contacts

''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 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 (anthropology)first contact with extraterrestrials. A Contact (movie)film adaptation of ''Contact'', starring Jodie Foster, was released in 1997.

Plot summary - spoiler Ellie is the director of "Project Argus," in which scores of radio telescopes in New Mexico are used to intensely SETIsearch 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 ChristianityChristian preachers, informally debating God's existence. Applying the scientific method, she states 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 wormholes to a place near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where they meet the senders of the message. Many of the travelers' questions are answered. Upon returning to Earth, the passengers discover that what seemed like many hours to them passed by in only fractions of a second on Earth, and that all their video footage has been erased, presumably by some phenomenon in the vehicle. 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.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 and in base 11, she finds out that a special pattern ''does'' exist when the numbers are reorganized as a square: a perfect circle. It is an unmistakably intelligent artifact, "the artist's signature", woven into the fabric of space.

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. Also, the novel end could be interpreted as the finding of a proof of "an intelligence that antedates the universe." The novel has been adopted as a touchstone by the leading proponents of the intelligent design movement, though Sagan was a well-known atheismatheist committed to scientific and intellectual rigor and opposition to 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." 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. This position is in direct conflict with the vast body of Sagan's views as represented in his work and writings, which are best described as dismissive of claims of supernatural origins of the cosmos and favoring explanations of a naturalismnaturalistic origin.It is somewhat questionable as to how an intelligence can encode a message inside a number like ''piπ''. Some numbers which define essential properties of our universe, like the fine structure constant or Isaac NewtonNewton's gravitational constant, could conceivably 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; which recalls Albert Einstein's conundrum, the question "Did God have any choice in creating the Universe?"). However, ''π'' falls into a different category. It is defined by the nature of the circle, which in turn has a specific definition as a set of points in a metric space. ''Any'' intelligence, working in any universe—no matter what the characteristics of its particular "space-time fabric"—must deduce the same value of ''π'' given the same definition of a circle (one presumes that a circle would be a useful abstraction to make in any reasonable universe which could sustain intelligent life).This type of argument goes back to philosophyphilosophers like Averroes, who proposed that not even God could create a triangle whose internal angles did not add up to 180 degrees. The degrees within a triangle is a fixed consequence of Euclidean geometry; 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 Feynman, he pointed out that the decimal expansion of the fraction 1/243 repeats in a rather amusing way:$\backslash frac\; =\; 0.00411522633744\; \backslash ldots$This letter irritated the censorshipcensor 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; is there more information in ''π'', for example, than in the definition of a circle?Furthermore, it is not surprising that a "message" can be found in the digits of ''π''. If ''π'' is indeed a normal number, then 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 pisearch.de.vu - knowing where it is.

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