The low estimate of potentially habitable/Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone is 300 million. It would be depressing if we are the only ones anywhere.
The first movie to truly respect astronomy and it’s research, and to make alien contact a plausible thing. And James Woods is awesome in just about anything— he just has to be James Woods, a script isn’t required for him.
I had Contact on VHS. When I bought my first home theatre system, I bought the DVD, and cranked it to the contact scene where Jodie Foster starts hollering orders to align all the dishes, maxing the subwoofer volume. Man, I love that movie. It's my number one remote dropper if it's ever on TV.
Carl Sagan was a much better evangelist for this stuff than NDT, considering the latter was being a douchebag about people asking about the first picture of the black hole from a couple years ago. I do hope we can land a Mars-style rover on Europa at some point.
Europa is the most interesting place in the solar system now. Everything is dead of life except maybe for it, but if so much as bacteria is located in its ocean…. That is an alien life. And that would mean it’s everywhere.
Add some intense choral-driven orchestral music, and it’s a screenshot of the alien blowing up at the end of Stargate.
Looking at the higher res SMACKS0723 image and zooming in on a section is emotionally overwhelming. Seeing all those galaxies - GALAXIES! not solar systems - and projecting into the vastness of the universe beyond all comprehension is just very, very hard to understand. I cannot wait to see what this continues to reveal in my lifetime. Just incredible.
I meant to post this earlier. But, I wanted to point out that the high resolution images and other fun stuff is worth checking out. https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery Might want to save the downloads for your desktop if your phone storage space is limited.