Name: The true story behind Carl Sagan’s cult classic, Contact | Jill Tarter for Big Think
Uploaded: 2022-08-06T18:26:47.000Z
Duration: 9 min 24 s
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- When we used to ask the question, "Are we alone?"

Past simple

We used to ask the priests and the philosophers.

To-infinitive

We used to ask them, "What should we believe?"

But what any of us believe isn't going to change

We want to know how we stack up against the cosmos.

intelligent are we relative to something else out there?

We're so lucky to be starting off this season

100 Most Influential  People in the World."

My title is Emeritus Director of SETI Research.

who was the inspiration  for Ellie Arroway,

played by Jodie Foster in the movie "Contact."

- I was back visiting Cornell for some symposium.

When I got there,  Ann Druyan, Carl's wife,

And Ann said, "Carl's writing a science fiction book.

I think you might recognize one of the characters,

I was going, "Wait, wait, Carl doesn't know this about me.

And it turns out, when I was a fresh Ph.D.,

I got invited to a  meeting in Washington,

and I walked into a room of 80 female Ph.D.s

and we did a little bit of amateur demographics,

and it turned out that  many of those women

had their fathers die when they were young, just like me.

And I remember one night walking along the edge of the Gulf,

holding my dad's hand and looking up in the sky,

And I just had this idea that on some planet

walking along the edge of an ocean with their parent.

And I don't know what  set of circumstances

led me to have that  particular worldview,

And I said, "Okay, I'm gonna be an engineer."

Then, sadly, my dad died a couple of years later.

And I had told my dad I was gonna be an engineer,

except thinking about  life beyond earth.

When we started, we  only knew about nine

But now we know that in the Milky Way galaxy,

there are more planets than there are stars.

And additionally, we now know about organisms

forms of life living in environments which,

when I was a student, I was taught, utterly no chance,

And now, it makes it just seem natural to ask the question,

'Well, with all that  potentially habitable

real estate out there, is any of it actually inhabited?'

is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence-

We don't know how  to define intelligence.

We certainly don't know how to detect it at a distance.

is find evidence of someone else's technology

that is detectable over these vast distances

We've been looking for electromagnetic radiation,

but we're specifically looking for the kinds of signals

that, as far as we know, nature can't produce,

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The true story behind Carl Sagan’s cult classic, Contact | Jill Tarter for Big Think

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