Contact

by Carl Sagan

She consented to rote memorization, but knew that it was at best the hollow shell of an education. She did the minimum work necessary to do well in her courses, and pursued other matters.

She dreamed of reconciling her two worlds. She had fantasies of musicians and physicists in harmonious social concert. But the evenings she organized were awkward and ended early.

Valerian had thought about extraterrestrial intelligence, abbreviated ETI, longer and harder—and in many cases more carefully—than anyone else. As she grew to know him better, it seemed that ETI provided a fascination, a romance, that was in dramatic contrast with the humdrum business of his personal life. This thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence was not work for him, but play. His imagination soared.

There were a billion channels to choose from. You could spend your life trying to outguess the computer, listening with pathetically limited human ears and brains, seeking a pattern.

a headline of the News-Post had caught her eye: GUERRILLAS CAPTURE JOBURG RADIO. If we like them, they’re freedom fighters, she thought. If we don’t like them, they’re terrorists. In the unlikely case we can’t make up our minds, they’re temporarily only guerrillas.

Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours to civilize civilization and Christianize Christendom? —HERMAN MELVILLE White Jacket (1850) Silence alone is great; all else is weakness. —ALFRED DEVIGNY La Mort du Loup (1864)

“With an ambassador, you’re supposed to put your best foot forward, and we’ve been sending mainly crap to space for forty years. I’d like to see the network executives come to grips with this one. And that madman Hitler, that’s the first news they have about Earth? What are they going to think of us?”

ELLIE IGNORED random access and advanced sequentially through the television stations. Lifestyles of the Mass Murderers and You Bet Your Ass were on adjacent channels. It was clear at a glance that the promise of the medium remained unfulfilled.

The program was one of her few favorites, Yesterday’s News, reruns of network news shows of earlier years. The second half of the program consisted of a point-by-point dissection of the misinformation in the first half, and the obdurate credulity of the news organizations before any claims by any administration, no matter how unsupported and self-serving. It was one of several television series produced by an organization called REALI-TV—including Promises, Promises, devoted to follow-up analyses of unfulfilled campaign pledges at local, state, and national levels, and Bamboozles and Baloney, a weekly debunking of what were said to be widespread prejudices, propaganda, and myths.

“It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.” He continued to carry both twig and larva. They walked for a while in silence past almost 55,000 names engraved in reflecting black granite. “Every government that prepares for war paints its adversaries as monsters,” she said. “They don’t want you thinking of the other side as human. If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters.”

She recalled how charming John Staughton had been to her while courting her mother, and how easily he had cast off this pose after he became her stepfather. Some new and monstrous persona, hitherto barely glimpsed, could emerge in men shortly after you married them. Her romantic predispositions made her vulnerable, she thought. She was not going to repeat her mother’s mistake.

“No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost,” der Heer replied, stroking her shoulder. “Maybe that’s one of its functions—so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.”

“So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly—like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who’s more religious would you say—the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?”

You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.

not resist thinking about the differences in national character—the Americans as individualists, and the Russians engaged in a collective endeavor.

Hokkaido had seemed safe enough for the testing of individual Machine components. But concern had been expressed about actually assembling the Machine in Hokkaido. This was, as the mountains that surrounded the facility bore eloquent testimony, a region surging with recent volcanism. One mountain was growing at the rate of a meter a day. Even the Soviets—Sakhalin Island was only forty-three kilometers away, across the Soya, or La Pérouse Strait—had voiced some misgivings on this score. But in for a kopek, in for a ruble. For all they knew, even a Machine built on the far side of the Moon could blow up the Earth when activated.

“A frond. It’s a palm frond. I know you grew up in New York, but you must know what a palm tree is. It’s all in Ivanhoe. Didn’t you read it in high school? At the time of the Crusades, pilgrims who made the long journey to the Holy Land took back a palm frond to show they’d really been there. It’s to keep my spirits up. I don’t care how advanced they are. The Earth is my Holy Land. I’ll bring a frond to them to show them where I came from.”

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.

. . mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise. —Ralph Waldo Emerson “Merlin,” Poems (1847) It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent. —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Omniania

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God. —THOMAS BROWNE “On Dreams” Religio Medici (1642) Angels need an assumed body, not for themselves, but on our account. —THOMAS AQUINAS Summa Theologica, I, 51, 2

“Last night, we looked inside you. All five of you. There’s a lot in there: feelings, memories, instincts, learned behavior, insights, madness, dreams, loves. Love is very important. You’re an interesting mix.”

You’ve got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it’s amazing you haven’t blown yourselves to bits by now. That’s why we don’t want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability—at least in the short term.”