Lem’s anti-contact story
The Stanisław Lem story defies being pigeonholed. The writer fumed at Andrei Tarkovsky’s over-psychologised screen version, accusing the director of using his book to shoot Crime and Punishment. Solaris does in fact deal with memory, identity and love. But it’s first and foremost a pessimistic treatise on how a species that everywhere only sees its own reflection could never come to know the riddles of the universe. ‘We aren’t looking for other worlds, we’re looking for mirrors,’ the cyberneticist Snaut growls at the hero, Kris Kelvin – but what we see on the other side is something we recoil against.
For astrobiologists and others who search for alien intelligence, Lem’s story is a warning. Kelvin spends days on end digging through the research archives on the planet Solaris left behind by his predecessors. The archives are full of descriptions of humiliating defeat: the pompous speeches of holders of academic titles; the political machinations at the commanding heights of institutionalised science; meetings and councils. The entire gilded academic staffage conceals a void, an intellectual powerlessness, which, in the face of the great unknown, has nothing to offer other than simplistic cataloguing of phenomena. It’s a symptom of the long-ago discarded dreams of a great breakthrough and the solution to a puzzle. But the causes of the defeat do not at all lie in the nature of the ocean-mind that is Solaris. They lie in human culture and mentality. And that’s the lesson that our contemporary scholars are trying to learn today.
The Solaris ocean doesn’t fit the definition distilled by Trifonov. It is the only creature of its kind in the universe. And because of its exceptionality, despite its planetary scale it went unnoticed by researchers, because it differed completely from what they imagined about life. That was Lem’s intuition concerning human nature – including the nature of scientists. We see only what we expect.
When the unknown goes unnoticed
In 1999, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Simons illustrated this particularly effectively with an experiment. He had his research subjects watch a film in which six students tossed around two balls. The viewers were supposed to count the number of throws (there were 15). But half of the participants were so focused on what they expected – the throws – that they completely missed the person in a gorilla suit who during the 25th second stopped in the middle of the frame, in the very centre of the group, and waved to the camera.
Scientists pride themselves on always looking for the unexpected. And rightly so, as the greatest scientific discoveries often came from completely unexpected observations. But how many bewildering discoveries have we not made yet, even when we’ve stood face to face with them like Simons’ gorilla?
The astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto as a moving point on photos made by the Lowell Observatory on 23 and 29 January 1930. Later analysis showed that the planet had already been photographed 14 times, but nobody had been looking for it in those earlier photos. We even build this kind of blindness into computers. In May 1985, the British Antarctic Survey published the results of measurements that clearly showed that the loss of ozone in the upper layers of the atmosphere was not 1-2 percent, as the scientific consensus was saying, but locally as much as 60 percent, leaving the scientific world in shock. Not only because of the catastrophic potential of this research, which ended up leading to a global mobilisation to fight the hole in the ozone layer, but also because the British had made them using instruments that were a quarter of a century old.
The American satellite Nimbus 7 had been measuring the very same data since 1978, but the Americans didn’t notice anything strange. Why not? We know that the data about the critically low ozone content in the atmosphere had been sent, because after reviewing the magnetic tapes where they were registered, scientists discovered a clear record of the ozone hole’s history. So why didn’t anybody do anything about it for seven years? Nobody has ever explained this potentially mortally dangerous oversight. There was a wealth of data (140,000 measurements a day), the computers were primitive, and results that were extremely divergent from the expected results were simply classified as system errors and ignored to save time.
If we can overlook basic facts about our planet, is it not possible that a truly great Unexpected might pass right under our noses? That’s the greatest fear of the astrobiologists, who have to face the fact that our knowledge about life on Earth, based on carbon, phosphorous and oxygen, may not be worth much in the face of worlds with conditions that differ drastically from those we know. They might be proof of the completely different paths in evolutionary history that life can take.
