Corrected entry: Ellie tells Palmer, "There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had planets, alright, and if just one in a million of those had life, and if just out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there." Such a brilliant MIT grad, should be more convincing using mathematical arguments: 4.00E+11 x 1/1.00E+6 x 1/1.00E+6 x 1/1.00E+6 = 4.00E-7 (that's 0.0000004 planets in our galaxy with life!) Not a very persuasive argument for vast quantities of life in the universe. (00:17:15 - 00:17:45)
Contact (1997)
21 corrected entries
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, Jodie Foster, Tom Skerritt, David Morse, Jena Malone, Geoffrey Blake
Factual error: When Mr. Hadden reviews Ellie's life history on his airplane, he says she graduated from MIT 'magna cum laude'. This is impossible, as MIT does not award academic honors to graduates.
Ellie Arroway: I work for a project called seti.
Palmer Joss: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? Wow, that's out there.
Trivia: Filmmakers George Miller and Francis Ford Coppola both sued Warner Bros. over Contact. George Miller sued for breach of contract (as he was the original director before being fired and replaced by Robert Zemeckis), while Coppola sued because he claimed that he and Carl Sagan (the writer of Contact) had already developed the premise for a TV show in the 1970's which was never produced, before Sagan later used the idea for Contact in 1985. Both suits failed - Miller's firing was within contract and perfectly reasonable, and Coppola was dismissed (twice) because he had taken far too long to sue the company (if he sued when Sagan began working in the 80's, he may have won, but he waited until after the film's release in 1997 to sue).
Question: If you read the book version of Contact you know that the stuff about transcendental numbers and the Artist's Signature was left out of the movie. This makes no sense to me, since it's not only the real ending, it's the whole POINT of the story. Without this information, the story's fundamental question (does God exist?) is not answered in the movie. Does anyone know why this was left out?
Answer: If anything, I think the film's producers deliberately left godly topics unaddressed (and questions dangling, unanswered) because they didn't want to alienate any particular audience. However, we know the producers of "Contact" certainly did vilify religion through the sinister scenes with Joseph, the evangelical extremist. At the same time, the film created empathy for the president's glib theological adviser, Palmer Joss. So, I don't think the film was shying away from religious topics, and I think it was pretty fair to the religious viewpoint, for the most part. But this movie wasn't about religion; it was about a primitive, materialistic, self-centered and aggressive species (humanity) reluctantly acknowledging the existence of vastly more intelligent and even godlike entities throughout the cosmos. Even the first-contact entities, advanced as they are, acknowledge other entities much more ancient and much more advanced (the virtual architects of the space/time conduit). The implication was that we live in a universe that may be populated with many intelligent entities that answer every human criteria of godhood. Ellie's narrow-minded atheism was surely shaken to its foundation by her experience; and, while she didn't "convert" to archaic earthly religions, she was spiritually a different person upon her return. The film, however, is open-ended and fence-straddling and doesn't presume to definitively answer the question of the existence of god, leaving it up to the audience to decide.
Answer: The film chooses to focus on Ellie's personal journey and how she deals with and comes to terms with what happens - it doesn't really involve God at all, other than the inclusion of Palmer Joss as a religious advocate, choosing to restrict itself to the much less theologically controversial theme of a straight first contact scenario, without the religious overtones. Given the depth of feeling on religious matters in the US, it's hardly surprising that the filmmakers preferred to leave this particular hot topic out. While Carl Sagan died during production of the film, he both co-produced and was involved in the story process, so he was clearly not concerned about this change.
Correction: Yeah, well, with the current estimate being that there are over a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, many of which are deemed to be considerably larger than our own, I think you'll find that Ellie's statement is, in fact, perfectly correct.
Tailkinker ★
Nope. There would need to be 2.5 Trillion galaxies, considerably more than "over a hundred billion" for Ellie's math to be correct.
Actually 2.5 Trillion bears out 1,000,000 planets with life. So... technically, there would need to be 5 Trillion to bear out 2,000,000 planets with life, thus meeting the requirements for use of the word millions, with an "s" as in plural of.
You're working on the idea of galaxies rather than stars. if each galaxy held 400 billion stars than the original corrections claim is easily in the right.
There are galaxies that are far bigger than Milky Way, even hosting a trillion or more stars.
But she's not talking about other galaxies. She is talking about planets and stars in our galaxy. The entry is correct, she's talking about an extremely low percentage.
lionhead