There is a Congressional committee. They tell Arroway that they think the machine was a hoax designed by the now-deceased Hadden. But she’s certain it was not. Arroway asks the committee to accept the truth of her testimony on faith, as inspired by Palmer Joss, who sits in the audience. In a private conversation, Kitz and a White House official talk about unreleased confidential information that Arroway's recording device recorded static for 18 hours—proving she may have gone somewhere. Because of his earlier popularity as a science writer from his best-selling books, including The Dragons of Eden, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1977, he was asked to write and narrate the show. It was targeted to a general audience of viewers, whom Sagan felt had lost interest in science, partly due to a stifled educational system. [60] Now, Arroway has only a subjective experience of aliens who refrain from public appearance. Their existence and technology appear to have been prophesied millennia ago in the Hebrew Bible. After Cosmos aired, Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions", although he never actually used the phrase in the Cosmos series. [64] He rather used the term "billions upon billions." [65]

This sequence is Sagan’s affirmation of the religious structure of revelation, as is the novel’s parallel between early Christian testimony and Arroway’s.At the height of the Cold War, Sagan became involved in nuclear disarmament efforts by promoting hypotheses on the effects of nuclear war, when Paul Crutzen's "Twilight at Noon" concept suggested that a substantial nuclear exchange could trigger a nuclear twilight and upset the delicate balance of life on Earth by cooling the surface. In 1983 he was one of five authors—the "S"—in the follow-up "TTAPS" model (as the research article came to be known), which contained the first use of the term " nuclear winter", which his colleague Richard P. Turco had coined. [76] In 1984 he co-authored the book The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War and in 1990 the book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race, which explains the nuclear-winter hypothesis and advocates nuclear disarmament. Sagan received a great deal of skepticism and disdain for the use of media to disseminate a very uncertain hypothesis. A personal correspondence with nuclear physicist Edward Teller around 1983 began amicably, with Teller expressing support for continued research to ascertain the credibility of the winter hypothesis. However, Sagan and Teller's correspondence would ultimately result in Teller writing: "A propagandist is one who uses incomplete information to produce maximum persuasion. I can compliment you on being, indeed, an excellent propagandist, remembering that a propagandist is the better the less he appears to be one." [77] Biographers of Sagan would also comment that from a scientific viewpoint, nuclear winter was a low point for Sagan, although, politically speaking, it popularized his image amongst the public. [77] Sagan, Carl (May 28, 1978). "Growing up with Science Fiction". The New York Times. p.SM7. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved December 12, 2018.

Arroway’s tale of the Machine ascending to the stars, Palmer says, was “foretold” in the story of Jacob’s ladder: “A ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.”The novel presses the parallel between religion and science by having Arroway compose a clandestine written testimony. She gives it to her first disciple, Palmer, to accompany the oral tradition presumably being propagated. If you like lots of technical detail and science alongside your philosophical debate, then you'll really enjoy this story. Personally, I tend to focus on the latter, but I didn't find the science overwhelming or overly uninteresting and zoning out on the odd detail didn't detract from what was an excellent book. So let's talk about the ending of this movie. It's a real gut punch. You find Ellie basically on trial, with the whole world divided on whether or not they believe she traveled to Vega. Then we get the big reveal that her audio devices actually did record many hours of static, proving she went somewhere, even if we couldn't hear anything on the recording. At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.”

Sagan was also a vocal advocate of the controversial notion of testosterone poisoning, arguing in 1992 that human males could become gripped by an "unusually severe [case of] testosterone poisoning" and this could compel them to become genocidal. [103] In his review of Moondance magazine writer Daniela Gioseffi's 1990 book Women on War, he argues that females are the only half of humanity "untainted by testosterone poisoning." [104] One chapter of his 1993 book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is dedicated to testosterone and its alleged poisonous effects. [105] The truth of the matter comes down to a faith decision initiated by an oral tradition spreading the good news. This recapitulates instead of repudiates the development of early Christianity.My favourite scene was the debate between Ellie and the 2 pastors on the nature of her belief in science versus theirs in religion. As far as I can tell, belief, faith and respect for each other's views is the heart of the book. I don't know much about Carl Sagan, but I get the sense he didn't believe in absolute certainties and he handles both viewpoints fairly and with an open mind in the book. He leaves you thinking.

Sagan's ability to convey his ideas allowed many people to understand the cosmos better—simultaneously emphasizing the value and worthiness of the human race, and the relative insignificance of the Earth in comparison to the Universe. He delivered the 1977 series of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in London. [75] It’s here that the novel really gets interesting, because Sagan purposefully dashes Arroway’s expectations. From the perspective of Earth, no time elapsed during the daylong journey. As a humorous tribute to Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a sagan has been defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to a very large number of anything. [68] [69] Sagan's number [ edit ] While teaching at Cornell, he lived in an Egyptian revival house in Ithaca perched on the edge of a cliff that had formerly been the headquarters of a Cornell secret society. [107] While there he drove a red Porsche 911 Targa and an orange 1970 Porsche 914 [108] with the license plate PHOBOS. According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:The Message, by contrast, is authentic because different human cultures are receiving the same data — it’s a public, not private, revelation. This museum’s fundraising success recently allowed it to build a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark. Sagan’s novel was prescient, foreseeing the appeal of using a museum purportedly curating expert knowledge to consolidate fundamentalist orthodoxy.