Event 3: Contact Viewing Party

Last week, on Thursday I think, I attended the watch party for the 1997 Robert Zemeckis movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster as Eleanor Arroway and Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss (IMDb). The movie begins with the young and hopeful Ellie as she speaks with people from across the continental United States with a HAM radio, a predecessor to her work in using radio frequencies and satellites to contact aliens. I'm not particularly interested in providing a more detailed synopsis of the film, nor am I really going to be talking about the final acts which have too much fiction and and not enough science for my taste. I also don't care for the the human drama aspect of the film, since that's not at all relevant to the course or the nature of this blog post.


Very Large Array - National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Very Large Array in New Mexico
https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla/

I did, however, notice some interesting things when watching the film, the first being that the broadcast was sent to the center of the Vega system. Vega, as a star, is only twenty-six light-years away from us, and under fine conditions can be seen by anybody not at the heart of a metropolitan area (Space). What's interesting about it is that the broadcast that the alien returned to Earth was transmitted into space in 1936. The movie is set in 1988, which means that the transmission would have had enough time to reach the Vega System and return to Earth, a testament to the thought and detail put into the story by Sagan. On the other hand, it is debatable whether that broadcast, though strong enough to leave the ionosphere, would have even been distinguishable from the CMB or any other noise (NRAO). Other factual errors that I noticed involved the aptly named "Very Large Array" in New Mexico, in how not only has it never had the ability to send and receive radio transmissions in space, but even if it could, the use of cellular communications in the form of walkie-talkies anywhere near it would disrupt its functions (Perreault). 

Arecibo Message
Arecibo Message
seti.org/seti-institute/project/details
/arecibo-message

But okay, let me move away from my relentless nitpicking of movies and the liberties cinema takes in the pursuit of entertainment, and focus on the idea of "contact". There is a large portion of the population that believes that humans have, at some point in the past, come into contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. This is stuff like Roswell, Area 51, grainy footage of UFOs, and even the recently released Pentagon footage that appears to capture an aircraft moving using technology far more advanced than what any nation on Earth possesses. It's also crop circles, Greys, tales of abduction, and in some circles, even the creation of the pyramids at Giza. I've always been less of a skeptic and more of a contrarian. I've never believed any of the stories of UFOs, or orbs of light, or abductions. And now that the government's released "evidence" of UFOs, despite vehemently denying it for the last half-century, I'm inclined to think they're still lying. 

We've also considered the conditions under which we would communicate with extraterrestrial life. The Arecibo message is a radio message that contains information about the Earth, humanity, and our current understanding of science, that was sent to star cluster M13 back in 1974. This wasn't particularly a means of establishing communication with aliens, but more a means of demonstrating our knowledge of mathematics and physics (SETI). The Pioneer plaques were a similar endeavor, two gold-anodized aluminum plaques placed on the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, which depict humans, our location relative to our Sun, the spacecraft, and a hydrogen-atom-based unit of measurement (NASA).

Contact is a great movie about the idea of alien communications and the skepticism with which it might be received, and the overwhelmingly idiotic public reception to such news, but despite how accurate it depicts the societal aspect of such an event, I feel it falls short with how it shows actual communication would ever be established. 

Pioneer Plaque
Pioneer Plaque
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/706/pioneer-plaque/



Works Cited

"A Detailed View of the Visual Message on the Pioneer Plaques". NASA Ames, NASA, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/706/pioneer-plaque/.

“Arecibo Message.” SETI Institute, SETI Institute, www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/arecibo-message.

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

Digital Recreation of the Arecibo Message. “Arecibo Message.” SETI Institute, SETI Institute, www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/arecibo-message.

Howell, Elizabeth. “Vega: The North Star of the Past and the Future.” Space.com, Space, 9 Nov. 2018, www.space.com/21719-vega.html.

Inverse-Square Law of Propagation, www.gb.nrao.edu/GBTopsdocs/primer/inverse-square_law_of_propa.htm.

Perreault, Tony. “Radio Frequency Interference.” NRAO, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 30 Apr. 2021, science.nrao.edu/facilities/vla/docs/manuals/obsguide/rfi.

Photograph of the Very Large Array in New Mexico. "Very Large Array". NRAO, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla/.

“Pioneer Plaque.” NASA, NASA, 13 Feb. 2018, solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/706/pioneer-plaque/.



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