I love reading books. The one that most shaped my thinking was “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari - how humans started somewhere in Africa and gradually conquered the whole Earth, moving from place to place, using every available resource and wiping out animals along the way. I read it and asked myself: okay, we conquered the whole planet, now what?

Human history can be described in many ways: as the invention of agriculture or the invention of cities. But perhaps the first human invention was something much simpler. We learned to migrate. When the rivers dried, we migrated. When winters grew too cold or the game finished, we migrated again. But unlike animals, humans had another type of migration – we were always curious what was there beyond the horizon.

But today the map looks different. Where do we go, when there is nowhere left to go?

Every continent is occupied. Every piece of land belongs to someone. When people move now across deserts, over mountains, across the Mediterranean or the Balkans, they are not migrating into empty land. Europe and North America are flooded by immigrant waves, which leads to overpopulation, cultural clashes and social tension. Climate change, scarcity, conflicts, exhausted resources. These forces will probably reshape the second half of this century. Governments talk about borders and policies.

I tried to find a solution to this problem not through politics, but through physics. I read Asimov’s New Guide to Science, then Al-Khalili’s Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed and I kept encountering the same strange idea: that space - the thing we move through - might not be as fundamental as it looks.

Physics has been suggesting something like this for more than a century. At the smallest scales of reality, the universe behaves in completely different way from the world around us.

The double-slit experiment was what really struck me. A single particle fired at a barrier with two slits doesn’t behave like a small object traveling through a precise location. Until it is measured, it behaves like a wave spreading across countless possibilities. Physicists describe this using something called Hilbert space - a mathematical structure with no directions, no distances, and no geometry. Only probabilities. The particle is not really somewhere. “Somewhere” only appears later, at our scale of reality.

Entanglement made this even stranger. Two particles created together stay connected even when separated by vast distances. Change one, the other responds instantly. At first this seemed impossible, as nothing is supposed to travel faster than light. But what if nothing actually travels? What if the particles were never truly separated in the first place?

If space emerges from something deeper, then distance might be less fundamental than we think.

This is the idea I wish to share with you.

Instead of asking where humanity can move within the space we already have on Earth or potentially Mars in the future, we might eventually ask something stranger:

What if space itself is a secondary manifestation of a deeper structure. If at a lower or more internal level there is no space, and perhaps no time. This would allow us, knowing the structure at this lower or internal level, to be able to change the geometry of space. Purely theoretically, in this situation we should have no obstacle to moving instantly to any point in the universe. Instead of trying to create ever more powerful rockets, with which we cannot reach another star within a human lifetime, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to deepen our knowledge of quantum physics? Quantum nonlocality does not itself allow us to move matter faster than light. But it hints at something deeper: that the separation we call ‘distance’ may not be as absolute as it appears at our scale of reality. If we could one day understand the underlying structure from which space itself emerges, we may find ways to alter geometry rather than simply travel through it.

Modern theoretical physics already hints at something like this. Some theories suggest that spacetime may be built from networks of quantum information, something like an immense cosmic fabric woven from entanglement. If the pattern of connections changes, the geometry of space may change with it.

If such a possibility ever becomes real, its consequences would reach far beyond physics. A civilization that is no longer confined to a single planet would no longer face the limits of land, resources, or survival. Pressure that today turns into competition, migration crises, and wars might one day dissolve simply because the horizon of knowledge has expanded.

I know this sounds impossibly far from the families walking across deserts today with everything they own in a single bag. It is far from them. My idea will not help anyone tomorrow.

But I have read something in the book “Sophie’s World” that stayed with me: that philosophy begins with the feeling that something is strange, not with the feeling that something is impossible.
Some of the greatest technologies in history often began as ideas that seemed abstract and impractical. When James Maxwell wrote equations describing electromagnetic waves, no one imagined radio or TV. Later Albert Einstein described the relationship between mass and energy, which sound purely theoretical before preparing the ground for nuclear power.

All these discoveries have broadened the horizon of human knowledge. We have climbed a mountain in physics to see that behind it rises another mountain, then a third one, and perhaps beyond that - the boundless ocean.

The same thing happens with every human migration, which, reaching the familiar horizon, discovers a new one even more distant. What will be the next human migration, will it not be in changing our perception of space and, as a result, in the possible ways of overcoming it?

References

Harari, Y. N. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper Collins.

Asimov, I. (1960). Asimov’s New Guide to Science. Basic Books.

Al-Khalili, J. (2003). Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Gaarder, J. (1991). Sophie’s World. Aschehoug.

*The essay was written for The Minds Underground Essay Competition 2026

My name is Kris Kelvin. By profession I am a psychologist; by circumstance, a reluctant witness to phenomena for which psychology has no vocabulary. I was sent to Solaris as part of a scientific expedition. It soon became clear that our categories would not suffice.

The beings that appeared aboard the station were not visitors. They were created by the Ocean as precipitations of memory, constructions assembled from neutrino matter, if the term “matter” can still be applied.

Among them was Rheya.

She had died on Earth. The Rheya who came to me on Solaris was at once identical and impossible. I feared her, rejected her, loved her. Each emotion cancelled the previous one and yet remained. When she vanished, I was left with a hypothesis masquerading as hope: that the Ocean had not exhausted its repertoire of dreadful miracles.

I awoke breathing deeply, savoring the darkness.

The horizon was already lit with a metallic blue glow. Light entered the cabin in a thin, surgical incision. And with it returned a thought that had pursued me since I examined a drop of Rheya’s blood beneath the microscope.

If she had been constructed from subatomic entities, then the Ocean was not manipulating matter in the conventional sense. It was operating at a stratum where space and time might be secondary effects rather than foundations.

If memory could be externalized, could desire not be as well?

If Rheya had been summoned from the recesses of my mind, why could I not be summoned in return - elsewhere?

Why not to Earth?

Or rather, to whatever “Earth” might signify at that level of reality.

I dressed in the suit and passed through the transition chamber. The terrestrial atmosphere was replaced by the corrosive breath of Solaris. I stepped onto the surface.

The blue sun was descending. The Ocean lay before me, its vast undulations tinted violet, indifferent as ever to human conclusions.

I walked toward the shore.

At the water’s edge I hesitated. I felt an unfamiliar fear - absurd, considering what I had already endured. What if this was not a passage but an annihilation? What if “home” was merely a word we invent to disguise finality?

Then I saw her.

Not as an apparition descending from the sky, but as a presence emerging from the depths, a pale oval of a face beneath the shifting surface. She opened her eyes. There was no accusation in them.

“Kris.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“At home.”

“On Earth?”

She regarded me with that faint, almost ironic tenderness I remembered.

“On ours.”

I stepped forward.

The Ocean received me without resistance. The surface closed above my head. For a brief instant I experienced neither weight nor direction, only suspension, as though the categories by which I had navigated existence had been temporarily withdrawn.

Above me, the enormous waves continued their methodical respiration, rising and falling in slow-motion.

Somewhere, I knew, a man would soon awaken, carrying within him the memory of an ocean.

*This paper was written for the Harvard Crimson Global Essay Competition, 2026.

Hi, overall great job. As a weird starting point for this feedback, when I started reading this essay, I was quite confused. It opens with a character named Kris Kelvin, references Solaris and Rheya, and assumes a familiarity with some kind of tv show or book that I didn’t recognize. I am usually on top of my pop culture references, but not this one apparently. So for the first few paragraphs, I was a bit worried that I would not be able to engage (or even understand, let alone relate) with the piece at all.

But then something shifted.Paragraph by paragraph, line by line, I started to lose myself in your writing. By the end, I found myself deeply moved, even without knowing the original story or context of these characters. That is a testament to your skill as a writer. You created enough emotional and philosophical weight within the essay itself that it transcended its source material. So truly, fantastic job.

Your prose is striking and controlled. Lines like “Light entered the cabin in a thin, surgical incision” and “the enormous waves continued their methodical respiration, rising and falling in slow motion” are precise and beautiful. You trust the reader to sit with that feeling of uncertainty, to inhabit Kris’s psychological state rather than having it explained. The moment where Kris asks himself, “What if this was not a passage but an annihilation? What if ‘home’ was merely a word we invent to disguise finality?” is the philosophical heart of the piece, and it lands with real weight.

In terms of areas for growth, my main suggestion relates to the opening. Since I was quite unfamiliar with the source material, again, I initially felt a bit lost. The names “Kris Kelvin,” “Solaris,” and “Rheya” were introduced without context. You might consider adding a single sentence early on that gently orients the reader. For example, you could write something like, “I had been sent to study the [place] , a mission that was due to [xyz] .” This would not compromise the literary quality of your prose, but it would invite readers like me into the world rather than leaving us to catch up.

This is a thoughtful, mature, and beautifully written essay. You have taken a complex source text and used it to explore profound questions about memory, love, and the nature of home. Even a reader who arrives without context, like me, can feel the weight of what you have accomplished. Again, fantastic job!