Part 1
In the movie, Solaris is depicted as an intelligent living planet whose existence is beyond human understanding. The purpose of project Solaris is to understand the behavior of the planet. However, years have gone past with little progress made. The crisis arose as contact with the research station was lost and psychologist Dr. Kelvin was sent for investigation. Upon his arrival, Kelvin found that the lost of contact and suicide of scientist Dr. Gibarian was caused by the projection of unexpected people into the station from Solaris. While the projection could be interpreted as Solaris’ response and its attempt to communicate with human, despite the objections from other scientists, Kelvin eventually decides to embrace the projection of his long-dead ex-wife Hari, with compassion. He later transmits his waking thoughts to the planet through an encephalogram. Solaris responded by starting to form islands on its ocean. One conclusion is that communication is the basis of understanding between different entities in human society and such communication is better facilitated today by technologies like the internet. A 2016 study investigated the effectiveness of an internet-mediated exchange program in promoting intercultural understanding. The program being studied is known as United Beyond Our Diversity or UBOD by the Global Teenagers’ Project whose participants include middle school students from Canada, Netherlands, Ghana, Lebanon and Taiwan. While the inter-class communications across countries were facilitated by a Wiki platform, the class discussions were supported by a Moodle. During the 16-week long program, student groups from each country created an introduction of its own culture and published it on the Wiki. Then they formed questions for partner groups from other countries. The questions include a variety of topics such as school life, poverty problems, local cultures and influence of globalization. Next, the groups perform cultural research and analysis to answer their partners’ inquiries. After synthesizing the answers, the groups post the results on the Wiki. Then they read through each other’s results, looks for similarities and differences across cultures and exchange their findings through discussions on the Moodle. All posts on the Wiki and Moodle as well as audio records during classes were used as evidence to measure participants’ intercultural communication, competence and critical cultural awareness. Among participants from Taiwan, 70% reported that the program made them look at their own culture and other cultures from a different perspective and 63.3% reported that it helped them think about cultural issues critically. The result showed significant improvement in their intercultural awareness with cultural knowledge gain, prejudice reduction and stereotype change. For example, students from Taiwan learned that countries that they initially perceived as backward, like Ghana and Lebanon, also have unique natural resources, abundant history, culture and modern technology. And such improvement would be difficult without the internet, Wiki platform and the Moodle. While communication is crucial for understanding between cultures and entities, it is not free, and often comes at the price of privacy.
In order to communicate with humans, Solaris gained unauthorized access to the memories and consciousness of Dr Kelvin and the station crew to generate the projections. This act can be interpreted as invasion of privacy. Although no technology today is sophisticated enough to directly monitor people’s consciousness, many are concerned with their privacy online, but don’t necessarily apply those concerns to their internet usage behavior and may expose sensitive information unconsciously. This phenomenon is known as the “Privacy Paradox”. A study in 2016 examined the relation between users’ privacy perception and their adoption of self-disclosure management strategies. The results showed a negative correlation between perceived privacy level of information and frequency of post. However, in contrast to its initial hypothesis, no significant relation was found between need for information privacy and the extent of self-disclosure management. What’s more disturbing is that the result revealed that disclosure management is less pronounced when users rate their SNS contact as trustworthy. Internet and social media offer affordances that allows us to comment on others’ status updates, upload pictures and tag friends. These affordances are known as “warm affordances”. However, the terms and conditions that these affordances rely on, specify the ownership of users’ data, to whom the data might be sold and who has the right to access or delete these data. These affordances, known as “cold affordances” are often complex, obscure and far from users’ daily experiences yet they an integral part of internet and social media usage. Conflicts arise as a result of the incompatible nature of “warm” and “cold” affordances. Whereas warm affordances reflect long-standing privacy routines and expectations while cold affordances challenges and sometimes violates them."
Dr. Kelvin’s primary goal is to determine if solaristics should be continued. After many years of study and experimentation, scientists have proven that Solaris is, a conscious, living computer. However, long after this breakthrough was made, the field made no additional progress. This situation is similar to human-computer interaction today; the lack of a common language for both humans and computers to intuitively interact blocks millions of people from taking full advantage of modern technology. Though programming languages improve upon the communication process, this solution is not perfect and does not account for the non-programmer majority of the population.
Part 2
One of the most prominent conflicts in the movie is how to establish communication between vastly different entities. As described in part 1 of the movie, the lack of scientific progress in the study of Solaristics led to a debate as to whether funding for this field of study should be cut completely. Over many years, hundreds of scientists have attempted to understand the consciousness and thought patterns of Solaris to no avail. It is established that Solaris projects human-like replicas from the memories and nightmares of the scientists aboard the station, seemingly as a possible form of communication. The scientists have attempted to study this phenomena with rigorous and meticulous testing, but eventually resorted to aggressive behavior toward the replicas due to the psychological harm they caused. The scientists then consider bombarding the planet with heavy radiation in order to render it harmless. Only when Dr. Kelvin, a psychologist, boards the Solaris station is any progress made. His empathetic approach towards communication with the replicas and the planet leads to a different way to render the planet harmless; by projecting his encephalogram to it. The planet immediately recognizes Kelvin's brain scan as another consciousness and discontinues the regeneration of the replicas, as well as forming islands hospitable in nature to the humans. This establishes a form of communication between Solaris and humans and becomes a revolutionary breakthrough in the study of Solaristics, ending the debate as to whether to cut its funding.
Part 3
Solaris demonstrates a progression similar to high-risk or unconventional research and computing. The movie follows part of scientist's research progression on Solaris. Solaristics is very similar to other high-risk research. Gartner's five-stage technology hype cycle can be used to model the expectations of Solaris over time. Stage 1, The technology trigger, represents the discovery of Solaris and the hypothesis that the planet may be sentient. Stage 2, The Peak of Inflated Expectations, represents the initial project funding by the soviet government and sending the original 85 scientists to Solaris. Stage 3, the Trough of Disillusionment, represents the station's decline into disarray; where only three scientists decide to continue researching Solaris, despite the Soviet government discontinuing funding. The encephalogram was the first major success and helped the scientists get to the next stage. Stage 4, The Slope of Enlightenment, represents the breakthrough when Solaris stopped the visitors and created islands. Stage 5, the Plateau of Productivity does not happen in the movie.[1]
The Solaris project may have difficulty finding funding but could be funded by HINGE (High Innovation/Net-Gain/Expectation) programs. HINGE programs are created to encourage scientists to do high-risk research rather than avoid it. In one survey, out of 314 funding agencies, 41 had HINGE programs showing that these programs are rare but not impossible to find. The study found that the most important elements for studies was the originality and track record of the proposer. Other factors that may seem important, such as addressing societal needs, are unimportant. [2] Studying a thinking planet that has little impact on society, besides furthering scientific discovery, fits what these HINGE programs would fund.
Unconventional computing uses alternate methods to potentially pass conventional methods in some application. Quantum computing uses quantum mechanics, a field of physics that studies subatomic-level behavior, to potentially pass modern computing methods in processing power and solve big-data programs. One main feature of this paradigm is using qbits to store data instead of ordinary bits. Each qbit can store 2^n all variations of numbers simultaneously using superposition instead of only storing 2^n numbers.[3] There is no physical quantum computer yet, but IBM allows people to experiment with designing simulated quantum systems using programming and digital circuitry. [4] Solaristics parallels high-risk research and computing. In the movie they create a proof of concept and eventually the scientists make a breakthrough. Maybe the project could reach stage 5 given more time and funding.
Resources
[1] Jackie Fenn, & Marcus Blosch. (2018, August 20). Understanding Gartner’s Hype Cycles. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767/understanding-gartner-s-hype-cycl
[2] Prendergast, P. J., Brown, S. H., & Britton, J. R. (2008). Research Programmes That Promote Novel, Ambitious, Unconventional and High-Risk Research: An Analysis. Industry and Higher Education, 22(4), 215–221. https://journals-sagepub-com.ezpxy-web-p-u01.wpi.edu/doi/abs/10.5367/000000008785201793es
[4] Abenojar, C. F., Eric. (02019-04-02). IBM | Quantum Computing. [5]https://www.ibm.com/quantum-computing/
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