A Novel

By Carl Sagan

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The next day the teacher, Mr. Weisbrod, said that 𝝅 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.” 

(Sagan 1985, 20)

“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)
(Sagan 1985, 25)

Ellie had never seriously read the Bible before and had been inclined to accept her father’s perhaps ungenerous judgment that it was “half barbarian history, half fairy tales.” So over the weekend preceding her first class, she read through what seemed to be the important parts of the Old Testament, trying to keep an open mind. She at once recognized that there were two different and mutually contradictory stories of Creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. She did not see how there could be light and days before the Sun was made, and had trouble figuring out exactly who it was that Cain had married. In the stories of Lot and his daughters, of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, of the betrothal of Dinah, of Jacob and Esau, she found herself amazed. She understood that cowardice might occur in the real world – that sons might deceive and defraud an aged father, that a man might give craven consent to the seduction of his wife by the King, or even encourage the rape of his daughters. But in this holy book there was not a word of protest against such outrages. Instead, it seemed, the crimes were approved, even praised. 

When class began, she was eager for a discussion of these vexing inconsistencies, for an unburdening illumination of God’s Purpose, or at least for an explanation of why these crimes were not condemned by the author or Author. But in this she was to be disappointed. The minister’s wife blandly temporized. Somehow these stories never surfaced in subsequent discussion. When Ellie inquired how it was possible for the maidservants of the daughter of Pharaoh to tell just by looking that the baby in the bullrushes was Hebrew, the teacher blushed deeply and asked Ellie not to raise unseemly questions. (The answer dawned on Ellie at that moment.)

When they came to the New Testament, Ellie’s agitation increased. Matthew and Luke traced the ancestral line of Jesus back to King David. But for Matthew there were twenty-eight generations between David and Jeus; for Luke forty-three. There were almost no names common to the two lists. How could both Matthew and Luke be the Word of God? The contradictory genealogies seemed to ellie a transparent attempt to fit the Isaianic prophecy after the event – cooking the data, it was called in chemistry lab. She was deeply moved by the Sermon on the Mount, deeply disappointed by the admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and reduced to shouts and tears after the instructor twice sidestepped her questions on the meaning of “I bring not peace but the sword.” She told her despairing mother that he had done her best, but wild horses wouldn’t drag her to another Bible class. 

(Sagan 1985, 29-31)

Valerian would emphasize how we are trapped by our time and our culture and our biology, how limited we are, by definition, in imagining fundamentally different creatures or civilizations. And separately evolved on very different worlds, they would have to be very different from us. It was possible that beings much more advanced than we might have unimaginable technologies – this was, in fact, almost guaranteed – and even new laws of physics. It was hopelessly narrow-minded, he would say as they walked past a succession of stucco arches as in a De Chirico painting, to imagine that all significant laws of physics had been discovered at the moment our generation began contemplating the problem. There would be a twenty-first-century physics and a twenty-second-century physics, and even a Fourth-Millennium physics. We might be laughably far off in guessing how a very different technical civilization would communicate.

(Sagan 1985, 39)

What was an infant’s view of air travel? You go to a special place, walk into a large room with seats in it, and sit down. The room rumbles and shakes for four hours. Then you get up and walk off. Magically, you’re somewhere else. The means of transportation seems obscure to you, but the basic idea is easy to grasp, and precocious mastery of the Navier-Stokes equations is not required. 

(Sagan 1985, 100)

In classical times, thousands of years ago, when parchment was in short supply, people would write over an old parchment, making what’s called a palimpsest. There was writing under writing under writing. This signal from Bega is, of course, very strong. As you know, there the prime numbers, and ‘underneath’ them, in what’s called polarization modulation, this eerie Hitler business. But underneath the sequence of prime numbers and underneath the retransmitted Olympic broadcast, we’ve just uncovered an incredibly rich message – at least we’re pretty sure it’s a message. As far as we can tell, it’s been there all along. We’ve just detected it. It’s weaker than the announcement signal, but I’m embarrassed we didn’t find it sooner.” 

(Sagan 1985, 108)

Attendance in churches had soared all over America. The Message, Ellie believed, was a kind of mirror in which each person sees his or her own beliefs challenged or confirmed. It was considered a blanket vindication of mutually exclusive apocalyptic and eschatological doctrines. In Peru, Algeria, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, and among the Hopi, serious public debates took place on whether their progenitor civilizations had come from space; supporting opinions were attacked as colonialist. Catholics debated and extraterrestrial state of grace. Protestants discussed possible earlier missions of Jesus to nearby planets, and of course a return to Earth. Muslims were concerned that the Message might contravene the commandment against graven images. In Kuwait, a man arose who claimed to be the Hidden Imam of the Shiites. Messianic fervor had arisen among the Sossafer Chasids. In other congregations of Orthodox Jews there was a sudden renewal of interest in Astruc, a zealot fearful that knowledge would undermine faith, who in 1305 had induced the Rabbi of Barcelona, the leading Jewish cleric of the time, to forbid the study of science or philosophy by those under twenty-five, on pain of excommunication. Similar currents were increasingly discernible in Islam. A Thessalonian philosopher, auspiciously named Nicholas Polydemos, was attracting attention with a set of passionate arguments for what he called the “reunification” of the religions, governments, and peoples of the world. Critics began by questioning the “re.” 

(Sagan 1985, 133-134) 

“And now they say they have a Message from the star Vega. But a star can’t send a message. Someone is sending it. Who? Is the purpose of the Message divine or satanic? When they decode the Message, will it end ‘Yours truly, God’ … or ‘Sincerely, the Devil’?  When the scientists get around to telling us what’s in the Message, will they tell us the whole truth? Or will they hold something back because they think we can’t understand it, or because it doesn’t match what they believe? Aren’t these the people who taught us how to annihilate ourselves? 

“I tell you, my friends, science is too important to be left to the scientists. Representatives of the major faiths ought to be part of the process of decoding. We ought to be looking at the raw data. That’s what the scientists call it, ‘raw.’ Otherwise … otherwise, where will we be? They’ll tell us something about the Message. Maybe what they really believe. Maybe not. And we’ll have to accept it, whatever they tell us. There are some things the scientists know about. There are other things – take my word for it – they know nothing about. Maybe they’ve received a message from another being in the heavens. Maybe not. Can they be sure the Message isn’t a Golden Calf? I don’t think they’d know one if they saw one. These are the folks who brought us the hydrogen bomb. Forgive me, Lord, for not being more grateful to these kind souls. 

“I have seen God face to face. I worship Him, trust Him, love Him, with my entire soul, with all of my being. I don’t think anyone could believe more than I do. I can’t see how the scientists could believe in science more than I do in God. 

“They’re ready to throw away their ‘truths’ when a new idea comes round. They’re proud of it. They don’t see any end to knowing. They imagine we’re locked in ignorance until the end of time, that there’s no certainty anywhere in nature. Newton overthrew Aristotle. Einstein overthrew Newton. Tomorrow someone else’ll overthrow Einstein. As soon as we get to understand one theory, there’s another one in its place. I wouldn’t mind so much if they had warned us that the old ideas were tentative. Newton’s law of gravitation, they called it. They still call it that. But if it was a law of nature, how could it be wrong? How could it be overthrown? Only God can repeal the laws of nature, not the scientists. They just got it wrong. If Albert Einstein was right, Isaac Newton was an amateur, a bungler. 

“Remember, the scientists don’t always get it right. They want to take away our faith, our beliefs, and they offer us nothing of spiritual value in return. I do not intend to abandon God because the scientist write a book and say it is a message from Vega. I will not worship science. I will not defy the First Commandment. I will no bow down before a Golden Calf.” 

(Sagan 1985, 136-137)

Joss argued that in every religion there was a doctrinal line beyond which it insulted the intelligence of its practitioners. Reasonable people might disagree as to where that line should be drawn, but religions trespassed well beyond it at their peril. People were not fools, he said. The day before his death, as he was putting his affairs in order, the elder Rankin sent word to Joss that he never wanted to lay eyes on him again. 

At the same time, Joss began to preach that science didn’t have all the answers either. He found inconsistencies in the theory of evolution. The embarrassing findings, the facts that don’t fit, the scientists just sweep under the rug, he said. They don’t really know that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, any more than Archbishop Ussher knew that it was 6,000 years old, any more than Archbishop Ussher knew that it was 6,000 years old. Nobody has seen evolution happen, nobody has been marking time since the Creation. (“Two-hundred-quadrillion-Mississippi … “ he once imagined the patient timekeeper intoning, counting up the seconds from the origin of the world.) 

And Einstein’s theory of relativity was also unproved. You couldn’t travel faster than light no matter what, Einstein had said. How could he know? How close to the speed of light had he gone? Relativity was only a way of understanding the world. Einstein couldn’t restrict what mankind could do in the far future. And Einstein sure couldn’t set limits on what God could do. Couldn’t God travel faster than light if He wanted to? Couldn’t God make us travel faster than light if He wanted to? There were excesses in science and there were excesses in religion. A reasonable man wouldn’t be stampeded by either one. There were many interpretations of Scripture and many interpretations of the natural world. Both were created by God, so both must be mutually consistent. Wherever a discrepancy seems to exist, either a scientist or a theologian – maybe both – hasn’t been doing his job. 

(Sagan 1985, 141-142)

“Wonder is the basis of worship.”

– Thomas Carlyle
Sartor Resartus (1833-34)
(Sagan 1985, 149)

“I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”

– Albert Einstein
Ideas and Opinions (1954)
(Sagan 1985, 149)

“Every government that prepares for war paints its adversaries as monsters,” she said. “They don’t want you thinking of the other side as human. If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters.” 

(Sagan 1985, 153)

A few weeks before, when Lunacharksy was still at Argus, he launched himself on one of his occasional tirades on the irrationality of language. This time it was the turn of American English. 

“Ellie, why do people say ‘make the same mistake again’? What does ‘again’ add to the sentence? And am I right that ‘burn up’ and ‘burn down’ mean the same thing? ‘Slow up’ and ‘slow down’ mean the same thing? So if ‘screw up’ is acceptable, why no ‘screw down’?”

…”And take this phrase ‘head over heels in love,’” he continued. “This is a common expression, yes? But it’s exactly backward. Or, rather, upside down. You are ordinarily head over heels. When you are in love you should be heels over head. Am I right? You would know about falling in love. But whoever invented this phrase did not know about love. …”

(Sagan 1985, 154-155)

She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With her previous partners, it seemed, at most one of these selves was able to find a compatible opposite number; the other personas were grumpy hangers-on. 

(Sagan 1985, 157)

“The theologians seem to have recognized a special, nonrational – I wouldn’t call it irrational – aspect of the feeling of sacred or holy. They call it ‘numinous.’ The term was first used by … let’s see … somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy. He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium treemendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that. 

“In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but, if I read this right, not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing ‘wholly other,’ and the human response to it as ‘absolute astonishment.’ Now, if that’s what religious people talk about when they use words like sacred or holy, I’m with them. I felt something like that just in listening for a signal, never mind in actually receiving it. I think all of science elicits that sense of awe.”

“Now listen to this.” She read from the text:

Throughout the past hundred years a number of philosophers and social scientists have asserted the disappearance of the sacred, and predicted the demise of religion. A study of this history of religions shows that religious forms change and that there has never been unanimity on the nature and expression of religion. Whether or not man …

“Sexists write and edit religious articles, too, of course.” She returned to the text. 

Whether or not man is now in a new situation for developing structures of ultimate values radically different from those provided in the traditionally affirmed awareness of the sacred is a vital question. 

“So?”

“So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly – like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who’s more religious would you say – the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?”

(Sagan 1985, 158-159)

“That’s another thing.” She interrupted her own train of thought as well as der Heer’s. “If that signal is from God, why does it come from just one place in the sky – in the vicinity of a particularly bright nearby star? Why doesn’t it come from all over the sky at once, like the cosmic black-body background radiation? Coming from one star, it looks like a signal from another civilization. Coming from everywhere, it would look much more like a signal from your God.” 

“God can make a signal come from the bumghole of the Little Bear if He wants.” Reankin’s face was becoming bright red. “Excuse me, but you’ve gotten me riled up. God can do anything.”

“Anything you don’t understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.” 

(Sagan 1985, 172)

There were other intelligent beings in the universe. We could communicate with them. They were probably older than we, possibly wiser. They were sending us libraries of complex information. There was a widespread anticipation of imminent secular revelation. So the specialists in every subject began to worry. Mathematicians worried about what elementary discoveries they might have missed. Religious leaders worried that Vegan values, however alien, would find ready adherents, especially among the uninstructed young. Astronomers worried that there might be fundamentals about the nearby stars that they had gotten wrong. Politicians and government leaders worried that some other systems of government, some quite different from those currently fashionable, might be admired by a superior civilization. Whatever Vegans knew had not been influenced by peculiarly human institutions, history, or biology. What if much that we think true is a misunderstanding, a special case, or a logical blunder? Experts uneasily began to reassess the foundations of their subjects. 

Beyond this narrow vocational disquiet was a great and soaring perception of a new adventure for the human species, of turning a corner, of bursting into a new age – a symbolism powerfully amplified by the approach of the Third Millennium. There were still political conflicts, some of them – like the continuing South African crisis – serious. But there was also a notable decline in many quarters of the world of jingoist rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism. There was a sense of the human species, billions of tiny beings spread over the world, collectively presented with an unprecedented opportunity, or even a grave common danger. To many, it seemed absurd for the contending nation states to continue their deadly quarrels when faced with a nonhuman civilization of vastly greater capabilities. There was a whiff of hope in the air. Some people were unaccustomed to it and mistook it for something else – confusion, perhaps, or cowardice. 

(Sagan 1985, 186-187)

“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. “

– George Santayana
Scepticism and Animal Faith, IX
(Sagan 1985, 235)

In the daylight, though, it’s hard to see any sign of human habitation. But at night, except for the polar aurora, everything you see is due to humans, humming and blinking all over the planet. That swath of light is eastern North America, continuous from Boston to Washington, a megalopolis in fact if not in name. Over there is the burnoff of natural gas in Libya. The dazzling lights of the Japanese shrimp fishing fleet have moved toward the South China Sea. On every orbit, the Earth tells you new stories. You can see a volcanic eruption in Kamchatka, a Saharan sandstorm approaching Brazil, unseasonably frigid weather in New Zealand. You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real. 

(Sagan 1985, 280)

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

– Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary (1857)
(Sagan 1985, 295)

One of Xi’s crimes in the eyes of the Cultural Revolution had been to admire some of the ancient Confucian virtues, and especially one passage from the Great Learning, which for centuries before every Chinese with even a rudimentary education knew by heart. It was upon this passage, Sun Yat-sen had said, that his own revolutionary nationalist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century was based:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom first ordered well their own states. Wishing to ordered well their own states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. 

(Sagan 1985, 300-301)

“Ah, scientific skepticism.” The Abbot flashed a smile that Ellie found absolutely winning; it was innocent, almost childlike.

“To communicate with a stone, you must become much less … preoccupied. You must not do so much thinking, so much talking. When I say I communicate with a stone, I am not talking about words. The Christians say, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ But I am talking about a communication much earlier, much more fundamental than that.”

“It’s only the Gospel of Saint John that talks about the Word,” Ellie commented – a little pedantically, she thought as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “The earlier Synoptic Gospels say nothing about it. It’s really an accretion from Greek philosophy. What kind of preverbal communication do you mean?”

“Your question is made of words. You ask me to use words to describe what has nothing to do with words. Let me see. There is a Japanese story called ‘The Dream of the Ants.’ It is set in the Kingdom of the ants. It is a long story, and I will not tell it to you now. But the point of the story is this: To understand the language of the ants, you must become an ant.”

“The language of the ants is in fact a chemical language,” said Lunacharsky, eyeing the Abbot keenly. “They lay down specific molecular traces to indicate the path they have taken to find food. To understand the language of the ants, I need a gas chromatograph, or a mass spectrometer. I do not need to become an ant.” 

(Sagan 1985, 306)

In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work. 

(Sagan 1985, 313)

“So I walk on uplands unbounded, 
And know that there is hope 
for that which Thou didst mold out of dust 
to have consort with things eternal.”

– The Dead Sea Scrolls
(Sagan 1985, 325) 

Physicists had to invent words and phrases for concepts far removed from everyday experience. It was their fashion to avoid pure neologisms and instead to evoke, even if feebly, some analogous commonplace. The alternative was to name discoveries and equations after one another. This they did also. But if you didn’t know it was physics they were talking, you might very well worry about them. 

(Sagan 1985, 331)

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References

Sagan, Carl. 1985. Contact. N.p.: Simon and Schuster.

ISBN 0-671-43400-4