Solaris

 

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, 1961, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston (2017).

Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is a deeply profound reflection on human psychology, moral obligation to non-human persons, and our naivete concerning the search for alien intelligence. The novel also challenges the very possibility of contact with any alien intelligence that engages the world with a vastly different non-human conceptual scheme and paradigm. It is a fifteen-year-old girl on a tour of the Solaris Institute that sums up the challenge and the failure of the scientific approach to contact. After seeing a film reel of the formation of one of the baffling, beautiful, and complicated structures created by Solaris, she asks, “What’s it all for?” 

The question gets to the heart of the problem. The scientists who are so interested in intelligent contact have no answer because their empirical methods and their language of description are not equipped to answer questions of purposiveness and intention. The project of contact will always fail because the scientific method can't discover purposes. At best, the language of science might describe patterns, functions, and roles. Still, intelligent contact requires discerning purpose and intent, so science can never make good on the promise of contact with something genuinely alien. How far do you think Lem’s novel goes toward showing that such contact will always remain hopeless?