Contact
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Contact, science-fiction novel by Carl Sagan, published in 1985.
(Read Carl Sagan’s Britannica entry on extraterrestrial life.)
Sagan, an astronomer at Cornell University who was inextricably tied to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (the SETI program), was one of the most famous popular scientists of the last century, as respected by his fellow professionals as he was by the public. A major proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life, Sagan designed a special plaque for the exterior of NASA spacecraft. It bore a universal message for spacecraft bound outside the solar system, which could be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it. He was also one of the first scientists, along with Frank Drake, to use a radio telescope to search for deliberate signals from nearby galaxies, estimating that our galaxy was home to more than a million civilizations.
The highly successful novel Contact, which was adapted for screen a year after Sagan died in 1996, was Sagan’s best-known foray into the world of fiction, bringing scientific principles to mainstream entertainment. Perhaps ironically, Sagan envisioned the novel as a film first, completing numerous drafts of a script treatment before turning to novel form. It proved a wise decision financially, for, before he began to work on the book, publisher Simon & Schuster offered him a $2 million advance (about $7.9 million in 2024 dollars). Simon & Schuster’s investment in turn proved to be well founded, for Contact sold 1.75 million copies in the first two years after its release as a hardcover in 1985.
Unsurprisingly, the overriding theme of the novel is that of extraterrestrial contact. The main character, astronomer Ellie Arroway, detects a signal from a nearby star, a repeating sequence of the first 261 prime numbers, which she deduces could only be sent from an intelligent civilization. It turns out that the message is more complex than initially realized; it actually contains a blueprint for an advanced space traveling machine. Religious fundamentalists, scientists, and governments argue over whether to build it and, in the end, a multinational team is chosen to make the trip. Throughout the story, Sagan intertwines complex mathematics with fiction, and through the knots in his story come hints of deep questions about the meaning of religion and spirituality, humanity, and social consciousness. Of particular interest to critics has been the implication that the universe is a created thing, a seemingly improbable tack for Sagan, an avowed atheist, to take. Sagan offered as evidence, at least within the bounds of the novel, a message that Arroway finds inside the mathematical constant pi: “Deep inside the transcendental number was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts. The universe was made on purpose, the circle said.” Much commentary has been devoted to this matter ever since Sagan’s book appeared, and it continues decades afterward.