, no one took the ETO’s proclamations seriously, thinking that they were like other extremists who spewed nonsense. And because of its members’ social status, governments always treated it carefully. By the time it was recognized as a threat, the rebels were already everywhere. It was only when the ETO began to develop an armed force that some national security organs began to notice it and realized how unusual it was. Consequently, it was only within the last two years that they had begun to attack the ETO effectively.

The members of the ETO were not of a single mind. Within the organization were complicated factions and divisions of opinion. Mainly, they fell into two factions.

The Adventist group was the purest, most fundamentalist strand of the ETO, comprised mainly of believers in Evans’s Pan-Species Communism. They had completely given up hope in human nature. This despair began with the mass extinctions of the Earth’s species caused by modern civilization. Later, other Adventists based their hatred of the human race on other foundations, not limited to issues such as the environment or warfare. Some raised their hatred to very abstract, philosophical levels. Unlike how they would be imagined later, most of them were realists, and did not place too much hope in the alien civilization they served either. Their betrayal was based only on their despair and hatred of the human race. Mike Evans gave the Adventists their motto: We don’t know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.

The Redemptionists didn’t appear until long after the ETO’s founding. This group’s nature was a religious organization, and the members were believers in the Trisolaran faith.