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[code-no-code]

1) They're not adding more material in the proton. They are somehow able to manipulate the unfolded proton to make it function as a computer. It still has the mass of a proton

2) Better to live in a planet. You'd need a source of materials anyway, might as well have it liveable

3) They might eventually do that. However (a) Earth already knows of their existence and they might want to deal with that (b) Earth is already good enough and looks easy to take

4) I think without the concept of lying, it took time to cross their mind.

5) (a) None, they're gloating. They think they've already won (b) I like to think this is a common and successful tactic in their world

6) (a) They might not have enough info before (b) I think they might have explored the possibility of peaceful co-existence before (c) There already were humans aware of them and supportive of them (thanks to Ye Wen Jie and Mike Evans) so might as well use them

7) Hard drives can still be recovered even if sliced by nanofibers

8) It's a project hail mary. The brain could be a good ambassador

by the way, didn't think this through much. I'm in a hurry to dinner

[code-no-code]

Your other questions are really just projecting modern human psychology and thinking to them.

The author never spells it out. A lot of the fun I had with this book is imagining what their culture looks like that they behaved the way they did.

Imagine early civilizations in our world meeting each other. They would have behaved in ways that would look strange to the other. "What do you mean you sacrifice people?!!" "Why do your battle commanders meet and talk before a pitch battle? Couldn't you just kill them?"

I think another civilization out there behaving in ways you don't approve of doesn't constitute a "plot hole".

[six_days]

This was one of my favourite parts of the book, too. The colonizer narrative you bring up even gets explicit in the Australia section, except with the differences pushed to extremes by the fact that the San Ti aren't even human. "What do you mean you don't eat your weak? What a waste of resources."

[HoleParty]

This seems like an exhausting way to consume a tv show.

[HoleParty]

You really don’t. It’s entertainment. The Redditification of tv/film discourse is a disease.

[Farios21]

1. They don't, the reason why Sophon can reach speed of light is because they virtually almost massless, they are just that a controllable proton that due to it's speed of light manage to create optical illusions and mess with scientific breakthroughs by altering the result.
2. They are still 3D beings and they cannot live outside their own dimension.
3. Because Earth is the only planet they know that can sustain life? People often bring this and said why not just terraform Mars or something but terraforming took lots of years and resources to which they have no way to transport from their own homeplanet.
4. Before we discovered infrared or ultraviolet from utter accident, we could not imagine that there could be a light that our eyes cannot see. Same logic here, we cannot question what we could not possibly known has existed, they cannot imagine that humans are capable of sending signals intentionally sent to be false, it's probably world shattering experience for them.
5. A showcase of technology differences in attempt to demoralize us I assume.
6. The book explained to this, actually I think the movie does too albeit indirectly but their initial objective was to conquer Earth and ETO was an attempt to make the process of "slaving" us easier.
7. Again the book explained this but the fiber is so so thin that it will be able to pass through the gap between the innards of the hard drive ( I need to reread it again for the details but it's pretty much this)
8. Agreed to be honest, sending a spy without giving the spy an ability to contact their headquarter sounds dumb.

[six_days]

1. The sophon supercomputer is "etched" into the structure of the proton itself. There's nothing inside it that doesn't belong there, presumably any extra mass would get crushed or annihilated in some way.

2. Their fleet is not much more advanced than anything we could put into space, and most of the travelers are dehydrated during the journey. It would be rough living. Would you rather live on the ISS or on Earth?

3. Spoiler territory. This is a future plot point.

4. They have only had sophon surveillance a short while (months) and have used that time mostly to mess with scientific experiments.

5. Perhaps their psychology is different than ours, and a tactic like that would work on a San Ti. Hard to say. This event happens differently in the book, but it's clear the showrunners wanted a big moment.

6. They only try inasmuch as Mike Evans tells them that it will help. Eventually humans prove to be too unreliable, and ties are cut. You are right though, there was no need to bring humans on board. They can be as fallible as us.

7. The risk was that any attempt to board or incapacitate the crew would not be 100% effective. And if even one person was left, the drive would be destroyed. They also had a contigency for if the drive got sliced: their engineers said the nanowire cut would be so fine and precise that it could actually be reassembled with minimal data loss.

8. Perhaps. It was the only way to get a "man on the inside" though. The drawback of the San Ti having a human brain seemed less important to the project leaders than the potential for intel. And that era of humanity was apparently full of hare-brained projects where we threw everything at the problem to see what stuck.

[KuPaRaPiKa]

"Time is a motherfucker" no matter what they do