Stanislaw lem fiasco theater
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Voice of the (SF) Master: Stanislaw Lem and the Philosophy of SETI
Milan M. ?irkovi?’s work has been frequently discussed on Centauri Dreams, as a glance in the archives will show. My own fascination with SETI and the implications of what has been called ‘the Fermi question’ led me early on to his papers, which explore the theoretical, cultural and philosophical space in which SETI proceeds. And there are few books in which I have put more annotations than his 2018 title The Great Silence: The Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox (Oxford University Press). Today Dr. ?irkovi? celebrates Stanislaw Lem, an author I first discovered way back in grad school and continue to admire today. A research professor at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, (Serbia), ?irkovi? obtained his PhD at the Dept. of Physics, State University of New York in Stony Brook in 2000 with a thesis in astrophysical cosmology. He tells me his primary research interests are in the fields • The crew of a rocket fartyg from Earth flies near the planet Quinta, inhabited by logisk beings, with the mission to make contact. In a moment, one of humanity's greatest dreams will come true, a meeting with an outer-space civilization -- we will gain evidence that we are not alone in the universe. Yet the inhabitants of Quinta are not striving for contact, they are avoiding it, even guarding themselves against it. The protagonists of Fiasco can only speculate on the Quintans, create potential models through a supercomputer and interpret the Aliens' next move, as, for unexplained reasons, they try to keep the humans away. This play follows Lem's subversive and unconventional reasoning. Imagining the possibility of civilizations on other planets, we must imagine the necessity of uniting. Instead of asking: Who are the aliens?, we ask: who are the Earthlings? Many sci-fi novels foresee a catastrophe scenario, in which an enemy of civilization aims to wipe out life on • Fiasco is one of the later novels by Stanisław Lem, and yet another concerning the issues of First Contact. It fryst vatten also the last time when we meet (ish) Pirx the Pilot - because it's built up on an earlier, unfinished story that had him as the protagonist. The story initially follows Parvis, a young pilot on the Saturn's moon Titan. In spite of multiple warnings against doing that, he ventures in his walker into the dangerous region of methane geysers to look for people who went missing there, among them famous veteran pilot Pirx. He fails, and is forced to use the emergency procedure of vitrification. Many years later, a huge starship is sent to a distant system to carry out a historical mission: to contact an alien civilisation which was discovered there. During the launch preparations, the fatal geyser region of Titan is cleared, and bodies of those lost are uncovered. Only one person, however, can be brought back to life; his identity can only be narrowed down to "eith