The reasons of cosmic silence. Eidetic variations about Fermi´s Paradox with Stanislaw Lem

Abstract

In this paper I exam possible reasons of failure of our discovery of extraterrestrial species in the Universe. After a brief look on Fermi´s Paradox, different causes are being suggested for our incapacity to recognize other civilizations or rational beings. I am doing so taking Stanislaw Lem´s science fiction novels as a leading clue. Possible reasons points to the human inability to embrace «Copernican humility», the idea that humans are merely inhabitants of a region of the Universe rather than measure of all things. The difficulty in self-relativizing leads, on the one hand, to the failure in acknowledge other living beings as such – as shown in the second section – and, on the other, inability to conceive other forms of communication. Thus, in the last step, the paper invites to re-exam our way of thinking of rationality and encourages to perform eidetic variations in order to conceive of different ways of multiplanetary cohabitation. The issue of Contact ultimately reveals itself, according to our analysis of Lem´s novels, as anthropological and subjective in its nature, not necessarily objective. This is achieved by pointing out briefly two possible ways of understanding the meaning of transcendentality and rationality in phenomenology.