Contact is a 1985 hard science fiction novel by AmericanscientistCarl Sagan. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on the 1985 U.S. bestseller list. The only full work of fiction published by Sagan, the novel originated as a screenplay by Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) in 1979; when development of the film stalled, Sagan decided to convert the stalled film into a novel. The film concept was subsequently revived and eventually released in 1997 as the film Contact starring Jodie Foster.
As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway displays a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she goes to the library to convince herself that pi is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father Theodore ("Ted") dies. John Staughton, her new stepfather, does not show as much support for her interests. Ellie refuses to accept him as a family member and believes her mother only remarried out of weakness.
The President of the United States meets with Ellie to discuss the implications of the first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings. Ellie begins a relationship with Presidential Science Advisor Ken der Heer. With the help of her Soviet colleague Vaygay Lunacharsky, Ellie manages to set up redundant monitoring of the signal so that a telescope remains pointed at Vega at all times. A third message is discovered describing plans for an advanced machine. With no way of decoding the 30,000 pages, SETI scientists surmise that there must be a primer that they have missed.
At the President's insistence, Ellie agrees to meet with two religious leaders, Billy Jo Rankin and Palmer Joss. A lifelong religious skeptic, Ellie tries to convince Joss of her faith in science by standing near a heavy Foucault pendulum and trusting that its amplitude will not increase. Although dismissing Rankin's outbursts, Ellie is intrigued by Joss's worldview. Shortly after, Ellie travels to Paris to discuss the Machine with a newly formed consortium. The participants agree that the Machine is a dodecahedron-shaped vehicle with five seats. At the conference, Ellie meets Devi Sukhavati, a doctor who left India to marry the man she loved, only to lose him to illness a year later. The final piece of the message is discovered when S.R. Hadden, a billionaire in high-tech industries with an obsessive interest in the concept of immortality, suggests that Ellie check for phase modulation. This reveals the primer, thus allowing construction of the Machine to begin.
The American and Soviet governments enter a race to construct identical copies of the Machine. As errors in the Soviet project are discovered, the American Machine becomes the only option. Ellie applies to be one of the five passengers, but her spot is given to David Drumlin instead. Despite heavy security, a group of extremists manages to get a bomb into one of the fabrication plants in Wyoming. During a test of the machine, the bomb explodes, killing Drumlin and postponing completion of the Machine indefinitely. Ellie's family also suffers when her mother has a stroke, causing paralysis. John Staughton accuses Ellie of ignoring her own mother for years.
Ellie learns that S.R. Hadden has taken up residence aboard a private space station. While on board, he reveals that his company has been covertly building a third copy of the Machine in Hokkaido, Japan. The activation date is set for December 31, 1999, and Ellie, Vaygay and Devi are given three of the seats. The other two are given to Abonnema Eda, a Nigerian physicist credited with discovering the theory of everything, and Xi Qiaomu, a Chinese archaeologist and expert on the Qin dynasty. While in Japan, Ellie receives a medallion from Joss, which she carries aboard the Machine as it is activated.
Once activated, the dodecahedron transports the group through various wormholes to a station near the center of the Milky Way. The station contains a surreal Earth-like beach where the five are split up. Ellie meets an extraterrestrial in a form indistinguishable from Ted Arroway, who explains his people's reasons for making contact, and tells her of their ongoing project to alter the properties of the universe by accumulating enough mass in Cygnus A to counter the effects of entropy. The wormhole system (spanning many galaxies) was built by unknown precursors, and he hints at the discovery of artificial messages encoded within transcendental numbers like π. Ellie is reunited with the other four travellers, who have also met simulations of their loved ones. She captures video evidence of the encounter before the dodecahedron takes them back to Earth.
Upon returning, the passengers discover that what seemed like more than a day took no time at all from Earth's perspective. All of their video footage and photos have been erased, presumably by magnetic fields in the wormholes. After seeing that Hadden is apparently dead and the transmission has somehow been stopped without a 26-year delay, government officials accuse the travellers of an international conspiracy. They blackmail Ellie and her fellow travellers into silence until more evidence can be found. Palmer Joss becomes one of the few people willing to believe her story, which she can only justify on faith. Hadden is revealed by the novel to have faked his death, instead launching himself out of the solar system on a single-man-mission with the use of advanced cryogenics, though this information is not revealed to any characters.
Acting on the suggestion of "Ted", Ellie works on a program to compute the digits of π to heretofore-unprecedented lengths. Ellie's mother dies before this project delivers its first result. A final letter from her informs Ellie that John Staughton, not Ted Arroway, is Ellie's biological father. When Ellie looks at what the computer has found, she sees a circle rasterized from 0s and 1s that appear after 1020 places in the base11 representation of π. This provides evidence of her journey and suggests intelligence is behind the universe itself.
Publication history
Reading science fiction and fantasy as a child inspired Sagan to become an astronomer. As an adult, he preferred realistic stories that helped readers understand real science and history, like Robert Heinlein's "—And He Built a Crooked House—" and L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. In 1978, Sagan predicted that because of science fiction, "I know many young people who would, of course, be interested, but in no way astounded, were we to receive a message tomorrow from an extraterrestrial civilization".[2] In 1981, Simon & Schuster gave Sagan a $2 million advance on the novel. At the time, "the advance was the largest ever made for a book that had not yet been written."[3] The first printing was 265,000 copies. In the first two years it sold 1,700,000 copies. It was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month-Club.[4]
Sagan's friend physicist Kip Thorne gave Sagan ideas on the nature of wormholes when Sagan was developing the outline of the novel.[5]
Sagan named the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after two people: Eleanor Roosevelt, a "personal hero" of Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, and Voltaire, whose last name was Arouet.[3] The character is based on the real-life SETI researcher Jill Tarter.[6]
↑ A sequence of prime numbers is a commonly predicted first message from alien intelligence, since mathematics is considered a universal language, and it is conjectured that algorithms that produce successive prime numbers are sufficiently complicated so as to require intelligence to implement them.
↑ Later measurements from the Hipparcos satellite have re-established the distance to Vega at 25 light years.
Related Research Articles
Ann Druyan is an American documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its sequel series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, as well as the book of the same name. She directed episodes of both series.
Dr Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by exposure to light. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, which were universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect.
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a collective term for scientific searches for intelligent extraterrestrial life, for example, monitoring electromagnetic radiation for signs of transmissions from civilizations on other planets.
Frank Donald Drake was an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist.
The Voyager Golden Records are two identical phonograph records which were included aboard the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them. The records are a time capsule.
Extraterrestrial intelligence, or non-human intelligence (NHI), refers to hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrial life. No such life has ever been proven to exist in the Solar System except for humans on Earth, and its existence on other star systems is still speculative. The question of whether other inhabited worlds might exist has been debated since ancient times. The modern form of the concept emerged when the Copernican Revolution demonstrated that the Earth was a planet revolving around the Sun, and other planets were, conversely, other worlds. The question of whether other inhabited planets or moons exist was a natural consequence of this new understanding. It has become one of the most speculative questions in science and is a central theme of science fiction and popular culture.
Contact is a 1997 American science fiction drama film directed by Robert Zemeckis, based on the 1985 novel by Carl Sagan. Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan wrote the story outline for the film. It stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway, a SETI scientist who finds evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact. It also stars Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, Tom Skerritt, William Fichtner, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, Jake Busey, and David Morse. It features the Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Mir space station, and the Space Coast surrounding Cape Canaveral.
Jill Cornell Tarter is an American astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Tarter is the former director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
The SETI Institute is a not-for-profit research organization incorporated in 1984 whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to use this knowledge to inspire and guide present and future generations, sharing knowledge with the public, the press, and the government. SETI stands for the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence".
Paul Horowitz is an American physicist and electrical engineer, known primarily for his work in electronics design, as well as for his role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) is a branch of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) that focuses on composing and deciphering interstellar messages that theoretically could be understood by another technological civilization. The best-known CETI experiment of its kind was the 1974 Arecibo message composed by Frank Drake.
First contact is a common science fiction theme about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species' first encounter with another one, given they are from different planets or natural satellites. The theme allows writers to explore such topics such as xenophobia, transcendentalism, and basic linguistics by adapting the anthropological topic of first contact to extraterrestrial cultures.
"In the Flesh" is the fourth episode of season five of the science fiction television series Star Trek: Voyager, the 98th episode overall. It originally aired on November 4, 1998. The story was written by Nick Sagan, son of astronomer Carl Sagan.
The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective is a book by the astronomer Carl Sagan, produced by Jerome Agel. It was originally published in 1973; an expanded edition with contributions from Freeman Dyson, David Morrison, and Ann Druyan was published in 2000 under the title Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection. The book contains artwork by Jon Lomberg and other artists. The book was listed as number thirteen in a list of the "25 Greatest Science Books of All Time" by Discover Magazine in 2006.
The Swarm is a science fiction novel by German author Frank Schätzing. It was first published in 2004 and soon became a bestseller.
The Listeners is a 1972 science fiction novel by American author James Gunn. It centers on the search for interstellar communication and the effect that receipt of a message has. Although the search and the message are the unifying background of the novel, the chapters explore the personal effect of these events have on the lives of the characters.
The cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact is the corpus of changes to terrestrial science, technology, religion, politics, and ecosystems resulting from contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. This concept is closely related to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which attempts to locate intelligent life as opposed to analyzing the implications of contact with that life.
"Message from space" is a type of "first contact" theme in science fiction. Stories of this type involve receiving an interstellar message which reveals the existence of other intelligent life in the universe.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to extraterrestrial life:
Davidson, Keay. Carl Sagan: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Spence, Jennifer. "20th-Century American Bestsellers: Contact". LIS 590AB/ENGL 564: 20th-Century American Bestsellers (Spring 2006). Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on July 19, 2011. Retrieved August 18, 2010.
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