There’s three machines in the book. US, Russia and the one that Hadden/Japan builds
Don’t recall 3 machines but I read the book long ago.
I assume Hadden was based on Howard Hughes? Hughes started out as an engineer and later made a lot of money before he went nuts.
I’d be quite surprised if a “search for God” was a motivation in a novel by Carl Sagan. I don’t object to the direction of the novel overall, I just lament the (likely inescapable) anticlimactic and somewhat cliché ending. Sagan kinda went off the rails there, with the magically timed termination of the signal and the message hidden in pi.
My interpretation was simply that even what little evidence was there was not enough to convince people when something really strange happened. I felt like they added those parts to let the audience know it really happened, while not realizing it compromised the ability to keep it ambiguous in-universe.
In other words, it’s the classic reveal at the end of a “was it all just a dream” movie where the audience, and only the audience, finds it out it wasn’t one.
Agreed. Not from the author of The Demon Haunted World.
If anything, the god-like designers at the end of Contact (the book) exemplied A.C. Clarke’s statement “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I’m a bit puzzled… I read a book in which the main character undergoes a trans-galactic trip to visit some space aliens, spending valuable time asking the aliens if they believed in God, in which discussions of God’s existence occurs with regularity (including a debate on this subject between Ellie and Palmer Joss and Rankin which occurs almost exactly in the middle of the novel), and concludes with this same character finding evidence that the Universe was created, ending with the following lines:
*The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle - another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point… Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.
The circle had closed.
She found what she had been searching for.*
Then there’s the final conversation Eleanor has in the novel, the one with Palmer Joss:
“I still don’t understand,” he confessed. “We know there’s a mathematical order to the universe. The law of gravity and all that. How is this different? So there’s order inside the digits of pi. So what?”
“No, don’t you see? This would be different. This isn’t just starting the universe out with some precise mathematical laws that determine physics and chemistry. This is a message, Whoever makes the universe hides messages in transcendental numbers so they’ll be read fifteen billion years later when intelligent life finally evolves. I criticized you and Rankin the time we first met for not understanding this. ‘If God wanted us to know that he existed, why didn’t he send us an unambiguous message?’ I asked. Remember?”
“I remember very well. You think God is a mathematician.”
“Something like that. If what we’re told is true. f this isn’t a wild-goose chase. If there’s a message hiding in pi and not one of the infinity of other transcendental numbers. That’s a lot of if’s.”
…
“Why are you so eager for me to tell my story?” she asked.
Perhaps he took it for a rhetorical question. At any rate he did not respond, and she continued.
“Don’t you think there’s been a strange… reversal of our positions? Here I am, the bearer of the profound religious experience I can’t prove - really, Palmer, I can barely fathom it. And here you are, the hardened skeptic trying - more successfully than I ever did - to be kind to the credulous.”
…
In the afterward, Sagan writes:
“I thank Joshua Lederberg for first suggesting to me many years ago and perhaps playfully that a high form of intelligence might live at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.”
Regardless, I stand by my statement that the debate of God’s existence was one of the principal themes of the novel and the novel ended with the lead character finding the empirical proof she sought for the creator’s existence. I mean… it’s rather baldly stated right there in the text: She had, indeed, found what she was searching for.
That’s not “God”, though, in the sense that any human religion defines it, except maybe straight-up deism.
Does the Entity that is revealed have any of the traits that are commonly attributed to Em by Earth’s religions? Dunno. But is this Entity the almighty Creator of the Universe, of all things visible and invisible? Yes, absolutely. And that’s the important part.
Well, that’ll certainly fill the collection plates…
The hidden agenda was that Contact is not a science fiction movie. It’s a goddam “space aliens are godlike beings that you believe in on absolute faith with no evidence or proof” movie. In other words based on the UFO cult not based on science fiction.
A second hidden agenda was that Contact is a gothic romance, not a science fiction movie. It’s all about Foster’s descent into an eerie world that fascinates her but where she has less and less power to control her destiny and is increasingly swept up in emotional storms and danger-fraught situations and wicked plots and permutations against which she is powerless and vulnerable. Could have used some old stone castles and an iron portcullis or two although some of those lab buildings were decently dismal.
The two hidden agendas dovetail nicely at the moment you mention. All vestiges of scientific verification and objective proof are swept away, along with any allegiances or social support for Foster’s character, and it’s all about her and her faith in what she knows although she has to take even that on faith, that she wasn’t hallucinating it all. And she gets to be even more frustratingly helpless and at the mercy of everyone else.
Have I mentioned that I hate that movie? Hmm, I believe I may have…
Interesting, though none of it has any relationship to the question I asked in the OP.
I am glad to see other people got the same thing out of Contact - that it was a search for God. As such, I hated it. I felt cheated. I had sat down to read what was supposed to be one of the greatest sci-fi books by one of the greatest authors and instead I was tricked into reading a goshdarn religious book.
The book pissed me off and I will never watch the movie. And it really killed my like for Carl Sagan. It wasn’t sci-fi. It was just fucking fantasy.
Damn, the guy writes a fictional tale exploring some ideas–which is basically all science fiction and fantasy are supposed to do–and all of Sagan, including stuff like Cosmos, has been ruined for you? Tough crowd!
Anyhoo if you do ever find yourself forced to watch the film, presumably with your eyes pried open like Alex in Clockwork Orange, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. (Except by that eye-prying thing, that looks pretty painful.) Unlike the book, the film never proposes a God/deity/creator who put proof of His existence in pi like a guy peeing in the snow.
The movie contains none of that. The aliens are very clearly aliens. When Ellie meets Alien-Daddy and basically asks him who the heck built this intergalactic subway tunnel and communications hub, the farthest Alien-Daddy goes is acknowledging that he and the other aliens who, in the past, also received messages and built the machine and travelled to meet each other (just as Earth folks did), don’t know who or what civilization built it in the first place. All he knows is that it goes back ages, long before Alien-Daddy and his/its fellow alien-type-people figured it out.
Neither he nor Ellie ever posit that a single, all-powerful Creator was behind it. For all Alien Daddy/Ellie/the audience know, it was just an impossibly ancient civilization.
(Palmer Joss suggests the “how do you know all this wasn’t created by God?” argument earlier in the film when he and Ellie are debating, IIRC, but that’s the last time the “let’s try to reconcile the idea of God and science” issue comes up.)
Honestly, the only nod the film gives to Ellie’s “finding what she was looking for” a la the novel is simply film-Ellie having a new appreciation for the difficulty of proving something in which others don’t believe and that seemingly doesn’t have tangible evidence. When James Woods’s Senator Kitz demands to know why she can’t make things easy on herself and just recant her testimony, Ellie says:
Now yes, those words are skillfully crafted by the screenwriters to sound as if they could’ve been spoken by Joan of Arc or some other person who’s had a religious experience. Except the difference is that Ellie wouldn’t have been trashed if she’d claimed she’d seen God. (Maybe by the science community, but many of the rest of humanity would have embraced her message.)
No, film-Ellie is making a blasphemous suggestion: when she says “something that is greater than ourselves,” she doesn’t mean God, but rather the community of beings speckled throughout the universe, rare and precious but still united by the simple shared qualities of life and sentience.
What really underscores the fact that the film isn’t as ambiguous as some people claim is that Ellie is, sadly, unaware that there really is evidence. The U.S. (and probably Japanese) government knows she’s telling the truth, and the film lets us know it too. This wasn’t a hallucination or wish-fulfillment dream; this wasn’t a religious experience that no one can prove. There is proof, but the government’s hiding it. And honestly that’s just about the most believable part of the film to me.
…Which, at long last, leads me to the OP. I think the answer given earlier is the most likely one: the government trashes Ellie, and hides the evidence, for any or all of the following reasons:
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Fear of scaring the public. “Of course there are no aliens with more powerful technology are out there, we promise. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.”
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Fear of the unknown. “If we don’t do anything further maybe they’ll continue to leave us alone, just like Alien-Daddy promised Eliie. At least we’ll be safe for most of our own puny human lives.”
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Fear of pissing off the religious and those who believe Man is the Ultimate creation built in God’s image. As Ellie pointed out: “We are, none of us, is alone.” That kinda screws with our uniqueness, doesn’t it? Sure, we may be rare and special but we’re not rare and special enough. Terran Exceptionalism, damn it!
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Fear of other countries using this technology. If the U.S. and Japan indicate that this whole thing was flopped–not just once but twice–maybe the members of the Axis of Evil du jour won’t be bothered to create a machine and set up their own private chats with alien intelligent lives (assuming they had the resources to do so).
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Fear of Ellie. This is a longshot but it only just occurred to me. The crowds outside congress are pretty damn worshipful of Ellie, but it’s fairly clear that once her reputation takes a hit and she simply can’t prove that yes, she is the only human being who’s made contact w/an alien race, she’s just going back to lead her scientific existence, as we see when she’s chatting w/some kids on a tour.
OTOH, if she were proven to be that Special Person? She gets way more powerful and a possible threat to any existing leaders, both religious and governmental. Now there’s no indication that Ellie has any desire for leadership or power–Ellie’s never expressed such an ambition and everyone who’s seen her grow up through the film knows that she’s about learning and connecting with people, not ruling over them.
But people who are in power can’t help but assume others want what they have, and will guard their own power jealously. It wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere in the back of their minds the government/religious leader types prefer Ellie to fade away rather than someone who’d challenge them into changing their ways, and eventually becoming an alternate option for people to follow (whether as a presidential candidate, Pope, I dunno, fill in the blank).
…So I think any or some combo of those answers is more than enough reason to keep the evidence private and clamp down any growing beliefs that Ellie’s experience was real.
Um. Yeah. That’s all I have. 
See the movie, it’s awesome and thoughtful and makes simply listening to static exciting, and the music is gorgeous, and Jodie Foster, David Morse, William Fitchner, John Hurt, James Woods and Jena Malone are fantastic in it, and then there’s “For Carl” and damn it why is the room so dusty?
"Wanna take a ride?"
Love that line from the movie.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Certainly those in power have no reason to help Ellie out in any way (by disclosing to her all the information they have). She might not be a threat to them…but then again, why take the chance?