It’s no secret that I love the movie Contact. Ellen Arroway, played by Jodi Foster, is one of my favorite scientist characters in fiction. She’s clever, moral, complex, and her motives are deeply human. I had always assumed that she was based on some real life character, but I didn’t know who. It turns out, she’s based on this year’s TED prize winner, Jill Tarter.
I think her fundamental thesis — that the Universe is far larger and weirder than we know, and seems probable that some of the weirdness in that vastness is living weirdness — is excellent. The search alone tells us a lot about ourselves, not to mention what the possible eventual discovery will tell us.
She makes a mistake though, and it’s one I hear often from my fellow intellectuals in positions of privilege: that if we could just set aside the things that make us distinct from each other, we’d be able to somehow work together to achieve enlightenment. But in setting aside those distinctions — those philosophical and procedural differences that make cultures distinct from each other — then we will have lost what makes us human. It is not our ability to agree on a single best mode of thought that makes us great. It is our ability to pull truth and beauty from distinct, often contradictory perspectives.
It is not the dissolution of distinctions that can make us enlightened. It is the recognition that distinctions are lines drawn on the surface of the Universe, not the Universe itself. Erasing the lines just deprives us of the map.