Contact Was Wrong - Aliens Can't Hear Us | Answers With Joe

Carl Sagan is an absolute legend and a hero, and his book Contact and the movie it's based on is phenomenal. HOWEVER... we examined the central conceit of the story - that aliens pick up our radio signals and return a message with instructions to build a machine - and look at the stars inside the 100 light-year bubble around Earth where our radio waves have traveled. And the potential of this happening... Well, it isn't good.

Sorry Carl.

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[Andlekin]

I don't know why, but the 100 mile goof really tickled me.

"How many habitable worlds are there within a 100-mile radius of earth?" - barely one!

[coreymerrill]

" maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox... is the universe got cable " that's a t-shirt, mug and poster in waiting.

[ColumbiaB]

In discussing the likelihood of habitable worlds where intelligent life has evolved, and developed radio communication technology, within “listening distance” of Earth, we should bear in mind that Sagan’s “Contact” did not postulate the star Vega as the home system of the aliens who detected human television transmissions, and then initiated communications with us. Vega was merely the site of a listening post the aliens had built — presumably, one of many they had placed in various parts of the galaxy.

[populuxe]

Yes, Sagan was quite capable of exercising artistic license to tell a story

[ray]

Shouting into the void and the Titanic comparison were incredibly apt.

[underwaterlaser]

“Shouting into the Void” is a great title for an auto biography.

[apasleger]

I fully agree with your statistical approach, as well as with the almost impossibility to detect an unfocused signal further than, say, one light-year away… BUT in Sagan’s book the contact came from Vega, 26 light-years away, well within the bubble. Further in the book it appears that Vega’s neighborhood isn’t inhabited, but that some kind of relay station is located there, waiting for civilizations to appear « nearby » and establish contact. The movie was not that bad, but left aside many things from the book, like the final twist with Pi, which I loved …

[flowerpt]

The radio transceiver is on Vega. Ellie takes the pod to Vega where it gets shifted to another wormhole to transit their transportation network.
This is all explained, narrated, and shown in the movie. Maybe review it with that in mind.

[FaultyMuse]

"Take [4500 stars], double it, then add 4000 more". That sounds a whole like like tripling with extra steps lol

[joetemple]

In the book "Contact" the aliens had a listening post that could hear us. it was not their home world.

[Michal_Kosakowski]

Now imagine there is a lifeform out there not advanced enough to build radio receivers, but their senses have evolved to experience it without any mechanical aid. They have lived peacefully for millennia in their primitive civilisations, and now are waging wars about weird voices of gods, that one day just appeared. There might be Intelligent beings killing each other in the name of our worst pop songs broadcasted decades ago.

[sifridbassoon]

two of my favorite scenes in Titanic are the scene with the flares that you mentioned and the scene when the last part of the stern goes under and you can see the name Titanic on the hull as the ship falls away into the ocean. Always gives me chills.

[lelandshennett]

“Our sun is a G class star...”

Fo shizzle

[tomislavhoman]

Take all the stars visible via naked eye, double it and add 4000 thousand stars - why not just (approximately) triple it? :)

[richdesau]

The attenuation problem always bothered me in the sense it was never an issue in these movies.

[PC-nfno]

This is exactly why I withdrew from the SETI at home program. For years my computer downloaded and analyzed signal packets looking for a radio signal that had almost no potential to contain a radio signal from a prespace or early space fairing alien culture. Seti had talked about looking for other transmissions of data or laser but I'm not sure how that has progressed. But now I'm going to check their site and see where they are at. Good Job Joe!

[philipocarroll]

But, in Contact, our radio signals were picked up by a wormhole relay system, so the signal only had to travel as far as Vega, or about 25 light years.

[michaelmoorrees]

"the aliens got cable" ... There are going to be a lot of angry aliens, our experience with customer service, is typical.

[souta]

Another issue that wasn't touched on is that signals below about 30MHz tend to get reflected or absorbed by our ionosphere. I don't think there was anything broadcast on frequencies above this limit until the late 30's, and it wasn't exactly common until after WWII.

Ham operators call this the MUF (Maximum Useable Frequency) in that frequencies above it no longer get reflected by the ionosphere and instead cut through. It varies a bit as well depending on season, sunspots, and other factors that aren't exactly well understood.

[michaelcorcoran]

I didn't know anything about the Earth transit zone. Always nice to learn something new. Sometimes it seems every channel has a lot of redundancy, but when it comes to cosmology there's just so much to learn!