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Contact – The Movie
In 1997, the movie Contact was released. This movie was based on the novel by the same name written by Carl Sagan.
I’ve watched this movie several times in the past – I think I even have it on DVD – but it was on one of the encore channels this morning and I couldn’t help watch it again.
As I watched the opening sequence it hit me how well that the film makers had captured the relationship between distance and time. I found that sequence on YouTube just now, so please take three minutes and watch it yourselves:
As I sat there and watched that movie, I came to understand the deeper meaning of the movie. It’s not simply a movie about radio astronomy and our search for extraterrestrial life. This movie is about our struggle with science and religion – something that I have been dealing with all my life.
Growing up as a product of our nation’s public school system, being a geek, astronomer wanna-be and general sci-fi nut, I believe most of the things that science tells us about our existence. I see the big-bang, I see the dinosaurs, I see evolution, I see lots of things that we have figured out: like gravity and the fact the Earth is a sphere and how Earth is part of the solar system and the Milky Way.
But as a Christian, I see a force at work behind all of this – I see God making things happen. I see God bestowing us with desire and intelligence to figure all of this out. Sometimes it’s hard to make things coincide – like the peverel 6 days of creation – but that’s what faith is about.
It’s hard sometimes to be able to cope with these conflicting stories – which make faith a much stonger thing in my mind. I see myself a mixture of both of the main characters of this film – both Ellie and Palmer. I mean seriously, how many Christians do you know that have a dedicated SETI at home computer?
There’s so much that I want to say about all of this (on both sides), but right now, I’m having a hard time concentrating because of being sick (which is why I stayed home today). Suffice to say that I’ll be back to finish this up (I may even make an entire page dedicated to the subject.
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@Moose: Well, we may not have disturbed anything. The premice of the story is that there are other civilizations that, “for billions of years” have been listening to the emissions of other civilizations.
It’s kind of hard to fathom, but just looking around at the stars we can see with our eyes gives us millions, if not billions, of possible neighbors. It seems so highly unlikely to me that we’re the only intelligent life in the universe. There’s too many stars in our galaxy – let alone the entire universe – for us to be alone.
The bigger question that I think we need to be looking at is: What do we do when (not if), we find some evidence of life anywhere but here on Earth?
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When I watched this, I realized just how LOUD we were. My thought was how fortunate for the rest of the Universe that we have only been able to transmit for such a short amount of time. I mean, who wants to hear most the crap that we produce as a collective humanity??
After all, my parents were the first generation to have television – 1930′s or 1940′s. Radio is not much before that – 1870′s or so. How many billions of years of silence have we now disturbed?