Arriving at New Mexico is Soviet astrophysicist Vasily Lunacharsky ('Vaygay'), a colleague of Ellie's. Due to Vega setting in other countries throughout the day, partnership with the world community-Australia, China, India, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Western Europe-is vital.

Summoned to the White House to debrief the (female) president, Ken explains that the German signal was the first television broadcast of moderate power transmitted from Earth and that the Vegans are simply acknowledging us back.Įllie advises the president that she's discovered blocks of non-repeating information coming in under the signal that might take decades to process. The facility breaks down the signal and to their shock, find a television broadcast of Adolph Hitler speaking at the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Drumlin decrypts enough of the signal to determine there's a picture there. Working closely together, Ellie and Ken ultimately develop a romantic relationship. While Kitz remains wary of sharing the discovery with the rest of the world, Ken is supportive of Ellie. In addition to Drumlin, who goes from skeptic to true believer, the multitudes who descend on New Mexico include the President's Science Advisor Kenneth der Heer and Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Kitz. Ellie quickly shares her discovery with the world astronomical community, bypassing the National Science Foundation. The signal is broken into a series of prime numbers which dramatically rules out celestial phenomenon. Ellie and the technicians rule out malfunction, military or commercial interference or a prank. We wanted to believe it too badly.Īrgus receives a set of moving pulses transmitting at 9.2 gigahertz from Vega, a debris strewn system only twenty-six light years from Earth. Drumlin's argument was suspect on these grounds alone. It was the modern incarnation of the geocentric solipsism, the conceit that had captured our ancestors, the notion that we were the center of the universe. It dovetailed perfectly with human fears and pretensions, with unproved doctrines about life-after-death, with such pseudosciences as astrology. So why had we received no signal? Could Dave possibly be right? No extraterrestrial civilizations anywhere? All those billions of worlds going to waste, lifeless, barren? Intelligent beings growing up only in this obscure corner of an incomprehensibly vast universe? No matter how valiantly she tried, Ellie couldn't make herself take such a possibility seriously. In absence of evidence, she has faith in the unseen. She considers resistance to the possibility of extraterrestrial life to be the domain of kooks. Inspired by a radio astronomer from Cal Tech named Peter Valerian, Ellie remains fascinated by the challenge of detecting intelligent life beyond the stars. David Drumlin, lectures Ellie that she should be devoting resources to practical science instead of 'pandering to UFO kooks and comic strips and weak-minded adolescents.' Ellie's graduate advisor, famed radio astronomer Dr. Through public support for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life), the facility is also scanning the cosmos for alien civilizations. Ellie Arroway-graduate Cum Laude from Harvard, with a doctorate in radio astronomy from Cal Tech-is director of Project Argus, an array of 131 radio telescopes in the scrub brush of New Mexico, studying quasar evolution, binary pulsars and the chromospheres of nearby stars by listening to radio emissions.

I like the movie a lot more than the book, though the DNA of what made the film so emotionally compelling is still here, hidden like numerals in π. I gave the book a lot of latitude, not only for Sagan's potential shortcomings with character and dialogue, but for hopes that the novel could live up to the engaging 1997 film adaptation starring Jodie Foster. Another member of the First Novel/ Last Novel club is astronomer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Cosmos and science communicator Carl Sagan, whose foray into fiction was Contact, published in 1985. Salinger ( The Catcher in the Rye), Harper Lee ( To Kill a Mockingbird) and Sylvia Plath ( The Bell Jar) all published one novel each.

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