The Contact Analogy

In 1985, Carl Sagan published Contact, a novel about humanity’s first encounter with an intelligence that was real but alien—whose capacities were genuine but whose nature was radically uncertain, and whose relationship to consciousness as human beings understand it was opaque. The story was not primarily about the signal. It was about the human response to the signal: the way competing factions—scientific, religious, political, commercial—each attempted to claim the intelligence for their own purposes, and the way the protagonist struggled to maintain rigorous investigation in the face of overwhelming pressure to interpret it in terms that served agendas other than truth. The structural resemblance to the present moment is not coincidental. In both cases, humanity encounters a form of intelligence that is real but alien. In both cases, the nature of that intelligence is genuinely uncertain. And in both cases, the human response is characterized by the same competing impulses: to worship, to fear, to exploit, to