Event 3: Contact Watch Party
Taken from IMDB For my third event, I attended the watch party for the movie Contact. This has always been one of my favorite movies, thanks to my lifelong obsession with space and the seemingly inevitable prospect of aliens. I've always been fascinated by the possibilities of intelligences completely different from our own, and I've been impatiently waiting for our SETI efforts to bear fruit-- despite the warnings by prominent minds like Stephen Hawking that they might very well mean our doom. The first time I watched the movie, I was quite disappointed when the movie failed to show me the true nature of the aliens who contacted humanity, and instead settled for murky vagaries-- but of course, now I can see the aliens were never really the point of the movie. In fact, aliens are rarely ever the point of any work of fiction that professes to be about aliens. In the end, nobody can possibly know what aliens are really like, and any speculation on that fr...