Abu and Obssa begin their read-through of The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. They cover just the prologue, a short opening that picks up right where The Three-Body Problem left off and introduces the idea of cosmic sociology.
Ye Wenjie lays out her two axioms for a skeptical Luo Ji at a graveside, and Abu argues the ant and the spider crawling over the headstone are doing more work than they seem, picking up Da Shi's line about bugs from the end of the first book. Obssa takes up the question Mike Evans puts to the Trisolarans, who broadcast every thought and can't see why the wolf in a children's fable would speak before it eats. He borrows the software idea of lossy communication to ask whether human art exists because no mind can hand a thought to another whole.