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Comment by stormking | Hacker News Reader

That's why the only books that have something meaningful to say about aliens are Solaris and Blindsight.

In case of the fermi paradoxon, I'd add the first two books of Baxter's Manifold series where he offers two distinct explanations, the first one being "it's not a paradox at all, we're truly the first" and "some natural process is killing them off before they can colonize the galaxy".

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Solaris is focused around a planetary ocean that's sentient in some manner too alien for humans to understand. That's how Lem sets up the story, because he likes to explore failures to communicate and what it would mean to encounter the truly alien. But it is his setup, and not the result of an actual alien encounter. We don't know whether it would be similarly impossible to communicate with aliens. Maybe Sagan and the SETI folks assume correctly that it is possible.

Both authors assume that what we call "intelligence" and "sentience" is deeply influenced by the environment our species evolved in (plus a billion happenstances) and that therefore any dream of meaningful communication with extraterrestrials is a naive dream.

Now, we don't know if they're right because, as you pointed out, we never met actual aliens. But that doesn't change the fact that their assumptions is based on actual science.

Klingon mating rituals, on the other hand, are not.

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