I watched the movie “Contact” the other night. I had seen the movie before and liked it but this time around I studied it more carefully.
For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a scientist who works for S.E.T.I (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She spends her days listening to signals transmitted from space in the hopes that one of those signals will be a message from an intelligent life form that is not native to Earth.
During the course of the film she picks up such a signal and the movie continues to explore the social, political, spiritual and religious ramifications that would occur if we, in fact, discovered that humans were not alone in the universe.
This part of the movie was done very well. I think it is the most “accurate” portrayal of how different groups of humans would behave in a situation like this (excluding the fact that it fails to show how Muslims or Buddhists would view this situation). After this, however, things get a bit shaky.
The alien intelligence transmits blueprints for the construction of a massive machine that will allow one human representative to travel to the origin of the signal. The technology used is beyond human comprehension. We are able to build it but not able to understand how it functions. This alien intelligence is obviously far more advanced than we are. At the end of construction the bill for this machine is more than a couple of trillion dollars.
And now my point, I feel that if a more advanced alien intelligence were to contact us and wish to speak with one human representative I don’t think they would send blueprints for a machine that costs so much. This might sound a bit frivolous but hear me out.
The advance of technology only came with the industrial revolution which, when you really think about it, was initiated by greed. Instead of paying your ten employees a salary to produce your product you can fire those employees, build a machine that will produce ten times as much as your former employees ever did and make 100 times more money. In today’s language we call this “good business sense” or “productivity” but really it’s nothing more than greed which is the basis of capitalism; making money through the exploitation of human and/or natural resources.
Any alien intelligence more advanced than us would not send blueprints fro a machine that only the greediest nation could ever hope to construct. It is for this reason that I feel “Contact” is fundamentally flawed as well as the fact that there’s hardly any black folks in it, but that’s another post for another day. In the meantime watch the movie and let me know what you think.
