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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

The thing that really struck me about sci-fi from the other side of the iron curtain was the fundamentally different look it took at communication with extraterrestrial intelligences. Lem, and the Strugatsky brothers (probably the best known off of the top of people's heads from that side of the world, thanks to Tarkovsky) both wrote extremely well-received books about how it's likely that this sort of communication would be impossible.

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Impossibility of communication (because the very physical means necessary are way beyond our capacity as a species) is also a far more plausible idea than anthropomorphic beings (speaking some language that can be deciphered and uttered by humans).

An ocean-shaped or a polymer-based "lifeform", while formidably uncanny, are still somewhat fathomable.

What about a radio-waves-based "lifeform"? Or a star whose plasma interactions are so complex that some form of artificial "life" emerges within it?

Lem's narrative is indeed intellectually teasing. And, yet, critical of our approaches and behaviors as a species.

> Impossibility of communication (because the very physical means necessary are way beyond our capacity as a species) is also a far more plausible idea than anthropomorphic beings (speaking some language that can be deciphered and uttered by humans).

Lem's work (at least Solaris) explored the intellectual inability of our species to communicate with a vastly superior intelligence. Solaris did not have any problem seeing what people were doing, thinking, signalling to it, and so on. It's just that what possible difference could it make?

The catch is, we simply don't know. We do not know if Solaris is a "superior" intelligence. We may guess it is an intelligence of sorts. There is also very little to suggest that it understands us in turn. My interpretation is that the phantoms were its effort to understand humans, and probably not a very successful one either.

Another fantastic book on the subject His Master's Voice, where a whole massive team of scientists tries to decode an interstellar signal. In the end, they didn't even prove it was a signal, and not a natural phenomenon.

Also - The Invincible. Probably the most western sci-fi styled book among his works, dealing with an interesting concept of mechanical evolution.

I have some opinions on that, but for the purposes of the story, I agree that the level of superiority of Solaris's intelligence is pretty much beside the point (or rather, the futility of attempting to parameterize Solaris's intelligence is the point). Maybe it's not even self aware. Maybe it's hyperintelligent but reaches conclusions in geologic time, or something. Maybe it's amused by us and would find the notion of communicating with us in a meaningful way silly.

On the topic of self awareness vis-à-vis aliens, Peter Watts' Blindsight is a recent classic.

https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

> Or a star whose plasma interactions are so complex that some form of artificial "life" emerges within it?

Close enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

IIRC in that, the communication difficulties were due to clock speeds not mindsets.

Or, at one point, the Qax in Stephen Baxter's novels, although they evolve as patterns of turbulence in fluids, and then somehow transfer themselves to the solar atmosphere. Communication difficulties there were mostly caused by the Qax being arseholes.

There must be a list of fictional alien races living in stars, but i couldn't find one with some quick googling.

Not sure if there is a list, David Brin's Sundiver [0] is one example of a novel with a fictional alien living in a star.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver

> An ocean-shaped [...] "lifeform", while formidably uncanny, are still somewhat fathomable

It might object to you dropping a lead-line into it to do so, though.

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