Quote: “Contact means an exchange of experiences, concepts, or at least results, conditions. But what if there’s nothing to exchange? If an elephant isn’t a very large bacterium, then an ocean can’t be a very large brain.” (End of Chapter 9)
The idea behind Solaris is such an interesting direction for science fiction in the way that it calls into consideration that if we were to find alien life out in the universe, there is a possibility that it shares no similarities to us as human beings in the slightest. So different, that we have no way of comprehending the way that it exists, how to communicate with it, or if it cares that we coexist with it.
As I’ve read through our assigned reading, many different ideas have crossed my mind, some disproved by the novel itself, some not. This novel is not only about the limits of human cognition, but more specifically about the limits and laws of the universe around us. We can only understand what we can directly observe, knowledge that expands as our ability to see things using technology also expands. What we can see are the observable laws of the universe, laws that all matter seems to follow, whether they know it or not. A rock doesn’t have to think in order to follow Newton’s first law of physics, it just doesn’t move because it hasn’t been moved. I think that the ocean in this book is meant to represent much of the same concept: it doesn’t necessarily think about the laws it is following, it just follows them. We as humans are limited by what we can observe around us, and then find a solution to it by thinking.
This brings me to the quote that I chose, where Kelvin’s ideas of contact are in human terms: we can only know what someone else is thinking if they “make contact” with us, in one way or another. Whether that is a baby crying because they want food, or are tired, or need their diaper changed, or a professor giving a lecture on the laws of thermodynamics, we as humans have only ever had contact in ways that we can understand.
This book also brings into question our possibility of actually recognizing alien life. I think based on this book, we would be able to recognize alien life with relative ease, it is a matter of communicating with it that I am not so sure of. Alien doesn’t necessarily mean something from outer space, the word is more accurately defined as something foreign to us. I would like to go deeper into that concept, and define aliens specifically as something foreign to the human race. If this were to be the definition used, then it can already be said that we have made contacts with aliens: the animals, insects, plants, bacteria, etc. that surround us are technically alien, and we make contact with them every day. However, these things that we have made contact with have all followed a similar evolutionary path to us humans: they evolved on earth, in the same climate, through the same time periods. We can even semi-effectively communicate with some of these “aliens”: our dogs come when we call them, baboons can be taught basic memory functions, cats see a brush and know to rub up against it because it untangles their fur. So in this sense, I think we can definitely recognize alien life, we technically already have. It is the alien life that doesn’t look at all like anything we have ever seen, the alien life that simply follows the laws of the universe that surround it, that we probably will have a harder time recognizing. But if they can do it in this book, or at least come close to recognizing Solaris as alien life, then I see no reason why we can’t do it too.