Contact (novel)
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| Author | Carl Sagan |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Simon Schuster Trade |
| Released | September 1985 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 432 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-671-43400-4 |
Contact is a science fiction novel written by Carl Sagan and published in 1985. Some of Sagan's character traits are evident in the main (female) character, Ellie Arroway, and the novel serves as an entertaining platform in which he encapsulates ideas surrounding many of his life's interests, especially the first contact with extraterrestrials.
A film adaptation of Contact, starring Jodie Foster, was released in 1997. (Although the film remained relatively true to the plot of the original novel, it differed in some respects, primarily that a number of scientists undertake the eventual journey in the 'ship', as opposed to Foster undertaking the journey in the film alone.)
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[edit] Plot summary
Ellie is the director of "Project Argus," in which scores of radio telescopes in New Mexico are used to intensely search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Before long, the project does, indeed, discover the first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings, a repeating series of the first 261 prime numbers (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). Further analysis of the message reveals that two additional messages are contained in different forms of modulation of the signal. The second message is a primer, a kind of instruction manual that teaches how to read further communications. The third is the real message, the plans for a machine that appears to be a kind of highly advanced vehicle, with seats for five human beings.
A subplot has Ellie interacting with a pair of Christian preachers, informally debating God's existence. Applying the scientific method, she states the agnostic viewpoint that "there isn't compelling evidence that God exists... and there isn't compelling evidence that he doesn't."
Ultimately, a machine is successfully built and activated, transporting five passengers—including Ellie—through a series of wormholes to a place near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where they meet the senders guised as persons significant in the lives of the travelers, whether living or dead. Some of the travelers' questions are answered by the senders, with the senders ultimately hinting at proof of a Universal Creator contained inside one of the transcendental numbers. Upon returning to Earth, the passengers discover that what seemed like many hours to them passed by in only twenty minutes on Earth, and that all their video footage has been erased, presumably by the time changing magnetic fields they were exposed to inside of the wormholes. They are left with no proof of their stories and are accused of fabrication.
Thus, though she has traveled across the galaxy and actually encountered extraterrestrial beings, she cannot prove it. The government officials deduce an international conspiracy, blaming the world's richest man in an attempt to perpetuate himself, embarrass the government and get lucrative deals from the machine consortium's multi-trillion-dollar project. The message is claimed to be a fabrication from a secret artificial manmade satellite(s) that cannot be traced, because the message stopped once the machine was activated, a feat that is impossible unless one considers time travel feasible, and Ellie and other scientists are implicated.
[edit] A message from God in pi
In a kind of postscript, Ellie, acting upon a suggestion by the senders of the Message, works on a program which computes the digits of π to record lengths and in different bases. Very, very far from the decimal point (10^20) and in base 11 (postulated number of dimensions in M theory, after 1995), it finds that a special pattern does exist when the numbers stop varying randomly and start producing 1's and 0's in a very long string. The string's length is the product of 11 prime numbers. The 1's and 0's when organized as a square of specific dimensions form a perfect circle.
The extraterrestrials suggest that this is an unmistakably intelligent artifact, an artist's signature, woven into the fabric of space. It is another Message, one from the universe's creator. Yet the extraterrestrials are just as ignorant to its meaning as Ellie, as it could be still some sort of a statistical anomaly. They also make reference to older artifacts built from space time itself (namely the wormhole transit system) abandoned by a prior civilization. A single line in the book suggests that the image is a foretaste of deeper marvels hidden even farther within Pi. This new pursuit becomes analogous to SETI; it is another search for meaningful signals in apparent noise.
The concept of a Message embedded within the digits of π has been criticized:
[edit] Pi's normality
First, it is an open question in mathematics if π is a normal number. If it is such, it would not be surprising that a "message" can be found in the infinite digits of the ratio. Actually, any specified message will be found within it, somewhere. Finding a picture of a circle or a drawing of Santa Claus is simply a matter of knowing where it is. Sagan assumed the "message" is not a likely occurrence due to its very high order, since the chance of random occurrence can also be calculated if pi is in fact normal.
[edit] Logic transcends existence
Furthermore, this reshaping of pi raises questions related to the omnipotence paradox concerning whether God can do logically impossible things. This paradox relies on the assumption that logic somehow transcends the constraints of the universe, rather than being a property of it. Yet assuming logic is a property of the cosmos, God may just have fashioned our reality in such a way that pi has unlikely properties, thus conveying a Message to anyone clever enough to count in Base 11.
In the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics beginning after the Big Bang, some numbers that define essential properties of our universe, like the fine structure constant or Newton's gravitational constant, could vary among universes.
The physical conditions in these universes would be radically different, and it is possible that intelligent life could not exist in all of them.
- See also: Anthropic principle
π, however, falls into a different category of numbers than those which primarily represent space and time, because it can be defined by the inherent properties of the real numbers. These in turn depend on the properties of the natural numbers; changing the value of π is therefore analogous to changing the value of "2" and encoding data in that. Any intelligence, working in any universe— no matter what the characteristics of its particular "space-time fabric"—must deduce the same value of π, presuming they are able to think of numbers at all, and that logic is not a property of the Cosmos.
This type of argument goes back to philosophers like Averroes, who proposed that not even God could create a triangle whose internal angles did not add up to 180 degrees. The number of degrees within a triangle is a fixed consequence of Euclidean geometry (in non-Euclidean space such a triangle is possible); God may choose to build a universe that follows different geometrical axioms, but once the axioms are chosen, the results are essentially determined.
(It is also worth recalling a question Richard Feynman raised while exploring the capabilities of mechanical calculators at Los Alamos, during the Manhattan Project. In a letter to his wife Arline, he pointed out that the decimal expansion of the fraction 1/243 repeats in a rather amusing way:
This letter irritated the censor reading mail between Los Alamos and the outside world, who feared that strings of numbers may communicate technical secrets. Gleefully, Feynman pointed out that if you actually do divide 1 by 243, you do get that string of digits, so there cannot be more "information" in the long string of numbers than there is in the single number 243. This illustrates how "information" can be a subtle concept.)
[edit] Creationism using the novel
The novel has been adopted as a touchstone by the leading proponents of the intelligent design movement [citation needed], though Sagan was a well-known atheist committed to scientific and intellectual rigor and never felt that objectively verifiable evidence had (or could) actually been found to support the "notion of a God who has created everything."
Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow, has said he "never wanted to believe. He wanted to know."[1] Intelligent design proponents often cite this quote and the ending of Contact as proof that Sagan believed that, using the tools of science, it was possible to discover if there was a creator of the universe [citation needed]. However, this position is in direct conflict with the vast body of Sagan's views as represented in his work and writings (such as 'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark') which are skeptical about claims of supernatural origins of the cosmos and favor explanations of a naturalistic origin. Sagan's novel illustrates the kind of extraordinary and verifiable evidence that a scientist like Sagan would need in order to start to take seriously the idea that our universe was created by design.
[edit] Conclusion
Sagan's only novel allows the reader to plausibly experience, in the imagination, what he longed to experience in real life: the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence. In the novel Sagan presented a fictionalized account that illustrates a search for and discovery of objectively verifiable evidence of the kind that a skeptical scientist would want to find as support for the hypothesis that the universe had been created by "an intelligence that antedates the universe." Yet at the very heart of this grand discovery lies the inherent unattestable element of "faith", as the returnees have no credible objective evidence of their own experience, much like the proof of God by testaments of the biblical times which are not accepted by modern science as evidence. The discovery of the message in Pi is objective, yet one could have found it without the alien’s advice, which leaves the question of the actual first contact, again of Faith.
