readiness to engage in off-world contact by enabling faster-than-light travel. In the parlance of the book, they create a warp drive. In this movie environment, while powering a spacecraft to an effective speed beyond that of light, a warp drive also creates a signature detectable through appropriate instrumentation. The movie centers on the seminal event, termed First Contact, when Homo sapiens sapiens first encountered beings from another world. In this case people from Vulcan, home of Mr. Spock, made a visit to Earth. Such a scenario is not without merit. It says, essentially, one only needs to worry about interactions when the two parties are in close proximity within a common physical ecosystem. Close proximity, as we’ve suggested previously, is a function of the use of the four primary forces to facilitate an interaction. It is also perhaps interesting to consider our current situation in light of such an admission test. We have not yet created a warp drive, and despite the popularity of the concept among various entertainment venues, apparently no alien species have approached us yet. Of course, this is reminiscent of the peddler in old Oklahoma offering an aerosol spray to repel wild elephants. “But,” the potential buyer observed, “there aren’t any wild elephants in western Oklahoma.” “It works well, doesn’t it?” was the peddler’s reply. More seriously, this discussion plays into our consideration of various approaches for seeking causality in the world around us; a topic of Chapter 7.

The final movie that we’ll consider in this regard is the 1997 release of Contact. We must note that the book on which this movie is based was written by Carl Sagan, a noted astronomer. However, more than his technical contributions to astronomy, probably Sagan’s greatest contribution, and memorial, was his ability to communicate. Through a variety of efforts, he presented a thoughtful and well-understood commentary on the relationship of science and humanity. What is perhaps interesting in this regard is that this movie, derived from Sagan’s book, presents the issue of contact between intelligent species from as much a religious perspective, as from a scientific one.

Incidentally, the book Contact posits something of a different ending from that in the movie. Sagan seemed to care very deeply about the interrelationships between religion and science. In his book, essentially as a post-script, he presents a scenario in which researchers who are working to establish the value of Pi to an arbitrary level of accuracy find something very interesting a few million binary digits into it. There, they find a very long sequence of bits whose sequence length is the product of two prime numbers. When they displayed this sequence as a two-dimensional picture using one prime number to define the x-axis and the other to define the y-axis, the resulting display of ones and zeros produced a picture of a circle. Such an occurrence would constitute an excellent, celestial “Kilroy was here” sign.

The movie paints a picture of the human side of the initial contact with extra-terrestrials from the viewpoint of a SETI group (SETI – Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) that, through their diligent monitoring of radio-frequency transmissions from non-earth sources, detects a signal from the vicinity of the star Vega. As it happens, the extra-terrestrials, who are never actually identified in the movie, apparently had their own version of SETI, triggered by their reception of our earliest high-power television transmissions. As it happens, the aliens only had a listening post in the vicinity of Vega; their home world was not in this neighborhood.

On receiving the initial earth TV transmissions, rather perversely a broadcast featuring Adolf Hitler opening the Olympic Games of Berlin, twenty-seven years after their transmission (Vega is located twenty seven light-years from earth), the aliens begin broadcasting a response message back toward the earth. So, about 54 years after the Berlin Olympics, when it is detected and deciphered by the SETI team, the alien message comprises a set of construction plans for an inter-galactic conveyance system. It will carry one person there and back, wherever “there” is. Of

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