Jed sed: > Hey, I am a literal-minded guy.
Yeah, we kind'a know that about you Jed! No offense taken. As for Sagan, I think he got the last laugh - posthumously. I think he got even with his superiors when he wrote his speculative novel "Contact". If one reads the novel it's pretty obvious that Sagan must have experienced many internal dialogues concerning how he might go about reconciling the values represented by religion versus those of science. I don't know if he ever came to grips with such a huge conundrum or not. Nevertheless, he left us with a worthy novel which was subsequently transformed into a great film, starring Jody Foster as Elanor Arroway the unabashed SETI researcher. I thought Jody managed to capture the joy (and also absolute frustration) of having experienced an authentic contact with an extraterrestrial civilization while not being able to prove it to the scientific establishment. In the movie it is amusing that behind closed doors the powers to be suspected Arroway's publicly disgraced encounter might actually possess a ring of truth to it. They secretly knew she had recorded 17 hours of "static" during her cosmic worm-hole trip, which presumably was when she was in "contact". This shouldn't have happened since according to the official logs Arroway was only "gone" for just a fraction of a second. Of course, they weren't going to let a little detail concerning a 17-hour recording gap out. In the end it would seem that Arroway eventually secures additional funding so that she can continue pursuing her interest in SETI research. She finds herself employed out on a remote location with a few radio telescopes at her disposal to play around with. In other words, it's best to isolate Arroway while discretely keeping a close eye on her activities! In the end you had to take Elanor Arroway's encounter on faith. Hopefully, the so-called "faith" of CF/LENR evidence commonly depicted by many skeptics will soon become a moot point when replications become ubiquitous. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
