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This is a (likely) reference to Contact (1997), with Jodie Foster.

Some celestial event. No - no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea.

The novel Contact by Carl Sagan was pretty good in this area of SETI.

Carl Sagan - Contact - awesome book, btw skip the movie

Philip K. Dick - anything!

Asimov - Foundation series

Cortázar - anything!

You haven't read Contact (or have forgotten some of the plot).

He explicitly circumvents this in the book.

Read it a few weeks ago. Pretty great, though the ending is a bit inconsistent and a bit 80s.

I've read Contact and I don't think it had anything similar to this. In Contact the message was coming from a planet system a mere 50 light years away and was no way that powerful.

Currently reading Carl Sagan's Contact. Loved the 1997 film with Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway. The book is a real treat.

Contact by Carl Sagan. I first read it as an adult and it took my breath away. The movie was a fair adaptation.

Also, I like to read Ender's Game once a year or so.

I'm reading Contact by Carl Sagan right now and my heart kept fluttering as I read this article.

I'm unqualified to comment on anything in this article, but this is really cool, and I didn't know Wired produced science journalism (or a highly technical Q/A) like this.

Contact is my favourite book.. cancellation of the SETI project is like a part of that book turning to dust.. fantasy.. sad, really

"Contact", by Carl Sagan. It's not "light" and "easy", but it ties our current world to future promise. And it has some wonderful storytelling and writing putting this into context.

The main character, Ellie, is a superb and rich portrayal. Friends to whom I've recommended the book agree on this.

If you've seen the movie, it's an ok Hollywood production. The book is much, much more.

Wonderful film that stands up to repeated viewings. I love the scene where Ellie gets the first hint of a signal and blasts across the desert in her T-bird shouting to her crew through the CB. An early Matthew McConaghy appearance where he hasn't yet succumbed to the inaudible muttering of later work. Contact is based on a Carl Sagan novel, which is also excellent.

I came from a deeply religious family and read this book after reading Contact (a friend lent me). It too had a lasting impact on my worldview. I cultivate a skeptical worldview nowadays thanks to this book.

Contact by Carl Sagan - A good novel that deals with the politics of Science and religion.
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse , A philosophical take on life , reality and belief system.
The Code Book by Simon Singh - A book that explains the history of cryptography in a very interesting way

The plan seems to be "to find intelligent civilizations, look for Earth-like planets that can harbor life." How terribly narrow minded.

> you'd think the chance that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life in our galaxy seems enormous

"And the Earthling rocket ships departed Planet X3, having found no life, only an advanced civilization of extraterrestrial robots."

> Another study out of the University of British Columbia looked at the number of sun-like stars in the galaxy and estimated that one in five of them could have an Earth-like planet

On Earth, Life has embarrassed us by being found in the most inhospitable, acidic, saltiest, hottest places. And then embarrassed us again, by turning up in the cold black energy-poor ocean depths, sipping sulfur from vents. Life is surely bigger than Earth-like planets. And Intelligence is surely bigger than Life.

In Sagan's book Contact, the hard problem was not finding intelligence, but recognizing it. By the end, we learn that the arrangement of the stars and the digits of pi itself carry a message. This is the level of thinking that our search calls for.

Everything from Asimov.

The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The Culture books from Iain Banks.

The Rama series from Clarke although it got tiresome after a while.

The Sparrow and Children of God from Mary Doria Russell.

Contact by Sagan which by the way is one of the very few sci-fi books that were successfully depicted in movies.

Brave new world from Huxley. Old one but still highly relevant.

The first ones from Gibson.

The Enter series by Orson Scott Card.

Bradbury's Farhenheit 451. This one is a classic.

Revelation Space from Alaistair Reynolds who writes the most hardcore sci-fi I've ever come across.

I disagree with one of them; I help run a science based summer camp and we get more and more applicants from stereotypically disadvantaged countries saying that they've taken MOOCs. Whether they actually went through and did all the problems or whether it's CV fluff, it's clear that these services are reaching people around the globe.

It makes a nice change to everyone saying that their favourite book is "A brief history of time" or "Contact".

And while it's clearly in jest, one of the things that puts me off working for a trendy startup is that many are essentially solving rich, busy people's problems, but claim to be making the world a better place.

The Culture was seemed too difficult for Banks to write about directly; a very large proportion of the Culture books are written about the intersection between the Culture and the "rest of the universe".

(side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something)

That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is.

I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).

Did they find the patterns (circle?) that was referend at the end of Carl Sagan’s Contact book?

Thank you! I started to think on those lines too thanks to the Carl Sagan's Contact novel. That was the first thing that came to mind.

Now the question is, what if there are "objects" more advanced than others and what if advanced-object sends a message concealing an trojan horse?
I think this question was also brought up in the novel/movie too...

I think this is a real life and practical show stopper to develop this concept...

Not consecutively repeating patterns.

But if you take any length pattern of digits, it would repeat an infinite number of times.

Let's take a one digit pattern, say '5'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '5's.

Now consider a longer pattern '53'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '53's. In fact, each 53 will be from one of the infinite number of '5's in the previous pattern '5'.

Now consider a longer pattern '537' . . .

. . . to continue . . .

It was long ago when I read Contact (the book), so I hope I don't misremember this too badly. At the end of the book the main character was given a budget, lab, resources, etc. They were working on looking for a message in the digits of Pi. Eventually her beeper beeped and they had found one! It must be woven into the fabric of the universe.

I think any sequence of digits that had any kind of message you are going to eventually find in Pi. Just like, if you look long enough you'll find a 5. If you keep looking you'll eventually find a 53. Keep looking, you'll eventually find a 537. Etc.

I've read two books recently:

* Contact
by Carl Sagan

I had previously seen the movie. The book (or rather the movie) takes a bit of a departure. The backgrounds on all the different characters as well as the political parts weren't that interesting to me. But overall the book was great.

* We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse)
by Dennis Taylor

I'd suggest listening to it on Audiobook. Excellent read. Makes me want to buy the book and read through it again. I can't wait until the next one comes out in (March?)

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Contact-Carl-Sagan/dp/0671004107/ref=...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse/dp/168068...

Sagan does something like this in Contact (the book).

Contact by Sagan

I'm not sure where to begin.

Demon-Haunted World is about skepticism, and how to use science and rational inquiry to avoid scams, pseudoscience, hoaxes, and possibly religion. It is not a strictly atheist book, although you could read it as one if you tilt your head properly.

But how can you not know anything else about Carl Sagan?

He wrote many books popularizing science, including Contact, The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain, and Cosmos. He also co-wrote and hosted the series Cosmos on PBS, which is the most-watched PBS show in history, and well worth watching on DVD.

He was founder and first President of The Planetary Society (http://www.planetary.org/). He was an avid supporter of SETI. He assembled the gold plaque that went into space on Pioneer 10, and the golden records that went out on the Voyager probes.

As an astronomer, he made several important hypotheses about the structure of other planets, particularly Venus, and drew connections between Venus and Earth-based global warming and greenhouse emissions.

He was active in investigating UFO claims, including serving on the Ad Hoc Committee that reviewed the Air Force's Project Blue Book. He was convinced of the probability of extra-terrestrial intelligence, but equally convinced that we had not encountered it yet.

Most importantly, he brought us the phrase "billions and billions", even though he never said it himself until long after it was a joke.

Here's a collection of quotations: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

And one for the road: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

> you have gone with "sound bites" highlighting the negatives without any context thus distorting the whole discourse.

Please provide some context around the following texts from Dharmasutra.

1) Criminal and Civil Law: "If he (Sudra) has sex with an Arya woman, his penis should be cut off and all his property should be confiscated." (Verse 12.1)

2) Contact with Impure Persons: "When a man touches an outcaste, a Candala, a woman who has just given birth or is menstruating, a corpse, or someone who has touched any of these, he becomes purified by bathing with his clothes on." (Verse 15.5)

Note: Candala is a low caste Hindu.

3) Pollution and Remedies: "An ancestral offering is ruined if it is seen by a dog, a Candala, or an outcaste." (Verse 15.24)

4) Unfit Food: "The following are unfit to be eaten: food into which hair or an insect has fallen; what has been touched by a menstruating woman, ..." (Verse 17.9)

Source: The Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Ancient India, Oxford University Press, 1999

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untouchability