Carl Sagan - Contact

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CONTACT
-Carl Sagan
For Alexandra,
who comes of age
with the Millennium.
May we leave your generation a world
better than the one we were given.
PART I
THE
MESSAGE
My heart trembles like a poor leaf.
The planets whirl in my dreams.
The stars press against my window.
I rotate in my sleep.
My bed is a warm planet.
-MARVIN MERCER
P.S. 153, Fifth Grade, Harlem
New York City, N.Y. (1981)
CHAPTER 1
Transcendental
Numbers
Little fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
-WILLIAM BLAKE
Songs of Experience
"The Fly," Stanzas 1-3
(1795)
By human standards it could not possibly have been artificial: It was the size of a world. But it
was so oddly and intricately shaped, so clearly intended for some complex purpose that it could
only have been the expression of an idea. Gliding in polar orbit about the great blue-white star,
it
resembled some immense, imperfect polyhedron, encrusted with millions of bowl-shaped
barnacles. Every bowl was aimed at a particular part of the sky. Every constellation was being
attended to. The polyhedral world had been performing its enigmatic function for eons. It was
very patient. It could afford to wait forever.
When they pulled her out, she was not crying at all. Her tiny brow was wrinkled, and then her eyes
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grew
wide. She looked at the bright lights, the white and green-clad figures, the woman lying on the
table below
her. On her face was an odd expression for a newborn--puzzlement perhaps.
* * *
When she was two years old, she would lift her hands over her head and say very sweetly, "Dada,
up." His
friends expressed surprise. The baby was polite. "It's not politeness," her father told them. "She
used to
scream when she wanted to be picked up. So once I said to her, `Ellie, you don't have to scream.
Just say,
"Daddy, up."' Kids are smart. Right, Presh?"
So now she was up all right, at a giddy altitude, perched on her father's shoulders and
clutching his
thinning hair. Life was better up here, far safer than crawling through a forest of legs. Somebody
could step
on you down there. You could get lost. She tightened her grip.
Leaving the monkeys, they turned a corner and came upon a great spindly-legged, long-
necked
dappled beast with tiny horns on its head. I towered over them. "Their necks are so long, the talk
can't get
out," her father said. she felt sorry for the poor creature, condemned to silence. But she also
felt a joy in its
existence, a delight that such wonders might be.
* * *
"Go ahead, Ellie," her mother gently urged her. There was a lilt in the familiar voice. "Read it."
Her
mother's sister had not believed that Ellie, age three, could read. The nursery stories, the aunt
was
convinced, had been memorized. Now they were strolling down State Street on a brisk March day and
had
stopped before a store window. Inside, a burgundy-red stone was glistening in the sunlight.
"Jeweler," Ellie
read slowly, pronouncing three syllables.
* * *
Guiltily, she let herself into the spare room. The old Motorola radio was on the shelf where she
remembered
it. It was very big and heavy and, hugging it to her chest, she almost dropped it. On the back
were the words
"Danger. Do Not Remove." But she knew that if it wasn't plugged in, there was no danger in it.
With her
tongue between her lips, she removed the screws and exposed the innards. As she had suspected,
there were
no tiny orchestras and miniature announcers quietly living out their small lives in anticipation
of the moment
when the toggle switch would be clicked to "on." Instead there were beautiful glass tubes, a
little like light
bulbs. Some resembled the churches of Moscow she had seen pictured in a book. The prongs at their
bases
were perfectly designed for the receptacles they were fitted into. With the back off and the
switch "on," she
plugged the set into a nearby wall socket. If she didn't touch it, if she went nowhere near it,
how could it
hurt her?
After a few moments, tubes began to glow warmly, but no sound came. The radio was
"broken,"
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and had been retired some years before in favor of a more modern variety. One tube was not
glowing. She
unplugged the set and pried the uncooperative tube out its receptacle. There was a metallic square
inside,
attached to tiny wires. The electricity runs along the wires, she thought vaguely. But first it
has to get into
the tube. One of the prongs seemed bent, and she was able after a little work to straighten it.
Reinserting the
tube and plugging the set in again, she was delighted to see it begin to glow, and an ocean of
static arose
around her. Glancing toward the closed door with a start, she lowered the volume. She turned the
dial
marked "frequency," and came upon a voice talking excitedly--as far as she could understand, about
a
Russian machine that was in the sky, endlessly circling the Earth. Endlessly, she thought. She
turned the dial
again, seeking other stations. After a while, fearful of being discovered, she unplugged the set,
screwed the
back on loosely, and with still more difficulty lifted the radio and placed it back on the shelf.
As she left the spare room, a little out of breath, her mother came upon her and she
started once
more.
"Is everything all right, Ellie?"
"Yes, Mom."
She affected a casual air, but her heart was beating, her palms were sweating. She settled
down in a
favorite spot in the small backyard and, her knees drawn up to her chin, thought about the inside
of the
radio. Are all those tubes really necessary? What would happen if you removed them one at a time?
Her
father had once called them vacuum tubes. What was happening inside a vacuum tube? Was there
really no
air in there? How did the music of the orchestras and the voices of the announcers get in the
radio? They
liked to say, "On the air." Was radio carried by the air? What happens inside the radio set when
you change
stations? What was "frequency"? Why do you have to plug it in for it to work? Could you make a
kind of
map showing how the electricity runs through the radio? Could you take it apart without hurting
yourself?
Could you put it back together again?
"Ellie, what have you been up to?" asked her mother, walking by with laundry for the
clothesline.
"Nothing, Mom. Just thinking."
* * *
In her tenth summer, she was taken on vacation to visit two cousins she detested at a cluster of
cabins along
a lake in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan. Why people who lived on a lake in Wisconsin would
spend
five hours driving all the way to a lake in Michigan was beyond her. Especially to see two mean
and babyish
boys. Only ten and eleven. Real jerks. How could her father, so sensitive to her in other
respects, want her to
play day in and day out with twerps? She spent the summer avoiding them.
One sultry moonless night after dinner she walked down alone to the wooden pier. A
motorboat
had just gone by, and her uncle's rowboat tethered to the dock was softly bobbing in the starlit
water. Apart
from distant cicadas and an almost subliminal shout echoing across the lake, it was perfectly
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still. She looked
up at the brilliant spangled sky and found her heart racing.
Without looking down, with only her outstretched hand to guide her, she found a soft patch
of
grass and laid herself down. The sky was blazing with stars. There were thousands of them, most
twinkling,
a few bright and steady. If you looked carefully you could see faint differences in color. That
bright one
there, wasn't it bluish?
She felt again for the ground beneath her; it was solid, steady... reassuring. Cautiously
she sat up
and looked left and right, up and down the long reach of lakefront. She could see both sides of
the water.
The world only looks flat, she thought to herself. Really it's round. This is all a big ball...
turning in the
middle of the sky... once a day. She tried to imagine it spinning, with millions of people glued
to it, talking
different languages, wearing funny clothes, all stuck to the same ball.
She stretched out again and tried to sense the spin. Maybe she could feel it just a
little. Across the
lake, a bright star was twinkling between the topmost branches. If you squinted your eyes you
could make
rays of light dance out of it. Squint a little more, and the rays would obediently change their
length and
shape. Was she just imagining it, or... the star was now definitely above the trees. Just a few
minutes ago it
had been poking in and out of the branches. Now it was higher, no doubt about it. That's what they
meant
when they said a star was rising, she told herself. The Earth was turning in the other direction.
At one end of
the sky the stars were rising. That way was called East. At the other end of the sky, behind her,
the cabins,
the stars were setting. That way was called West. Once every day the Earth would spin completely
around,
and the same stars would rise again in the same place.
But if something as big as the Earth turned once a day, it had to be moving ridiculously
fast.
Everyone she knew must be whirling at an unbelievable speed. She though she could now actually
feel the
Earth turn--not just imagine it in her head, but really feel it in the pit of her stomach. It was
like descending
in a fast elevator. She craned her neck back further, so her field of view was uncontaminated by
anything on
Earth, until she could see nothing but black sky and bright stars. Gratifyingly, she was overtaken
by the
giddy sense that she had better clutch the clumps of grass on either side of her and hold on for
dear life, or
else fall up into the sky, her tiny tumbling body dwarfed by the huge darkened sphere below.
She actually cried out before she managed to stifle the scream with her wrist. That was
how her
cousins were able to find her. Scrambling down the slope, they discovered on her face an uncommon
mix of
embarrassment and surprise, which they readily assimilated, eager to find some small indiscretion
to carry
back and offer to her parents.
* * *
The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the
pictures
were awfully different from the movie. But in both, Pinocchio--a life-sized wooden boy who
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magically is
roused to life--wore a kind of halter, and there seemed to be dowels in his joints. When Geppetto
is just
finishing the construction of Pinocchio, he turns his back on the puppet and is promptly sent
flying by a well-
placed kick. At that instant the carpenter's friend arrives and asks him what he is doing sprawled
on the
floor. "I am teaching," Geppetto replies with dignity, "the alphabet to the ants."
The seemed to Ellie extremely witty, and she delighted in recounting it to her friends.
But each time
she quoted it there was an unspoken question lingering at the edge of her consciousness: Could you
teach
the alphabet to the ants? And would you want to? Down there with hundreds of scurrying insects who
might
crawl all over your skin, or even sting you? What could ants know, anyway?
* * *
Sometimes she would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and find her father
there in his
pajama bottoms, his neck craned up, a kind of patrician disdain accompanying the shaving cream on
his
upper lip. "Hi, Presh," he would say. It was short for "precious," and she loved him to call her
that. Why
was he shaving at night, when no one would know if he had a beard? "Because"--he smiled--"your
mother
will know." Years later, she discovered that she had understood this cheerful remark only
incompletely. Her
parents had been in love.
* * *
After school, she had ridden her bicycle to a little park on the lake. From a saddlebag she
produced The
Radio Amateur's Handbook and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. After a moment's
consideration, she decided on the latter. Twain's hero had been conked on the head and awakened in
Arthurian England. Maybe it was all a dream or a delusion. But maybe it was real. Was it possible
to travel
backwards in time? Her chin on her knees, she scouted for a favorite passage. It was when Twain's
hero is
first collected by a man dressed in armor who he takes to be an escapee from a local booby hatch.
As they
reach the crest of the hill they see a city laid out before them:
"`Bridgeport?' said I...
"`Camelot,' said he."
She stared out into the blue lake, trying to imagine a city which could pass as both
nineteenth-
century Bridgeport and sixth-century Camelot, when her mother rushed up to her.
"I've looked for you everywhere. Why aren't you where I can find you? Oh, Ellie," she
whispered,
"something awful's happened."
* * *
In the seventh grade they were studying "pi." It was a Greek letter that looked like the
architecture at
Stonehenge, in England: two vertical pillars with a crossbar at top--?. If you measured the
circumference of
a circle and then divided it by the diameter of the circle, that was pi. At home, Ellie took the
top of a
mayonnaise jar, wrapped a string around it, straightened the string out, and with a ruler measured
the circle's
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circumference. She did the same with the diameter, and by long division divided the one number by
the
other. She got 3.21. That seemed simple enough.
The next day the teacher, Mr. Weisbrod, said that ? was about 22/7, about 3.1416. But
actually, if
you wanted to be exact, it was a decimal that went on and on forever without repeating the pattern
of
numbers. Forever, Ellie thought. She raised her hand. It was the beginning of the school year and
she had
not asked any questions in this class.
"How could anybody know that the decimals go on and on forever?"
"That's just the way it is," said the teacher with some asperity.
"But why? How do you know? How can you count decimals forever?"
"Miss Arroway"--he was consulting his class list--"this is a stupid question. You're
wasting the
class's time."
No one had ever called Ellie stupid before, and she found herself bursting into tears.
Billy
Horstman, who sat next to her, gently reached out and placed his hand over hers. His father had
recently
been indicted for tampering with the odometers on the used cars he sold, so Billy was sensitive to
public
humiliation. Ellie ran out of the class sobbing.
After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on
mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn't all that
stupid.
According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that ? was exactly equal to
three. The
Greeks and Romans, who knew lots of things about mathematics, had no idea that the digits in ?
went on
forever without repeating. It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago. How
was she
expected to know if she couldn't ask questions? But Mr. Weisbrod had been right about the first
few digits.
Pi wasn't 3.21. Maybe the mayonnaise lid had been a little squashed, not a perfect circle. Or
maybe she'd
been sloppy in measuring the string. Even if she'd been much more careful, though, they couldn't
expect her
to measure an infinite number of decimals.
There was another possibility, though. You could calculate pi as accurately as you wanted.
If you
knew something called calculus, you could prove formulas for ? that would let you calculate it to
as many
decimals as you had time for. The book listed formulas for pi divided by four. Some of them she
couldn't
understand at all. But there were some that dazzled her: ?/4, the book said, was the same as 1 -
1/3 + 1/5 -
1/7..., with the fractions continuing on forever. Quickly she tried to work it out, adding and
subtracting the
fractions alternately. The sum would bounce from being bigger than ?/4 to being smaller than ?/4,
but after a
while you could see that this series of numbers was on a beeline for the right answer. You could
never get
there exactly, but you could get as close as you wanted if you were very patient. It seemed to her
a miracle
that the shape of every circle in the world was connected with this series of fractions. How could
circles
know about fractions? She was determined to learn calculus.
The book said something else: ? was called a "transcendental" number. There was no
equation with
ordinary numbers in it that could give you ? unless it was infinitely long. She had already taught
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herself a
little algebra and understood what this meant. And ? wasn't the only transcendental number. In
fact there
was an infinity of transcendental numbers. More than that, there were infinitely more
transcendental numbers
than ordinary numbers, even though ? was the only one of them she had ever heard of. In more ways
than
one, ? was tied to infinity.
She had caught a glimpse of something majestic. Hiding between all the ordinary numbers
was an
infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed unless you looked
deeply
into mathematics. Every now and then one of them, like ?, would pop up unexpectedly in everyday
life. But
most of them--an infinite number of them, she reminded herself--were hiding, minding their own
business,
almost certainly unglimpsed by the irritable Mr. Weisbrod.
* * *
She saw through John Staughton from the first. How her mother could ever contemplate marrying him--
never mind that it was only two years after her father's death--was an impenetrable mystery. He
was nice
enough looking, and he could pretend, when he put his mind to it, that he really cared about you.
But he was
a martinet. He made students come over weekends to weed and garden at the new house they had moved
into, and then made fun of them after they left. He told Ellie that she was just beginning high
school and was
not to look twice at any of his bright young men. He was puffed up with imaginary self-importance.
She was
sure that as a professor he secretly despised her dead father, who had been only a shopkeeper.
Staughton
had made it clear that an interest in radio and electronics was unseemly for a girl, that it would
not catch her
a husband, that understanding physics was for her a foolish and aberrational notion.
"Pretentious," he called
it. She just didn't have the ability. This was an objective fact that she might as well get used
to. He was
telling her this for her own good. She'd thank him for it in later life. He was, after all, an
associate professor
of physics. He knew what it took. These homilies would always infuriate her, even though she had
never
before--despite Staughton's refusal to believe it--considered a career in science.
He was not a gentle man, as her father had been, and he had no idea what a sense of humor
was.
When anyone assumed that she was Staughton's daughter, she would be outraged. Her mother and
stepfather never suggested that she change her name to Staughton; they knew what her response
would be.
Occasionally there was a little warmth in the man, as when, in her hospital room just
after her
tonsillectomy, he had brought her a splendid kaleidoscope.
"When are they going to do the operation," she had asked, a little sleepily.
"They've already done it," Staughton had answered. "You're going to be fine." She found it
disquieting that whole blocks of time could be stolen without her knowledge, and blamed him. She
knew at
the time it was childish.
That her mother could truly love him was inconceivable. She must have remarried out of
loneliness,
out of weakness. She needed someone to take care of her. Ellie vowed she would never accept a
position of
dependence. Ellie's father had died, her mother had grown distant, and Ellie felt herself exiled
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to the house
of a tyrant. There was no one to call her Presh anymore.
She longed to escape.
"`Bridgeport?' said I.
"`Camelot,' said he."
CHAPTER 2
Coherent Light
Since I first gained the use of reason my inclination
toward learning has been so violent and strong that
neither the scoldings of other people... nor my own
reflections... have been able to stop me from
following this natural impulse that God gave me. He
alone must know why; and He knows too that I have
begged Him to take the light of my understanding,
leaving only enough for me to keep His law, for
anything else is excessive in a woman, according to
some people. And others say it is even harmful.
-JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ
Reply to the Bishop of
Puebla (1691), who had
attacked her scholarly
work as inappropriate
for her sex
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable
consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear
wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in
question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a
proposition when there is no ground whatever for
supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such
an opinion became common it would completely
transform our social life and our political system;
since both are at present faultless, this must weigh
against it.
-BERTRAND RUSSELL
Skeptical Essays, I (1928)
Surrounding the blue-white star in its equatorial plane was a vast ring of orbiting debris--rocks
and ice, metals and organics--reddish at the periphery and bluish closer to the star. The world-
sized polyhedron plummeted through a gap in the rings and emerged out the other side. In the
ring plane, it had been intermittently shadowed by icy boulders and tumbling mountains. But now,
carried along its trajectory toward a point above the opposite pole of the star, the sunlight
gleamed off its millions of bowl-shaped appendages. If you looked very carefully you might have
seen one of them make a slight pointing adjustment. You would not have seen the burst of radio
waves washing out from it into the depths of space.
For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The
stars
were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and
instruction
of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of
it.
Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and
humbled
by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of
fancy.
At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their
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most
unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy,
they took
steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million
years humans
had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. I the last few thousand years
they
began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the
human population
had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the
nights became
starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their
ancestors and
that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as
astronomy
entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended
only
with the dawn of space exploration.
* * *
Ellie would look up at Venus and imagine it was a world something like the Earth--populated by
plants and
animals and civilizations, but each of them different from the kinds we have here. On the
outskirts of town,
just after sunset, she would examine the night sky and scrutinize that unflickering bright point
of light. By
comparison with nearby clouds, just above her, still illuminated by the Sun, it seemed a little
yellow. She
tried to imagine what was going on there. She would stand on tiptoe and stare the planet down.
Sometimes,
she could almost convince herself that she could really see it; a swirl of yellow fog would
suddenly clear, and
a vast jeweled city would briefly be revealed. Air cars sped among the crystal spires. Sometimes
she would
imagine peering into one of those vehicles and glimpsing one of them. Or she would imagine a
young one,
glancing up at a bright blue point of light in its sky, standing on tiptoe and wondering about the
inhabitants
of Earth. It was an irresistible notion: a sultry, tropical planet brimming over with intelligent
life, and just
next door.
She consented to rote memorization, but knew that it was at best the hollow shell of
education. She
did the minimum work necessary to do well in her courses, and pursued other matters. She arranged
to
spend free periods and occasional hours after school in what was called "shop"--a dingy and
cramped small
factory established when the school devoted more effort to "vocational education" than was now
fashionable. "Vocational education" meant, more than anything else, working with your hands. There
were
lathes, drill presses, and other machine tools which she was forbidden to approach, because no
matter how
capable she might be, she was still "a girl." Reluctantly, they granted her permission to pursue
her own
projects in the electronics area of the "shop." She built radios more or less from scratch, and
then went on to
something more interesting.
She built an encrypting machine. It was rudimentary, but it worked. It could take any
English-
language message and transform it by a simple substitution cipher into something that looked like
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gibberish.
Building a machine that would do the reverse--converting an encrypted message into clear when you
didn't
know the substitution convention--that was much harder. You could have the machine run through all
the
possible substitutions (A stands for B, A stands for C, A stands for D...), or you could remember
that some
letters in English were used more often than others. You could get some idea of the frequency of
letters by
looking at the sizes of the bins for each letter of type in the print shop next door. "ETAOIN
SHRDLU," the
boys in print shop would say, giving pretty closely the order of the twelve most frequently used
letters in
English. In decoding a long message, the letter that was most common probably stood for an E.
Certain
consonants tended to go together, she discovered; vowels distributed themselves more or less at
random.
The most common three-letter word in the language was "the." If within a word there was a letter
standing
between a T and an E, it was almost certainly H. If not, you could bet on R or a vowel. She
deduced other
rules and spent long hours counting up the frequency of letters in various schoolbooks before she
discovered
that such frequency tables had already been compiled and published. Her decrypting machine was
only for
her own enjoyment. She did not use it to convey secret messages to friends. She was unsure to whom
she
might safely confide these electronic and cryptographic interests; the boys became jittery or
boisterous, and
the girls looked at her strangely.
* * *
Soldiers of the United States were fighting in a distant place called Vietnam. Every month, it
seemed, more
young men were being scooped off the street or the farm and packed off the Vietnam. The more she
learned
about the origins of the war, and the more she listened to the public pronouncements of national
leaders, the
more outraged she became. The President and the Congress were lying and killing, she thought to
herself,
and almost everyone else was mutely assenting. The fact that her stepfather embraced official
positions on
treaty obligations, dominoes, and naked Communist aggression only strengthened her resolve. She
began
attending meetings and rallies at the college nearby. The people she met there seemed much
brighter,
friendlier, more alive than her awkward and lusterless high school companions. John Staughton
first
cautioned her and then forbade her to spend time with college students. They would not respect
her, he said.
They would take advantage of her. She was pretending to a sophistication she did not have and
never would.
Her style of dress was deteriorating. Military fatigues were inappropriate for a girl and a
travesty, a
hypocrisy, for someone who claimed to oppose the American intervention in Southeast Asia.
Beyond pious exhortations to Ellie and Staughton not to "fight," her mother participated
little in
these discussions. Privately she would plead with Ellie to obey her stepfather, to be "nice."
Ellie now
suspected Staughton of marrying her mother for her father's life insurance--why else? He certainly
file:///F|/rah/Carl%20Sagan/Contact.txt (10 of 242) [1/17/03 2:02:22 AM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Carl%20Sagan/Contact.txtCONTACT-CarlSaganForAlexandra,whocomesofagewiththeMillennium.Mayweleaveyourgenerationaworldbetterthantheoneweweregiven.PARTITHEMESSAGEMyhearttrembleslikeapoorleaf.Theplanetswhirlinmydreams.Thestarspressagainstmywindow.Irotateinmysleep.Mybedisawarmplanet.-MARVIN...

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