Wrapped up the first book after much struggle. Am I crazy for finding it extremely poorly written? Writing aside, the characters suck, the motivations suck, and the scenario building feels like it was tossed together by a 12 year old. I don’t get the hype. Everything is paper thin. The fictional science aspect is the most compelling part but as a cohesive whole it fails to land.
Yes, I think the author has at least a rudimentary understanding of the 3-body problem.
It’s been a bit since I read it, but from what I remember is they wanted to know how long they had before a world-ending cataclysm that they couldn’t recover from, aka how long they had to migrate everyone to a new system. to plan for the evacuation they needed to know how long they had, and how much of that would be in hibernation. And I think there was some other complication that made evacuation a problem but I forget the details now.
The point is they wanted to know centuries ahead, iirc, to make their plan.