Stanisław Lem's Sci-Fi focused on that concept a lot - that yes, we might find intelligent life in the universe, but it might be so completely different, so alien to us, that any form of communication is not as much impossible, but simply pointless.
> Lem's IQ, as he mentioned in passing in an autobiographical essay (it was measured when he was in high school), was above 180, but no one who read many of his books needed that datum to conclude that here was an unusually powerful and wide-ranging intelligence. The son of a physician, Lem was trained in the sciences. Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world.
Not as extreme as the other two in highlighting the impossibility of meaningful contact. Lem becomes much more skeptical later in his career. Because they actually do make contact to one individual alien and communicate with it. In Fiasco there is some communication but it turn out to be all completely different than expected base don human assumptions (and it all ends in the humans destroying everything, of course all from good intentions). In "Solaris" there is no meaningful communication at all, one can't even say there are misunderstandings.
> Solaris chronicles the ultimate futility of attempted communications with the extraterrestrial life inhabiting a distant alien planet named Solaris. The planet is almost completely covered with an ocean of gel that is revealed to be a single, planet-encompassing organism. Terran scientists conclude it is a sentient being and attempt to communicate with it.
> The novel is written as a first-person narrative, the memoir of a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, who becomes involved in a Pentagon-directed project (code-named "His Master's Voice", or HMV for short[2]) in the Nevada desert, where scientists are working to decode what seems to be a message from outer space (specifically, a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation)
> The book is a further elaboration of Lem's skepticism: in Lem's opinion, the difficulty in communication with alien civilizations is cultural disparity rather than spatial distance. The failure to communicate with an alien civilization is the main theme of the book.
I remembered one more, just a very short story, nothing as exciting as the books:
EDIT (Thanks @yeellow): Pilot Pirx => Ijon Tichy (how could I mix them up? Well, it's been two decades or so since I last read them)
- ~~Pilot Pirx~~ Ijon Tichy series: I remember a short story from the "Ijon Tichy" series of stories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries): It started with a microphone being lowered to onto the surface of an extremely hot planet (hotter than Venus) and a conversation was recorded, I think it was a student and a teacher, or it was between scholars of that alien race. Of course, already it is clear that this wasn't about any reality-based-fiction, the whole setup was just to show human thought in a mirror by letting the conversation come from aliens. In the conversation the rogue (student? scientist? I don't remember) proposes that there could be life on planets that are much colder than their own. This obviously preposterous idea (haha) is shot down by the other party in the conversation and exposed as silly nonsense contradicting science (of that hot world).
By the way, unrelated to the current subject but possibly one of the best stories ever written, is the Ijon Tichy story where he is alone in his space shit and a tiny meteor destroys the controls. It takes two people to repair the damage though, one inside, one outside the space ship - simultaneously. He knows about some time altering vortexes and manages to fiddle with the engines to fly through them. Each time he flies through one of those vortexes there are multiple versions of himself on the space ship, for example his Wednesday and his Saturday version. The story is about his difficulty recruiting himself for the repairs. It's hilarious! It starts with him waking in the middle of deep sleep because somebody who looks like him is shaking him. In his sleepy state he forgot all about the time vortexes and he thinks he's dreaming. So he refuses to move because "damage repaired during a dream is not really repaired, so I may as well just keep sleeping". The next day he has the exact opposite problem: He finds himself sleeping and tries to convince his previous-day version to do the repairs together, without success of course. That's just the start though, more and more versions of himself appear and disappear...
Lem's books are great but the hero you refer to is Ijon Tichy. Pilot Pirx is also Lem's character but stories on him are classical sf. Pirx is also a main character in Fiasco, Lem's last sf book.
As much as I would like this to be true, I think it's unlikely - Tachyons were first suggested in a scientific paper in 1967, while Tichy first appeared in Star Diaries in 1957, 10 years prior.
Wow, indeed. Lem is my favourite author and I read most of the books on him and his works and I am not sure I saw this. I will check if it is a well known fact but I doubt it is a coincidence.
