Creature(s) from Outer Space

[Ferocitus]

Have you tried the good one?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(1972_film)

Yes. I enjoyed it for what it was, not as an interpretation of Lem's story. It missed a few points.

Although Stanisław Lem worked with Tarkovsky and Friedrich Gorenstein in developing the screenplay, Lem maintained that he "never really liked Tarkovsky's version" of his novel.[29] Tarkovsky wanted a film story based on the novel but artistically independent of its origin. However, Lem opposed any divergence of the screenplay from the novel. Lem went as far as to say that Tarkovsky made Crime and Punishment rather than Solaris, omitting epistemological and cognitive aspects of his book.[30] Tarkovsky claimed that Lem did not fully appreciate cinema and that he expected the film to merely illustrate the novel without creating an original cinematic piece. Tarkovsky's film is about the inner lives of its scientists as human beings. Lem's novel is about the conflicts of man's condition in nature and the nature of man in the universe. For Tarkovsky, Lem's exposition of that existential conflict was the starting point for describing the inner lives of the characters.[31]

Lem was scathing about the 2002 version.

...to my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space... As Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book was entitled "Solaris" and not "Love in Outer Space".
— Stanislaw Lem, Solaris Station (December 8, 2002)

 

[Ferocitus]

Well sure, that's how evolution works. The chances of this working are going to be pretty low. Additionally, the more complex the organism the less likely this is going to work. I think for anything more complicated than a bacteria or virus particle (which isn't alive to begin with), there is basically no chance of the transfer working out. I have nothing to back this up than intuition and my knowledge of the space environment.


I actually don't mean interstellar distances, I mean inter-solar distances (think Earth to Mars not Earth to Alpha Centauri). The time scale would still be millions of years in a very harsh environment. You would need something the size of a large (~on the order of kilometers) asteroid to break off the Earth to provide enough radiation protection for something inside it to survive millions/billions of years. Impacts that are energetic enough to break off large asteroid-sized chunks of the Earth and send them on a hyperbolic escape trajectory are going to be energetic enough to sterilize anything they break off through heating and shock in my estimation.

You don't need a full kilometer of rock to shield something but unless the ejecta was engineered by intelligence, there is very little chance it will have suitable geometry to protect life inside it from any angle. Radiation in our solar system is constant and only goes from pretty bad to hellish. Over the timescales involved, anything that doesn't have tens of meters of protection around it on all sides would be fried.



I got you but also meant that even if a tardigrade survived a trip to Mars, it's going to die when it gets there. Pretty much if it goes anywhere but Earth it will not survive, notwithstanding miraculous DNA mutations that would allow it to survive off Earth.


I guess I'm saying biological transfer isn't impossible but it very nearly is. I can't wait to get to Mars to seek the answers to the question.

If Mars had water 2 billion years ago, then there is a minuscule
possibility that viruses could have made it there from Earth. After all,
it would have been receiving some tiny number blown on the solar wind
for a very long time. The sporadic nature of syzygies, or favourable
alignments lowers the probabilities even further from minuscule.
Or the reverse might have happened: viruses could have started on Mars,
and were blown to Earth where they flourished.

Of course, actual physical samples from Mars, or Titan, or Europa, etc
would be terrific.

Don't think I'm being overly optimistic. The probabilities of life
existing elsewhere that I get whenever I play with the Drake Equation
are so low I wonder whether I even exist.

 

[Kyriakos]

Yes. I enjoyed it for what it was, not as an interpretation of Lem's story. It missed a few points.

Although Stanisław Lem worked with Tarkovsky and Friedrich Gorenstein in developing the screenplay, Lem maintained that he "never really liked Tarkovsky's version" of his novel.[29] Tarkovsky wanted a film story based on the novel but artistically independent of its origin. However, Lem opposed any divergence of the screenplay from the novel. Lem went as far as to say that Tarkovsky made Crime and Punishment rather than Solaris, omitting epistemological and cognitive aspects of his book.[30] Tarkovsky claimed that Lem did not fully appreciate cinema and that he expected the film to merely illustrate the novel without creating an original cinematic piece. Tarkovsky's film is about the inner lives of its scientists as human beings. Lem's novel is about the conflicts of man's condition in nature and the nature of man in the universe. For Tarkovsky, Lem's exposition of that existential conflict was the starting point for describing the inner lives of the characters.[31]

Lem was scathing about the 2002 version.

...to my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space... As Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book was entitled "Solaris" and not "Love in Outer Space".
— Stanislaw Lem, Solaris Station (December 8, 2002)

The movie (Tarkovsky's Solaris) looked great, but to me (i haven't read the book) it came across as not much of an intellectual approach to anything. Somewhat concurrent sci-fi were roughly on par, and they often (afaik) weren't based on a famous book either. Eg La planete savage, and Phase IV.

The space station scenes did look more like something out of a russian play.