Contact
I just watched the 1997 film "Contact" starring Jodie Foster and Matthew Mcconaughey. I was inspired to watch it by the Carl Sagan biography I'm getting close to finishing by Keay Davidson (highly recommend). The idea for the movie was originally conceived by Sagan and wife Anne Druyan in 1979 but development stalled and Sagan decided to turn it into a novel instead. Later, it was re-picked up by Hollywood but unfortunately wasn't released until half a year after Sagan passed from cancer.
Briefly, I want to say that I saw "Arrival" when it came out a couple years ago and decidedly prefer "Contact". Contact's story feels fuller, more layered and somehow (in spite of wormhole travel) more plausible. Though I don't remember too many details of "Arrival", I remember feeling like the story had nowhere to go after the first third of the film. Contact, in contrast, develops steadily to the end. I was sincerely interested in where the story was going and, indeed, it went somewhere very interesting.
Probably my favorite new (to me) idea from Contact is the notion that aliens have built a subway-like network of wormholes through the Galaxy and share a billions-year old tradition of benevolently passing the information for how to access this network to new intelligent civilizations. They pass the information from one civilization to another through a sort of initiation ritual waaaaaaaaay older than any human culture's on Earth, welcoming a newly evolved intelligent species to the Galactic community. I also love that the tradition is so old that no one knows who began it. The information of who built the tunnel system doesn't really matter and is long lost to the depths of cosmic time. However, what does matter, and what does get passed along is the information for how to use it. I see this as reflective of how information gets passed from one generation to the next amongst humanity. For example, we don't need to know who built the internet; but we do need to know how to use it. What's important is that a species gets to join the network, that it spread its wings and join the larger community. I find it an awe-inspiring, exhilarating thought to imagine a galactic community we are presently unaware of, but that one day we might be invited to join.
Great blog post, Elan! This makes me want to re-watch the movie now. I love the idea that the network is so old that nobody knows who created it. The Internet, however, is still evolving and we do know about it's origin! I recommend the inspiring albeit slightly scatterbrained TED talk by the man himself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web (the set of web pages and hyerlinks, whereas the Internet refers more to the physical connections): https://youtu.be/OM6XIICm_qo . He discusses the centralization of the Web, his view on it, and his vision to re-decentralize it! He's leading a project at MIT to do so, called SOLID: https://solid.mit.edu/ :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Oliver! I watched that TedTalk; I think he must've said "Data" 200 times! My favorite line was at 16:00, "They're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them".
DeleteThe moment when his point actually made sense to me was when he showed the example of a scientist working on Alzheimers drug design doing a Google search query for "What proteins are involved in signal transduction AND are related to pyramidal neurons?" Google can't come up with any. But the recently created linked database returns 32 appropriate proteins. All of a sudden the researcher has 32 proteins to investigate in trying to develop a novel Alzheimer's drug. That's incredible! I wish he had given more concrete examples of how linked data can benefit our lives; I suspect a lot of people need convincing given privacy concerns.
By the way, I wasn't suggesting that we don't know who created the web. Rather, my point was just that that piece of information is trivial compared to the information for how to use it :)