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Good afternoon. I'm glad to be joined by my science and technology adviser ... [words cut by film editors]... This is the product of years of exploration ... [words cut]... by some of the world's most distinguished scientists. Like all discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined, and scrutinized. It must be confirmed by other scientists. But clearly, the fact that something of this magnitude is being explored is another vindication ... [film scene performed over recording, with dialogue obscuring Clinton's remarks and creating a gap]... If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far reaching and awe inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental. We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people's future. Thank you. [47] The truth of the matter comes down to a faith decision initiated by an oral tradition spreading the good news. This recapitulates instead of repudiates the development of early Christianity. Speaking about his activities in popularizing science, Sagan said that there were at least two reasons for scientists to share the purposes of science and its contemporary state. Simple self-interest was one: much of the funding for science came from the public, and the public therefore had the right to know how the money was being spent. If scientists increased public admiration for science, there was a good chance of having more public supporters. [93] The other reason was the excitement of communicating one's own excitement about science to others. [10]

Carl Edward Sagan was born in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York City's Brooklyn borough on November 9, 1934. [9] [10] His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York City; his father, Samuel Sagan, was a Ukrainian garment worker who emigrated from Kamianets-Podilskyi (which was then in the Russian Empire). [11] Sagan was named in honor of his maternal grandmother, Chaiya Clara, who had died while giving birth to her second child; she was, in Sagan's words, "the mother she [Rachel] never knew." [12] Sagan's maternal grandfather later married a woman named Rose, whom Sagan's sister Carol would later say was "never accepted" as Rachel's mother because Rachel "knew she [Rose] wasn't her birth mother." [13] Sagan's family lived in a modest apartment in Bensonhurst. He later discussed his family being Reform Jews, the most liberal of Judaism's four main branches. He and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother "definitely believed in God, and was active in the temple [...] and served only kosher meat." [14] During the worst years of the Depression, his father worked as a movie theater usher. [14] Sagan was associated with the U.S. space program from its inception. [ citation needed] From the 1950s onward, he worked as an advisor to NASA, where one of his duties included briefing the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. Sagan contributed to many of the robotic spacecraft missions that explored the Solar System, arranging experiments on many of the expeditions. Sagan assembled the first physical message that was sent into space: a gold-plated plaque, attached to the space probe Pioneer10, launched in 1972. Pioneer11, also carrying another copy of the plaque, was launched the following year. He continued to refine his designs; the most elaborate message he helped to develop and assemble was the Voyager Golden Record, which was sent out with the Voyager space probes in 1977. Sagan often challenged the decisions to fund the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station at the expense of further robotic missions. [45] Scientific achievements [ edit ] Sagan and the Viking spacecraft

Besides, Arroway thinks there are better ways for an “omnipotent, omniscient [and] compassionate” Being to leave “a record for future generations, to make his existence unmistakable.” That record would contain information unavailable to the historical human writers of sacred texts. I am writing this review to mainly focus on the major differences between the movie and the book.The book follows the same basic plot as the movie, but with a few exceptions (SPOILER ALERT):

Dr. Ellie Arroway works for the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. She was inspired to pursue a career in science, starting with amateur radio, by her father, who died in her youth. Her work involves listening to radio emissions from space in the hopes of finding signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The program loses funding after David Drumlin, the President's science advisor, deems it futile. However, Arroway receives financial support from S.R. Hadden, the secretive billionaire industrialist who runs Hadden Industries, which enables her to keep working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. The Message, by contrast, is authentic because different human cultures are receiving the same data — it’s a public, not private, revelation. Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others—for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein—considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws. [118]

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity. [119] Thematically, the ideas of science and faith run throughout the film. Certainly, the debate on the existence of God, strict adherence to facts, and the idea of finding indelible proof play huge roles. Sagan was a popular public advocate of skeptical scientific inquiry and the scientific method; he pioneered the field of exobiology and promoted the search for extra-terrestrial intelligent life ( SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (for his book The Dragons of Eden), and (for Cosmos: A Personal Voyage), two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award, and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After developing myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 on December 20, 1996. At the end of the film, Arroway is put into a position that she had traditionally viewed with skepticism and contempt: that of believing something with complete certainty, despite being unable to prove it in the face of not only widespread incredulity and skepticism (which she admits that as a scientist she would normally share) but also evidence apparently to the contrary. [29]

He is also the 1994 recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare." [53] He was denied membership in the academy, reportedly because his media activities made him unpopular with many other scientists. [54] [55] [56] At the museum, Arroway sees a display of “a plaster impression from a Red River sandstone of dinosaur footprints interspersed with those of a pedestrian in sandals.” The diorama seemed to prove that humans and dinosaurs co-existed and that evolution was false. amazing piece of fictional mathematics: she finds a message hidden in the decimal expansion of the number pi. If you are going to read the book,

Part one gave you some of the awe and wonder of space and how hard scientist work to make discoveries. You can see in the first part of this book where Robert J. Sawyer got some of his ideas for WWW. Wake.

Like early followers of Jesus attesting to his resurrection and messiahship and speaking in tongues, Arroway and the rest of the Five will be deemed mad if they tell their tale. The official story becomes that the Message was real, but that the Machine did not work. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film (2nd ed. 2005) pp 69–72. The debate at Sagan’s creation museum centres on the authority and methods of religion and science. Science, Arroway explains, prizes skepticism and evidence because it realizes that scientists make mistakes. Now, Arroway has only a subjective experience of aliens who refrain from public appearance. Their existence and technology appear to have been prophesied millennia ago in the Hebrew Bible.

Wherever you turned, there was one astronomer being quoted on everything, one astronomer whose face you were seeing on TV, and one astronomer whose books had the preferred display slot at the local bookstore. Sagan also commented on Christianity and the Jefferson Bible, stating "My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts, the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document." [121] While we don't know what the next message says, Ellie is equipped with the knowledge that she's not crazy. Although the gospels were not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life, the parallel between Arroway’s gospel and those of the New Testament is upheld. The truth, held by the world to be madness, must be taken on faith and without proof, circulated by oral tradition and then written text. The Artist’s Signature Ellie's childhood, teenage years, and early graduate and internship years are described in a more detail.