Consequently it was the physicists, rather than the biologists, who put forward the paradoxical formulation of a ‘plasmic mechanism’, implying by this a structure, possibly without life as we conceive it, but capable of performing functional activities — on an astronomic scale, it should be emphasized.

It was during this quarrel, whose reverberations soon reached the ears of the most eminent authorities, that the Gamow-Shapely doctrine, unchallenged for eighty years, was shaken for the first time.

There were some who continued to support the Gamow-Shapley contentions, to the effect that the ocean had nothing to do with life, that it was neither ‘parabiological’ nor ‘prebiological’ but a geological formation — of extreme rarity, it is true — with the unique ability to stabilize the orbit of Solaris, despite the variations in the forces of attraction. Le Chatelier’s law was enlisted in support of this argument.

To challenge this conservative attitude, new hypotheses were advanced — of which Civito-Vitta’s was one of the most elaborate — proclaiming that the ocean was the product of a dialectical development: on the basis of its earliest pre-oceanic form, a solution of slow-reacting chemical elements, and by the force of circumstances (the threat to its existence from the changes of orbit), it had reached in a single bound the stage of ‘homeostatic ocean,’ without passing through all the stages of terrestrial evolution, by-passing the unicellular and multicellular phases, the vegetable and the animal, the development of a nervous and cerebral system. In other words, unlike terrestrial organisms, it had not taken hundreds of millions of years to adapt itself to its environment — culminating in the first representatives of a species endowed with reason — but dominated its environment immediately.

This was an original point of view. Nevertheless, the means whereby this collodial envelope was able to stabilize the planet’s orbit remained unknown.