Life As We Don't Know It (Part 1)

As I mentioned a while back at the end of the article "Zeus's Little Secret, Or Galileo and Clarke's Europan Vacation," Science Fiction and Society is hosting a series of articles on the topic of extraterrestrial life. We will continue this series over the next week or so with a multipart feature, "Life As We Don't Know It," as well as some reviews of the books and movies mentioned in the article. New material will be published every other day. So please enjoy it and feel free to leave your own thoughts in the discussion area. We're looking forward to hearing from you.

And now, our feature presentation...

We are not alone. They're out there, and they're coming for us. These are just a few of the catch phrases that are tossed around with increasing frequency in this day and age. While these lines could easily refer to the IRS, that's not quite the traditional application. They're usually referring to extraterrestrials—little green men, if you will—and now more than ever we're all convinced that they're real.

Hollywood has had a lot to do with that. In recent years, movies about aliens have multiplied faster than a tribble at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure, they've always been around—The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, and the appropriately-titled E.T. to name just a few—but in the '90s things really took off. 1996's Independence Day signified a rebirth of sorts for the science fiction genre on the big screen, and Hollywood is flying high.

Most recently there have been stories about the laws of time (Frequency), a galactic spoof (Galaxy Quest), and an animated feature with a decidedly Japanese flavor (Titan A.E.).

But what I'd like to talk about today isn't the history of sci-fi on the silver screen, but rather how it has handled the question that is at the heart of our fascination with space: Are we alone? And to do this, we'll start with the 1997 film Contact.

Based on Carl Sagan's novel of the same name, Contact follows the career of a young woman named Eleanor Arroway, who became fascinated with space as a little girl. Back then she imagined that there was life on Venus, a different kind of people who dwelled amongst crystal cities.

As she grew older, Dr. Arroway found that this was a pipe dream. There was no one on Venus. But she also found that space is a pretty big place, and if our