"Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed." Stanisław Lem, Solaris
Solaris is a planet with two suns: a red sun and a blue sun. For 45 years after its discovery, no spacecraft had visited Solaris. At that time, the Gamow-Shapley theory—that life was impossible on planets which are satellites of two solar bodies—was firmly believed. According to the earliest calculations, in 500,000 years’ time Solaris would be drawn one half of an astronomic unit nearer to its red sun, and a million years after that would be engulfed by the incandescent star.
A few decades later, however, observations seemed to suggest that the planet’s orbit was in no way subject to the expected variations: it was stable, as stable as the orbit of the planets in our own solar system. A study was made of the planet’s surface, which is covered by an ocean dotted with innumerable flat, low-lying islands whose combined area is less than that of Europe, although the diameter of Solaris is a fifth greater than Earth’s. The ocean was an organic formation, which must be extraordinarily evolved, because it was capable of exerting an active influence on the planet’s orbital path. - Parts from the novel Solaris.
Stanisław Lem's sci-fi novel inspired me to create the ocean like organic structure, what people is trying to understand for many years.
Is it possible to understand a life from an other planet? A life, which may has totaly different purpose of living, what we can imagine.
Lem's novel is searching the answers for this question, among lot of other questions.
Bálint Kulcsár, 2022