Cool stuff.It’s the 20th anniversary of Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 science fiction film Contact, and we’re in the middle of remembering its story of aliens purposefully communicating with our planet. There was also that really cool quote, which I have a shirt of - For small creatures such as we, the vastness of existence is made bearable only through love or whatever. It's a good read! Pretty much the entire book is building up tension, like, oh what's going on, are there actually aliens, what do they look like, blah blah blah, and it didn't feel to me like it was dragged out for too long. so, okay, it's a very idealized version of the actual arguments. Both sides of the argument are presented as intelligent people that know what they're talking about, and if i remember right, they're both also willing to hear what the other party has to say. I thought they had a good place in the story, the usual science-vs-religion debates, and I don't recall those parts being too dull. I'm seeing the other comments knocking the religious debates, but honestly, I didn't think those were that bad. I like to say that I like sci-fi, but Contact was definitely a different brand of it - it's got a lot of believable realism in it. I read it! And to be honest, I thought it was a really enjoyable read. I didn't intend to write this much, but Contact has been a pretty big influence on my life. The sexism I've encountered there has been real, and so have the complex relationships, and also the wonderful people I surround myself with, who delight in asking questions and push the limits of what we know. I've worked at several biotech startups, and now I work in the general tech industry. I did a science fair project in school on radio astronomy because I read this book, and I ended up robotics and biology in college. I'm a woman now, but reading this as a teenage girl prepared me a little bit for the sexism I would encounter later in life, and gave me a glimpse of how complex relationships could be. Since we're all supposed to be flawed and limited, it makes sense that while we can attempt to reconcile our world with our faith, that's our journey, not something that is supposed to be achievable.Īs someone who was raised atheist, this book made me a lot more sympathetic to religion, and a lot less of an asshole to religious people. In religion, questioning God, struggling with faith, testing beliefs, trying to find meaning in the sometimes capricious and cruel events around us have a long and storied history. It's right for us to question - in science, asking more questions, finding out more wrong things (falsifiable hypotheses), and poking things until they do other things gets us closer to understanding the world around us. There's danger in surety, be it in science or belief, and it's shown in the cultists and the insistence of the scientists around Ellie (movie) / and other scientists (book) that what they experienced was not based in reality.
CARL SAGAN CONTACT BOOK PDF MOVIE
I've also long enjoyed the religious aspects and questions that the book and movie bring up. Since it's written by Carl Sagan, the science is great and the forward-thinking aspects are well grounded in reality. You get to dig so much deeper into Ellie, her research, her relationships - professional, personal, romantic, familial - and there are so many subtle details that make her feel like a real person, one you'd really love to be friends with. Jodie Foster was also just killer - I really wish she'd had more fame in her career. I re-watched Contact recently, and it gave me a lot more appreciation for Matthew McConaughey's acting, and made me like him more for taking the part in Interstellar, continuing to act in sci-fi movies that aren't just blowing things up. I like to think of them as both starting with the same premise, but then taking slightly different perspectives on it.
I honestly love them both, even though there are some significant differences that I could see a fan of either being upset about.
I read the book first, and then saw the movie.