Life As We Don't Know It (Part 2)
now learned four words.
And things just continue from there. For verbs they sometimes use movies. The aliens have found a way to communicate with beings who are completely different from them.
This scientific and mathematical jargon is the lingua franca of the universe, and this is the only way in which we will be able to communicate with alien life when we first encounter it. So in this respect Contact has treated the question of alien life very well. While the universal translator of Star Trek or the babel fish of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy may make for great storytelling, they just aren't realistic.
QUARANTINED BY LIGHT
The last thing to point out about Contact's treatment of our first encounter with alien life is how indirect it is. No alien armies invade Earth, no human starships enter orbit around faraway worlds to enter into high-level negotiations with foreign governments. In Contact, an alien culture receives one of our TV transmissions that took 26 years to reach their listening post. It then takes another 26 years for their reply to reach us. This is with the message traveling both directions at the speed of light.
According to Einstein, nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light. I personally do not believe that this will prove to be true, and we have some evidence that subatomic particles called tachyons do in fact violate this aspect of relativity, but for the time being there is no way to exceed this speed. But remember that their will one day be a 30th century science, and who knows what humans will be able to do.
Back to our story, when Ellie finally does meet the aliens in Contact she doesn't meet them anywhere near Earth. She meets them at the center of our galaxy, taken there by an ancient interstellar subway. And she doesn't meet them face-to-face, either. She meets them in the form of her late father, a form they pulled from her mind as she slept the night before. After a brief conversation, she is returned to Earth.
And that's that. No invasion armies, no target practice using asteroids. Just a brief and amiable encounter. This is most likely how it will go when it happens in real life. Or just as likely we will receive a message but the interstellar distances will be so great that we will never actually meet those who sent it. Space is huge. We are quite isolated out here in the backwaters of the Orion spiral arm. How often would you go visit your pen pal who
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