Solaris, Contact and Marilynne Robinson

Contact opens with a sweeping shot from a camera that must be attached to a rocket or satellite or something. There's a similar shot in Solaris (the Russian version) when Kelvin is landing on the planet with the thinking ocean. It's a continuous shot that you most likely have seen before in Carl Sagan's timeless series on the Cosmos. He and his scientific team made the series in the late 70s. Many astronomers, astronauts, thinkers, tinkers and space folk remark on its scope--encompassing and forward thinking and still totally relevant. The idea behind the shot in Contact, Solaris and The Cosmos is entrenched in the premise of science and science fiction--there is a big universe out there, we might should be thinking about it more often. The shot is a retreating one. From the edge of the universe, if there is an edge, down to earth where mortals roam and do the things that mortals do. It takes a minute for the shot to be complete and for your imagination to catch up with this new scope, there is lots of space to cover, way more than you cover on your morning commute. Covering that space makes one think  about what we're up to here on earth and why we are up to what we are up to. It then galvanizes us in a way--are there others up to something somewhere in all that space? And so we have some epic movies about what it would be like to make contact with other life forms that may or may not be up to something, like Contact and Solaris.

Marilynne Robinson explains what these movies are up to at length, "Here is another instance of evolution, to illustrate my point. The universe passed through its unimaginable first moment, first year, first billion years, wresting itself from whatever state of nonexistence, inflating contorting, resolving into space and matter, bursting into light. Matter condenses, stars live out their generations. Then, very late, there is added to the universe of being a shaped stick or stone, a jug, a cuneiform tablet. They appear on a tiny, teetering, lopsided planet, and they demand wholly new vocabularies of description for reality at every scale. What but the energies of the universe could be expressed in the Great Wall of China, the St. Matthew Passion? For our purposes, there is nothing else. Yet language that would have been fully adequate to describe the ages before the appearance of the first artifact would have had to be enlarged by concepts like agency and intention, words like creation, that would query the great universe itself. Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us, a change gradualism could not predict--if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are."

Showing the clumsy agency and bulky intention of humans is central for detailing, in a movie, the quirks of searching for and making Contact. After all, to act intentionally on the basis of an "encouraged imagination of humankind that is large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are" is quirky. Maybe that's why it makes for good movies. Solaris and Contact are  manifestations of Marilynne's hopeful fable. They both juggle thoughts about the brain, sentience and metaphysics. They both agree with Marilynne that the brain is the most phenomenal thing known to exist in our universe. What's most phenomenal, and they all three agree again, is that our brain when paired with agency is capable of imagining other brains, other metaphysics, and other physical universes that lie outside the bounds of science--they can't be proved. Marilynne Robinson, Contact and Solaris find the same landing points on the other side of big questions about our life and other life forms--our imagination is where they live, and that makes them no less real. Having such a humble and accommodating imagination is what all three ask of us. More importantly, all three, in their indefatigable pursuit of good science, end up somewhere between feeling apologetically remiss and bashfully unfounded. All three are forced to concede defeat and lean on faith. Not so much faith in God, it's more of a faith in the spirit of all that is unsubstantiated. One could call this God if they felt like it. A pretty cool place to end up, don't ya think? I do. Understand that these two movies are most excellent. And notice how well each movie (and book) modestly encourage this deferential thoughtfulness.