Carl Sagan’s vision transcends the genre like no other
In Season One of South Park, Mr. Garrison vomits at the mere mention of the film Contact. “Waited that entire movie to see the alien and it was her goddamned father,” he moans.
It’s a funny line, but as a critique of the film it’s also unfair. If you’d read the book, you’d know that Contact wasn’t going to be like Alien or E.T. even Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If you’ve read Sagan’s other books, you’d know he found the idea of aliens physically visiting Earth wildly improbable. And while he did enjoy speculating on the nature of “exobiology,” those musings came second to his goal of spreading scientific literacy.
What irked me as well was the fact that South Park’s creators seemed to have missed the point of the story. Contact isn’t an action or a horror movie. It’s not even a film like Arrival, where the aliens’ physiology is relevant to philosophical arguments about the nature of language and the mind.
The point of Contact is suggested by the title itself: it’s a story about making a connection with another intelligence. This encounter, Sagan is telling us, will ultimately startle us not because of how alien, but how familiar, it is.
… an awful waste of space
I’ve always thought it was terribly unfair that people of a scientific bent were seen as killjoys, while peddlers of tarot cards and horoscopes were praised for being “open-minded” and “attuned to the energy of the cosmos,” or something.
The poet e.e. cummings called progress “a comfortable disease,” and the “flying saucer cultists,” as Sagan called them, were suffering from this disease. Myths of alien visitors might fill the God-shaped hole left in the wake of enormous technological and cultural changes, he argued. But that didn’t make them true.
I think that for Sagan, mythology — including contemporary myths like UFOs, astral projection, ESP and so on — amounted to little more than mental masturbation. The feeling of what is true, which at best marks the beginning of inquiry, becomes for the spiritualist an end in itself.
Science, on the other hand, requires actually going out and courting the universe. There’s give and take, disappointment and rejection. But there’s also the possibility of deep connection.
The universe is vast. Even our own galaxy is unfathomably huge, and it’s only one of billions. The Milky Way is home to billions upon billons of stars, many of which likely have planets of their own. And given what we know about the biochemistry of life, it’s a good bet that life has arisen and evolved on many of those planets. In some cases, it may even have developed civilization and technology as advanced or more advanced than our own.
“The universe is a pretty big place,” as Ellie Arroway’s father reminds her at the beginning of Contact. “If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
But if Sagan was nearly certain that life must exist somewhere out there in the cosmos, he was also deeply skeptical of claims that aliens had actually visited Earth. And he had good reason to be.
Even in a universe teeming with life, space travel is hard. Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, but developed rudimentary space flight only in the last half century or so. To date, we’ve sent only a handful of unmanned craft outside of our solar system, and we’re nowhere near sending humans on interstellar missions. We can’t even get to the planet next door.
Sagan wrote Contact during the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation still felt like a probable terminus for the human race. These days, climate change is the more pressing existential threat. But either way, we’re reminded of the fact that advanced technological civilizations don’t necessarily last forever. Even if many others have existed or will exist during the long history of the universe, what are the odds that their flourishing will overlap with ours?
Finally, Sagan wondered, what reason would they have to come here? Even if they had mastered interstellar travel, and even if that attainment coincided with the emergence of our own global civilization, what interest could Earth possibly hold for them?
The sheer number of UFO sightings ought to arouse our suspicion. Given what we’ve just been saying about the longevity and capability of technological civilizations, to have been visited so frequently seemed unlikely at best, “as if all the anthropologists in the world were to converge on one of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean because they just invented the fishnet there.” In any event, you’d expect all those encounters to yield at least one piece of unequivocal scientific evidence. That they had not convinced Sagan that we were dealing with a pop culture phenomenon, not a scientific one.
Contact must be understood in this light, as an antidote to pop culture myths and an introduction to the hard but much more rewarding science of searching out alien life.
We are starstuff
T.S. Eliot once wrote: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”
In other words, to learn and explore is not simply a matter of accumulating facts or stockpiling selfies. Genuine exploration changes us. To learn is also to grow, and hopefully come to a greater awareness of what drives us to explore in the first place.
If you were watching Contact and hoping to see a really cool alien with a big head and slimy exoskeleton or something like that, you failed to appreciate what Sagan really wanted us to understand: the most important consequence of alien contact would be the way it transformed how we saw ourselves.
In Cosmos, Sagan wrote that “an extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.” By seeing ourselves through their eyes, perhaps we could finally appreciate that basic, underlying unity.
Sagan seemed to hope so. The alien takes the form of Ellie’s father, in its words, to “make things easier for her.” But any fan of Sagan’s work will recognize in this scene his belief that scientific discovery doesn’t just illuminate the natural world; it also humanizes us.
Sagan’s project was about transcending all the various parochialisms that kept us from seeing the world, and each other, as fundamentally connected. He longed for a politics that transcended races and nations, and a theology that transcended superstition and dogma. His humanism was encapsulated by the Enlightenment poet Alphonse de Lamartine: “I am the fellow citizen of every thinking being; my country is truth.”
Near the end of the film, the religious scholar Palmer Joss is asked whether he believes Ellie’s story about having visited an alien on a distant planet. He replies that he does. “As a man of faith I’m bound by a different covenant than Dr. Arroway,” Joss says. “But our goal is one and the same: the search for truth.”
Contact is Sagan’s confession of faith that the highest expressions of science, religion, and art may yet converge. We may not see that through the abortive and tribalistic signifiers we use to define and separate ourselves, but contact with alien intelligence will break the spell. Communing with these strange fellow seekers of Truth, we will put aside our petty totems and embrace a vision of the Good that spans the stars.