Log Entry #13: 11/11/10

Yesterday, we finished watching the film Contact (based on Carl Sagan's cosmos theories) in class. Staring Jodie Foster as Dr. Arroway, a radio astronomer searching for extraterrestrial intelligence who, one day, receives a message from a different planet called Vega. After thoroughly reading Sagan’s article, “The Quest for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, it became came quite clear that the the information stated in the story was the driving force for what led Dr. Arroway to search for a message from other civilizations. He believed that the search for alien life is a task that might be very hard to succeed in, but with all the space in the universe, there must be some kind of life. In the movie, Ellie and her scientific team do make contact with aliens, and the film elaborates on that key point for the rest of the movie. Throughout movie, there are many scenes where Ellie chooses reasoning over intuition and does not believe in a God. As a result, she is not chosen as the one human to go to Vega  in the first attempt (in the U.S.). On that same note, Ellie was questioned about god when her father died suddenly. She said that "only if I had the medicine in the lower level, I would have been able to save him".I found this quite interesting because it would take more like a miracle to save a person, rather than, just using medicine. In conclusion, with watching this movie, it has given me a lot of desire to peer into the sky and truly question what is out there.