The Invincible

by Stanisław Lem

“Yes. Because if our adversaries are the products of inanimate and probably unthinking evolution, we cannot regard the problem in terms of revenge or payback for the Condor, for the fate of its crew. That would be no different than whipping the ocean for having sunk a ship and drowned its sailors.”

This is why we should treat them like a force of nature. Nature likewise does not appraise, it offers no values. These beings are simply themselves, they endure, and they act in such a way as to be able to endure further .

How many extraordinary phenomena like this, so foreign to human comprehension, might lie concealed in space? Do we need to travel everywhere bringing destructive power on our ships, so as to smash anything that runs counter to our understanding? What was the term they used—the necrosphere, which means the result of necro-evolution, the evolution of inanimate matter.

that humankind had not elevated itself sufficiently, had not yet earned the right to that so splendidly termed stance of galactocentrism, which had long been glorified, yet which did not mean searching only for beings that resemble oneself and understanding only such beings, it meant not interfering in matters that did not concern human beings.

Occupy an empty place, by all means, why not; but don’t attack something that exists, that over millions of years has established its own equilibrium of survival—an active survival that is not dependent on anything except radiation forces and material forces, and that is no better and no worse than the survival of the proteinaceous compounds we call animals or human beings.

Not everything everywhere is for us, he thought as he walked slowly downhill.