This movie makes for a good politics/religion discussion. I read the book a couple of times, saw the movie more times than I have seen most other movies. The book and screenplay were written by Carl Sagan, one of the most famous scientists of modern times, certainly the most visible scientist when I was growing up. He was one of the chief scientists for NASA for decades. He was heavily involved in the early robotic space probe expeditions as well as a key player in the moon program. His early work was with the exploration of Venus. He worked on the Voyager program and was responsible for putting a gold record and map of our solar system on it. Of particular interest to me, and for purposes of this discussion, was his early advocacy for SETI (which I think is a bunch of hooey and a gigantic waste of time and money - akin to astrology). He published a book called "Cosmos" right about the time that PBS was to air the TV documentary series based upon the book. I read the book a few times (most recently a month or two ago), and still watch reruns of the series on the Science Channel. Brilliant stuff. Anyhow, he was dying from a rare disease when he wrote the book "Contact" in which SETI actually discovers intelligent extra terrestrial life. It is interesting to see the mash up of science and religion in the book and movie. Fascinating is a better word. Perhaps he became more religious as his own mortality stared him in the face. I'll talk about the movie, since it's still shown on the movie channels from time to time if you want to catch it. It's a superb effort, in any case. Jody Foster stars as a brilliant scientist who works for SETI and on SETI related projects. She gains access to the VLA telescopes in Arizona for a few months, and one day they receive a signal that clearly originated from intelligent sources not of this earth. After analyzing the incoming data, they first figured out that the incoming pulses of radio waves were signalling prime numbers, then there was a sub-pattern to it, and finally there was the greatest discovery man could ever make. The first layer of information was the prime numbers. But in listening to the audio of the incoming signal, it was clear to one of Foster's co-workers that there was some other kind of signal. They ended up attaching the signal to a TV monitor and there was Adolph Hitler making a speech to open the Olympic games of 1932. They figured that the aliens captured what we started sending out in 1932 and simply returned it to us as a way of saying "we got it, and understand." Interlaced with the video signal was a data channel that turned out to have hundreds of thousands of pages of something that looked like hyrogliphics and they figured they might never figure out how to decode it. Then Foster's "guardian angel," a ultra rich eccentric billionaire with an interest in science, came to the rescue and delivered the "rosetta stone" for decoding the text. It turned out to be the plans for some sort of device whose function we could not understand immediately. The nations of the world agreed to spend $1T to build it, and even once built, all the greatest minds of humanity could do was speculate on its function. It did have a kind of "pod" that clearly would hold a single person, but nobody knew what would happen once they turned the machine on. Throughout the movie, there is a lot of religious symoblism and imagry. Foster's boyfriend turns out to be a clergyman whose job is to advise the president on spiritual and ethical matters - though he's not some born again type or anything like that. He's portrayed as a very smart, well educated, modern day philosopher. Foster runs into the bullshit that is government throughout the movie. Her boss takes credit for her discovery and even edges her out for the seat on the first ride in the new machine. Fortunately for Foster, and unfortunately for him, the leader of an obscure religious sect gains access to the machine (the machine is 10 stories tall, a big thing) and blows it up during one of the final test runs, killing her boss. Foster's guardian angel comes to the rescue once again. He says, "the first rule of government procurement is 'why build one of these things when you can build two for 4x the cost?'" Turns out the Japanese, who build significant portions of the first machine, had build a complete second machine, and Foster was chosen to take the ride. She gets in the machine, they run the countdown, and she begins a trip through a network of wormholes and ends up on a planet far away, where she meets the aliens. They tell her that they've noticed humanity, and the time for the first step had arrived. They simply wanted to say hello and let them know they were being watched. Nothing else would be coming forth for a long time to come - humanity has a long way to go. Meanwhile on earth, the TV cameras from all the networks capture what looks like her capsule falling through the machine and the whole thing taking about 5 seconds. As if nothing happened and she couldn't have gone to that far away place she did. The president appoints a select committee of congressmen, scholars, etc., to investigate what happened. They get Foster to testify, in one of those Clarence Thomas hearing type of settings. Her guardian angel had died on Soyuz (he was dying of cancer and bought a trip there from the Russians), and the govt. made it out like he had conspired with Foster to commit a great hoax on the people. That's the story, here's my analysis. People have long speculated that Foster's guardian angel was meant to be Sagan himself. Take that for what it's worth. Foster had numerous arguments with her boyfriend about religion, and how she didn't believe in it one bit, while he raised seriously good questions that gave her pause. She never swayed from her position tho. In fact, the big reason her boss was chosen over her was that she was interviewed by the panel choosing the person to take the first ride and she was asked if she believed in God. She said no, and her boss said yes. The committee felt that since 95% of the planet believes in one diety or another, it would not be proper representation of the planet to send an atheist. The greatest irony of the movie was at the end, when she was basically telling everyone that she experienced what she did, it had to be real, though she had no proof. She could only ask everyone to take it on FAITH that she wasn't lying about it. The whole trip to meet the aliens was hugely religious in its symbolism. She went to HEAVEN. It was depicted as a tropical paradise. The alien greeted her in the form of her dead father. If you believe in Heaven, you expect to see your dead father there, right? Off of which raises the big question: why is such a learned and acclaimed scientist associating ET with God, and the belief in scientific things that have no proof with religion? In any case, Sagan is sorely missed by me. Now I'll answer the big question I expect to be asked (in advance). I do not believe in ET. There is not one shred of evidence of life anywhere but on Earth; we're talking about 200+ worlds in our solar system. WTF is SETI? It's not science, though it uses scientific equipment. It's no better than astrology - talking about stuff that is purely imaginary. WTF is astrobiology? It is one of the most absurd propositions to me that it is science. Space is the worst place for human beings to go. You can't live off the land, and everything about it is poisonous to life as we know it (especially us). NASA is great at science - sending robots to take pictures of all the dead planets we can reach within a lifetime, and we've gotten a really good understanding of what our solar system and the rest of the universe is like. Have at it.
The universe is constantly expanding, thus allowing for an increasing number of planets that could hold organic life. Therefore the probability that life exists elsewhere in the universe (I notice I'm concentrating outside our solar system) is infinitely large; not bad.
The universe expanding has nothing to do with a change in the number of planets in the universe. But there definitely are a lot of planets out there. If a person thinks that life can start on it`s own then with the number of planets out there, there has to be other planets other than earth with suitable conditions for life.
What about the fossilized microorganisms they found with the Mars landers? n. An extraterrestrial being or life form. Granted, we haven't found anything that is alive right now, but we haven't really looked that far away from our own planet yet. At work, some guy came in and did a presentation on the colonization of Mars. He showed us a lot of things. He claimed that they could design a human life sustaining set of buildings with everything we needed inside. It would take a minimum of like 24 people to operate the whole faciltiy. The catch is, that all 24 of those people would have to be working all the time, and cross trained in Agriculture, geology, nuclear physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, etc, etc, etc. I don't even know of one person that knows all that. Basically, everyone would have to be a superman in terms of knowledge. They would have to plan out what shipments they needed from earth years in advance, because that's how long it would take for supplies to arrive. There would need to be a trade route established between earth, a moon base, and the earth. He argued that it would be necessary to have minerals or something shipped back to earth to support and justify the financial impact of such a space station. Basically, he made it sound possible, but highly unlikely. I was able to avoid work for about an hour for that meeting, so it all worked out well for me.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/805/1 Next week is someone going to lecture on bigfoot? Maybe you can get another hour off of work Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the space program, but I'm a realist. Mars is poison. You can't breathe the air, the soil won't support plant life, it's wide open to streams of radiation from the solar winds and other sources... It's a frigid desert wasteland.
I failed to mention that all human activity would be strictly indoors. They described how they would grow plants inside using hydroponics, and they could breath with correct pressure inside the sealed buildings. Obviously, mining for minerals would require them to get into some kind of outdoor mobile vehicle.
One solar flare and everyone dies within about 30 minutes. I don't know of any shielding technology that we have that can protect people on mars. The plants die and everyone dies. We can certainly mount some sort of expedition there, I'm just not seeing the point or why it's worth spending the $trillions it would cost.
