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 front is sure to be punctured immediately by the truth, if we ever know it. 

Stephen Hawking Taken from The Guardian

    What we can know and speculate about is how humanity will react to the knowledge that aliens exist, and Contact's version of events rings painfully true. From the fanatics and cults to the urge to leverage the discovery for geopolitical advantage, Contact certainly presents a very cynical view of humanity. A book I have read that is quite similar to Contact is a Chinese sci-fi novel called The Three-Body Problem, which also involves aliens contacting Earth-- but rather than the benign aliens of Contact, The Three-Body Problem's aliens have genocidal intentions. Similar to Contact but even more cynical, the Three-Body Problem and its sequels present humanity at its lowest, as society crumbles under the mere specter of alien invasion, centuries before the aliens even arrive. I find it interesting that despite the far darker nature of the Three-Body Problems' aliens, in the end both it and Contact conclude with a simple message of belief and love. In the end, the nature of the aliens didn't really matter-- what matters, in the end, is human nature, and whether it can be, or needs to be, overcome. 

The Three Body Problem Taken from Goodreads

Works Cited:

Anderson, Paul Scott. “Will SETI 2.0 Lead to a Discovery of Intelligent Aliens?: Space.” EarthSky, 14 Apr. 2020, earthsky.org/space/seti-breakthrough-listen-new-technologies-and-strategies/.

Cofield, Calla. “Stephen Hawking: Intelligent Aliens Could Destroy Humanity, But Let's Search Anyway.” Space.com, Space, 21 July 2015, www.space.com/29999-stephen-hawking-intelligent-alien-life-danger.html.

“Contact (1997 American Film).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 31 May 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film).

Garber, Steve. “SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” NASA, NASA, 29 Sept. 2014, history.nasa.gov/seti.html.

“The Three-Body Problem (Novel).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 31 May 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel).

Image Credits:

“Contact.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 11 July 1997, www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/. 

Penrose, Roger. “'Mind over Matter': Stephen Hawking – Obituary by Roger Penrose.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Mar. 2018, www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/stephen-hawking-obituary.

“The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.” Goodreads, Goodreads, 11 Nov. 2014, www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-problem.