Nobody knows where, or if the machine will even take anyone anywhere. (Unfortunately, the first transmission involves Hitler, to the embarrassment of many.) The second and far more important message is a blueprint for a machine, one designed to take five people somewhere. Two additional messages are broadcast: one is a playback of the very first Earth transmission into space, replayed to the planet to show that Earth has been noticed. Prime numbers are not the only thing being transmitted in the Message. It is almost definitely from another civilization. After meticulously checking for hoaxes and radio interference, the Argus scientists confirm that the message is coming from the star system of Vega, twenty-six light years away. One night, the radio telescopes pick up a signal: prime numbers, which would be extremely unlikely to be created by natural phenomena. She is assigned to work on the Argus project, a large radio telescope array designed to search the farthest reaches of the universe. She originally works on more 'conventional' studies, but as the years pass, she decides to follow her interests and work on the SETI project. As she grows from a young girl to a mature woman, she gains a rebellious streak, asking tough questions about religious contradictions and refusing to listen to her stepfather under the pretense that he is not Ellie's true father, who passed away before Ellie reached adolescence.Īfter her college and graduate school years, she works as an astronomer with radio telescopes.
The young Ellie Arroway is curious and skeptical, asking questions about everything. The book opens with a description of her childhood. The heroine of the story is Eleanor Arroway, an astrophysicist and radio telescope engineer, working on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (also known as SETI).
Based on Sagan's own studies as an astrophysicist and philosopher, Contact provides a possible glimpse of the world's reaction to extraterrestrial life. That is the premise of Carl Sagan's novel Contact.
But they caught a broadcast of prime numbers, a message that would change the course of Earth's history forever. If the telescopes hadn't been looking at the star that night, the scientists watching over the signals picked up by the telescopes may never have discovered the first sign of life outside our planet. It was probably sheer luck that caused the many radio telescopes of the Argus project to point at the star system of Vega at exactly the right time. Contact (the webpage author, not the Vegans)
0 kommentar(er)
