the one single question

While flipping through TV channels during lunch time showed the movie Contact playing on one of them. I hadn’t seen the movie before but had a vague idea of the story outline from the trailers, that it was a science fiction about a lady contacting extraterrestrial intelligience.

It was an interesting scene… just before leaving for her outer-space trip to try and establish contact, she was being interviewed by an international panel, and someone asks her: if you had only one single question that you could ask them, what would it be?

Her question…

How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?

———–

Another nice quote (after she returns from a space journey) was…

I… had an experience. I can’t prove it, I can’t even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever. A vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how… rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are *not*, that none of us are alone.

This sounds pretty much like Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot – though he only comments about a picture, or the Total Perspective Vortex described in H2G2.

Of course Arthur Dent (in H2G2) dosen’t sound very credible either to anybody else after he returns… 🙂