Contact

by Carl Sagan

Hiding between all the ordinary numbers was an infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed unless you looked deeply into mathematics. Every now and then one of them, like π, would pop up unexpectedly in everyday life.

Ellie had never seriously read the Bible before and had been inclined to accept her father’s perhaps ungenerous judgment that it was “half barbarian history, half fairy tales.” So over the weekend preceding her first class, she read through what seemed to be the important parts of the Old Testament, trying to keep an open mind. She at once recognized that there were two different and mutually contradictory stories of Creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. She did not see how there could be light and days before the Sun was made, and had trouble figuring out exactly who it was that Cain had married. In the stories of Lot and his daughters, of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, of the betrothal of Dinah, of Jacob and Esau, she found herself amazed. She understood that cowardice might occur in the real world—that sons might deceive and defraud an aged father, that a man might give craven consent to the seduction of his wife by the King, or even encourage the rape of his daughters. But in this holy book there was not a word of protest against such outrages. Instead, it seemed, the crimes were approved, even praised.

When they came to the New Testament, Ellie’s agitation increased. Matthew and Luke traced the ancestral line of Jesus back to King David. But for Matthew there were twenty-eight generations between David and Jesus; for Luke forty-three. There were almost no names common to the two lists. How could both Matthew and Luke be the Word of God? The contradictory genealogies seemed to Ellie a transparent attempt to fit the Isaianic prophecy after the event—cooking the data, it was called in chemistry lab. She was deeply moved by the Sermon on the Mount, deeply disappointed by the admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and reduced to shouts and tears after the instructor twice sidestepped her questions on the meaning of “I bring not peace but the sword.” She told her despairing mother that she had done her best, but wild horses wouldn’t drag her to another Bible class.

The boys at the high school seemed painfully immature, and it was difficult—especially with her stepfather’s strictures and curfews—to establish much of a relationship with the young college men she met at lectures and rallies. John Staughton was right, she reluctantly admitted to herself, at least about this: The young men, almost without exception, had a penchant for sexual exploitation. At the same time, they seemed much more emotionally vulnerable than she had expected. Perhaps the one caused the other.

She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken.

The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female.

But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

One day he told her he wanted a baby. He would be serious, he’d settle down, he’d get a regular job. He might even consider marriage. “A baby?” she asked him. “But I’d have to leave school. I have years more before I’m done. If I had a baby, I might never go back to school.” “Yeah,” he said, “but we’d have a baby. You wouldn’t have school, but you’d have something else.” “Jesse, I need school,” she told him.

I needed school, too!

You stay safely on your own planet and point your telescope with its associated electronics. Information about other worlds then comes fluttering down through the feeds. She marveled at the notion.

When she thought carefully about it, she was surprised that, in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, what could be done was so far ahead of what had been done.

By studying radio waves you can learn about planets and stars and galaxies, about the composition of great clouds of organic molecules that drift between the stars, about the origin and evolution and fate of the universe.

If global war ever came, perhaps the radio astronomers would be the first to know, their windows to the cosmos overflowing with orders to battle-management and damage-assessment satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and with the transmission of coded launch commands to distant strategic outposts.

“So from their point of view, Hitler is the first sign of intelligent life on Earth. I’m not trying to be ironic. They don’t know what the transmission means, so they record it and transmit it back to us. It’s a way of saying ‘Hello, we heard you.’ It seems to me a pretty friendly gesture.”

Attendance in churches had soared all over America. The Message, Ellie believed, was a kind of mirror in which each person sees his or her own beliefs challenged or confirmed. It was considered a blanket vindication of mutually exclusive apocalyptic and eschatological doctrines. In Peru, Algeria, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, and among the Hopi, serious public debates took place on whether their progenitor civilizations had come from space; supporting opinions were attacked as colonialist. Catholics debated the extraterrestrial state of grace. Protestants discussed possible earlier missions of Jesus to nearby planets, and of course a return to Earth. Muslims were concerned that the Message might contravene the commandment against graven images. In Kuwait, a man announced himself as the Hidden Imam of the Shiites. Messianic fervor had arisen among the Sossafer Chasids. In other congregations of Orthodox Jews there was a sudden renewal of interest in Astruc, a zealot fearful that knowledge would undermine faith, who in 1305 had induced the Rabbi of Barcelona, the leading Jewish cleric of the time, to forbid the study of science or philosophy by those under twenty-five, on pain of excommunication. Similar currents were increasingly discernible in Islam.

The usual religious hysteria which can be predicted because this hysteria is based on previous episodes of actual real-life hysteria that has occurred in the past.

UFO groups had organized round-the-clock vigils at Brooks Air Force Base, near San Antonio, where the perfectly preserved bodies of four occupants of a flying saucer that had crash-landed in 1947 were said to be languishing in freezers; the extraterrestrials were reputed to be one meter tall and to have tiny flawless teeth. Apparitions of Vishnu had been reported in India, and of the Amida Buddha in Japan; miraculous cures by the hundreds were announced at Lourdes; a new Bodhisattva proclaimed herself in Tibet. A novel cargo cult was imported from New Guinea into Australia; it preached the construction of crude radio telescope replicas to attract extraterrestrial largesse. The World Union of Free Thinkers called the Message a disproof of the existence of God. The Mormon Church declared it a second revelation by the angel Moroni.

Based on historical facts.

No, a certain kind of mind and character was drawn to the military applications of science and mathematics—people who liked big explosions, for example; or those with no taste for personal combat who, to avenge some schoolyard injustice, aspired to military command; or inveterate puzzle solvers who longed to decrypt the most complex messages known. Occasionally the spur was political, tracing back to international disputes, immigration policies, wartime horrors, police brutality, or national propaganda by this nation or that decades earlier.

By the time context-recognition chips were commercially available, he was ready with Preachnix, a submodule which could be plugged into Adnix. It would simply switch channels if by chance a doctrinaire religious program should be tuned in. You could preselect key words, such as “Advent” or “Rapture,” and cut great swaths through the available programming. Preachnix was a godsend for a longsuffering but significant minority of television viewers.

I’d buy this.

No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.

You look at human history and it’s clear we’ve been on our own.”

“Do Buddhists believe in God, or not?” Ellie asked on their way to have dinner with the Abbot. “Their position seems to be,” Vaygay replied dryly, “that their God is so great he doesn’t even have to exist.”

ROTF!

Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic; and she found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard. • • •

But then she brightened. “In fact it was a marvelous ride.”

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods— They kill us for their sport. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE King Lear, IV, i, 36

“This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so . . . brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power.”

Exactly. Truth.

But she was much too busy undoing and reconstructing the mythology of her life.

I’ve done this twice, so far.