Once the slogans died down, the girl shouted, “God does not exist. All religions are tools concocted by the ruling class to paralyze the spirit of th… - Liu Cixin

Earth was treated as a knowledge battery: After it was charged fully with Trisolaran knowledge, it would provide more power.

The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper — or, at least, neutral — act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?

This was the theory of “contact as symbol” proposed by sociologist Bill Mathers of RAND Corporation in his book, The 100,000-Light-Year Iron Curtain: SETI Sociology. Mathers believed that contact with an alien civilization is only a symbol or a switch. Regardless of the content of the encounter, the results would be the same.