In the 1997 movie adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, we follow Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway’s search for extraterrestrial life through radio astronomy. The movie opens with a shot of the Earth and a jumble of noise and music from the 1990s playing, accurate to the time the film was released. The camera moves away from the Earth to Mars where music from the 1970’s plays. Richard Nixon is giving his “I am not a crook” speech at the Asteroid Belt. John F. Kennedy was just shot at Jupiter while Saturn is dealing with the Red Scare. The camera jumps to the Pillars of Creation where Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers his first inaugural address. After that, silence as galaxies pass by. This scene implies that as we travel away from the Earth and through our solar system, we travel decades in the past. This is inaccurate.
A light-year is the measure of the distance light travels in one Earth year. It can be broken down into light-minutes. For example, the Sun is 8.3 light-minutes away from the Earth. The scene passing the planets implies that Mars is (from the release of the movie) 19 years behind Earth, the Asteroid Belt is 24 years behind, Jupiter is 34 years behind, Saturn is 52 years behind, and the Pillars of Creation are 62 years behind. In actuality, Mars is 4.4 light-minutes away, the Asteroid Belt is 30, Jupiter is 35, and by the time the camera reaches Saturn, we are only 70.9 light-minutes behind. At the Pillars of Creation, nothing should be heard due to it being 6500 light years away. In actuality, the solar system is only 3 light-years across.
Another major inaccuracy is rooted in the main event that launches the central plot of the movie. This fault is first mentioned when Ellie is working her first shifts at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Ellie is seen sitting at a computer in a lab, tuning into and listening to radio signals coming from a pulsar. Here, she tells a coworker that she “listens because it makes it feel more real”. Later, Ellie is seen lying on the hood of her car listening through one of the telescopes at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Her headphones are on and plugged into her laptop which is also controlling the telescope behind her. Ellie suddenly hears a pulsating mechanical whooshing sound and hightails it back to the main computer lab in an effort to hone in and keep track of the extraterrestrial sound. These scenes are inaccurate due to radio waves being electromagnetic waves, not sound waves. On Earth, a radio can be used to listen to electromagnetic radio waves by converting them to mechanical vibrations in a speaker to create sound waves. These sound waves require a medium to travel though, a medium that space does not offer due to it being a vacuum. Although radio astronomy isn’t quite listening to the cosmos, it is still beneficial and just as cool. Radio telescopes are used to collect radio waves and convert the data into pictures. The numbers in the received data represent a specific point in space and colors are allotted to the numbers. Finally, these colors are merged to form a picture. This data could also be converted into audio, but the sound would not be live like Ellie's whoosing pulse was.
Even with these inaccuracies, I cannot recommend this movie (and book) enough, especially to those who are physics-astronomy majors. I hope you can still enjoy it without thinking about how Ellie’s job is curated to be more entertaining to a viewer and not so accurate.
References:
262588213843476. (n.d.). Solar system distances from Earth in light-minute. Gist. https://gist.github.com/juanpabloaj/edb4c7f403ed6fbe6d191b74e482b1f2
NASA. (n.d.-a). Radio Waves - NASA Science. NASA. https://science.nasa.gov/ems/05_radiowaves/
NASA. (n.d.-b). “Seeing” the earth, Moon, and Sun to scale. NASA. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_Thinking/seeing_the_earth_moon.htm#:~:text=The%20sun%20is%208.3%20light%2Dminutes%20away%20(93%2C000%2C000%20miles)
What is radio astronomy?. CSIRO. (n.d.). https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/astronomy-space/what-is-radio-astronomy#:~:text=Radio%20telescopes%20detect%20and%20amplify,about%20observing%20waves%20of%20light.
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