Lem's "Solaris" is just a big Strawman
I don't know if someone cares about the old literature here, but I just have to get it out of my head.
If you have ever read Stanislav Lem's "Solaris" you know that "The Ocean" and the research surrounding it is the main theme of the book. In the book's universe, countless decades were spent on trying to understand what the heck is happening in The Ocean and why does it act the way it does. And humanity failed to understand anything about it.
I don't want to sound like the book should've been "Humanity F Yeah", but, it feels like Lem just said "We will never make contact with aliens because I depicted humanity failing to do so in my book".
The humanity found out that the ocean takes fragments from their memories and forms something new out of them. So why not try to experiment with different memories? Send a rat there and see what happens. Send a man with amnesia and see what happens. Sand a baby and see what happens. Send a man hypnotized into having a false memory and so on and so on. They even send the Kelvin's (Main Character) brain waves into the ocean and the ocean stopped sending "the guests!". There's so much you can try and experiment but the humanity in the book just... Doesn't do it for some reason!
The ocean itself is made out of something. Why not try to see it's internal structure? I'm sure in the age of space travel the humanity could X-raying the entire planet. They could try to take a small part of the ocean and see if it functions as a proper ocean would. It does? Then investigate it's internal structure! It doesn't? Then there must be some part of it that controls the other parts.
In less then a century neuroscience understood so much about the work of our brains. Yes, we don't know everything about them, but we know what they are made of, how does basic memories work, what happens if certain regions of it are affected. There's always a reason for something happening in real world. Unless the ocean just rolls the dice and does random shit there must be some logic behind it. Why couldn't the humanity replicate the signals that the ocean sends to it's structures and see what happens?
I could go for a long, long time saying how humanity could've understand the ocean. If it didn't want to contact humans -- that would be one thing. But just stating that we fundamentally can't because you wrote a book with your made up scenario sounds like an ocean-sized strawman to me.
P.S. I wouldn't have much of a problem with this book if 1) it didn't state it's ideals with characters just saying them out loud. 2) When someone else (Tarkovskiy) sees that you put a big romantic tragedy in your book and decides to focus on it you trow a tantrum that "this is not what the book is about!!!!".
No problem if you like the book itself, I just hate this smugness.