The opening scene of the 1997 film Contact, with humanity's cluttered radio broadcasts fading into silence, is a stunning testament to the infinitesimal position of our species in the vastness of space—or it should be, if it were anywhere close to accurate.

Here's the scene in question: [ Ссылка ]

As pretty as the visuals are, it's pretty much impossible to fly by four planets in the solar system in a perfectly straight line. More than two planets don't tend to align as precisely as that, especially when even a slight change in angle could make your straight path totally miss the target.

I found these things out the hard way while trying to simulate the scene in Space Engine. I'd originally wanted to fly by more planets than Saturn by rotating towards them, but the camera bugged out whenever I tried to record anything other than a zoom-out. I ended up finding a date where the sun, Earth, and Saturn line up, but adding in any other planets would have made a date like that a lot harder to come by. Technical difficulties with the program aside, I think the lack of rotation helps to illustrate the inaccuracies in Contact.

And we're not even talking about the Pillars of Creation yet! Did you know that this particular nebula is 7,000 light years from Earth? (And Contact only passed a star or two on the way). Our radio broadcasts in Contact are still going strong by the time we reach the gas and dust of the Pillars. Since radio travels at the speed of light, to get that far it should've been sent 7,000 years ago. The first radio transmission was in 1900.

Fortunately, I was able to record two identical videos, and the one in addition to what you see here had a distance counter. Unlike Contact, the audio in this video is roughly synced with the light years.

We don't reach one light year until about 1:18 through this video. We have to speed up the zooming a lot once we leave the solar system, going a few light years per second through the rest of radio history. The audio fades out just before those first few radio broadcasts were sent; we pick up the pace to hundreds of light years a second, then thousands as we leave the Milky Way. The Virgo Supercluster of galaxies recedes at many millions of light years per second, and by the time we fade to white we're billions of light years from home, nearing the edge of the observable universe.

"Observable", we say—there's a lot out there that's just too far to be seen. Here's where I'll admit a few "inaccuracies". Space Engine generates new (fake) galaxies to fill the gaps in our data, so many of the tiny lights you see blinking on once we leave the Milky Way are made up by the program. In a way, though, this makes the video almost MORE accurate—we know there's stuff there, but we just haven't found it all yet.

At the time of Contact's release (on this day, July 11th, in 1997), we'd barely scratched the surface in the search for exoplanets, and with the new James Webb Space Telescope we'll be able to see even further into space. Maybe some of those fake galaxies will get to be replaced by real ones. Maybe in 25 years someone else will come along and call THIS video horribly misguided. I'd certainly welcome the criticism if it means we get to live through a new era of incredible discovery, an infinitesimal species peering further into the dark.

***

(Any and all criticism of Contact is made with love).

Produced in part with SpaceEngine PRO©, Cosmographic Software LLC.

0:00 1 AU
0:39 8.76 AU
1:16 0.05 light years
1:18 1 light year
1:28 10+ light years
1:43 The Nineties (22+ light years)
1:46 The Eighties (32+ light years)
2:01 50+ light years
2:14 75+ light years
2:21 100+ light years
2:23:50 122 light years (first radio broadcast)
2:36 1,000+ light years
2:44 10,000+ light years
2:54 100,000+ light years
3:09 1,000,000+ (one million) light years
3:18 10,000,000+ (ten million) light years
3:24 100,000,000+ (one hundred million) light years
3:28 1,000,000,000+ (one billion) light years

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