{"id":12203,"date":"2021-10-25T09:25:38","date_gmt":"2021-10-25T14:25:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=12203"},"modified":"2021-10-25T09:43:21","modified_gmt":"2021-10-25T14:43:21","slug":"solaristics-ets-and-the-ontology-of-climate-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/10\/25\/solaristics-ets-and-the-ontology-of-climate-trauma\/","title":{"rendered":"Solaristics, ETs, and the ontology of climate trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As we prepare for another Climate Change Conference of the Parties<\/a>, and all the activist organizing<\/a> around it, it’s important for us to come to terms with exactly what we are dealing with. This post approaches climate change from a somewhat oblique, exo-planetary perspective.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have given a few talks recently in which I propose that climate change, along with its “traumatic core,” is analogous to the phenomena encountered by the fictional scientist-visitors to the planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem’s 1962 novel of that name and its cinematic adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. As Lem put it<\/a>, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The peculiarity of those phenomena [witnessed on Solaris] seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Attempting to make sense of that “seemingly rational activity” comes to be called “Solaristics.” But alongside that activity, the Solarian ocean triggers psychological and metaphysical traumas for the humans who visit it. Solaristics, or the effort to learn about this ontologically indeterminate alien Other, becomes a profoundly unsettling activity: it is, Slavoj Zizek describes it<\/a>, an encounter with one’s own “traumas, dreams, fears, desires… the innermost of your inner space.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here I want to compare that argument with a different kind of “encounter phenomenon,” that of reported sightings and encounters with scientifically anomalous non-human intelligences<\/strong>, or SANHI. I take that term from the literature on UFOs and ETs<\/a>, but modify it to make clear that it doesn’t include scientifically accepted<\/em> or explainable <\/em>non-human intelligence, such as that found in other mammals, cetaceans, cephalopods, and the like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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