You look up at the sky — three suns. None of them has a face. Light comes from all sides, but instead of warmth, there’s just this: no promise of tomorrow.
You can spend hours guessing trajectories, building models, even think you’ve got it — and then the whole thing falls apart like a bad joke.
Physicists admit it. The three-body problem can’t be solved, not in principle. The starting conditions are known down to the last speck of dust — and still, chaos rules. No certainty about the next step. Not because we don’t know enough, but because that’s how the world works.
On Trisolaris, this isn’t just a theorem from a textbook. There’s a city underfoot that might vanish the moment the suns start their new dance.
But they build anyway. Hundreds of times they start over, pouring themselves into walls and trees as if eternity lies ahead.
Even though eternity isn’t even on the horizon. There’s only a ragged scrap of “now.”
No rational sense in it. They could hide underground, wait for disaster, stockpile supplies, and build nothing at all.
But for some reason, that almost never happens.
Every cycle, there are homes again, gardens, books for kids who aren’t here yet or are already gone. Passing down knowledge sounds like self-deception: who needs words about the past if the future might just not be?
The next generation will either survive by chance or vanish in a week along with the library.
Usually, this is where the reflex kicks in — looking for a reason. They’re like this because of evolution? Otherwise, the species would have died out?
Honestly, looking at people — the differences are smaller than you think.
We live on a scrap of time between disasters too; only our eras are longer and the illusion of control stronger. Still, we know: the end will come, whether in a billion years or in one generation.
And yet cathedrals grow slowly and stubbornly for strangers’ eyes. Diaries get written no matter what. Books hide in corners as if there’s a chance someone will read them after the total darkness.
It looks like irrationality.
But sometimes, it’s the clearest sign of reason: to act when there are no guarantees at all.
Not because you believe in a reward later. Because inside, you can’t do it any other way.
You could shrug it off: the cycle will repeat and everything will turn to dust — why bother?
But try to really stop, even just in your mind — it instantly feels empty, like you’ve stopped being yourself.
Existentialism always felt sad: everything is temporary, all efforts doomed sooner or later to become nothing. But despite that, effort becomes the only way to stay human amid chaos.
When the impossibility of predicting the future is the universe’s baseline — acting for the sake of acting turns from nonsense into freedom.
You don’t put life on pause waiting for a stable era (which might never come).
You invest now — even when the horizon disappears with the last light.
If you knew for sure that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed… could you keep going?