Disclaimer, I love Sagan, his Cosmos series and book are cornerstones of my intellectual development, I would call him my shaman, if the term wouldn’t likely make him churn in his grave. It is a very clever book, but Sagan, like most sci fi writers, doesn’t do a great job on character development. The movie is better than the book in a few aspects, more personal drama, more believable technological billionaire. There is one, just one thing the movie didn’t include, but is such a crucial thing that makes a gigantic difference. And I actually understand them, it would have been a completely different movie had they included it, so I believe they made the right choice of leaning it out so only those who read the book (or this blog) discover it.
So here I go, the one immense thing the movie leaves out, is the question Ellie asks the extra-terrestial contact right before comes back, she asks for any bit of information she can bring back to mankind. She is told by that this extra-terrestrial civilization has been playing wit Pi and found, deep into the millionths of figures into Pi, a statistically impossible number of ones and zeros, that are spaced out by prime numbers, just like the message to earth was hidden into prime numbers. In these, or other words, she affirms that this impossible, as since Pi is intrinsic to the fabric of the universe, hiding a message within Pi would only be possible if you could dictate the nature of the Universe.
Exactly. In an infinite irony, the scientist gets the answer to the questions all religious people wanted to ask “is there a God?” But the answer is both an affirmation and a denial. An affirmation as, in Sagan’s message, a God does exist; but a denial, as a God so subtle contradicts every major religion on earth and makes them look utterly absurd.
It is one of the best meaning-of-life divertimentos I’ve read in quite a while. It did made me think, just as many years ago I realized I could not believe in an anthropomorphic deity, now I wonder if my expectation of a deity with volition as we know it is too infantile too. worth to think about it.
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