Build a movie plot around this: Who chooses the candidate to travel in the machine? An international panel
Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) works for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Fascinated by science and communication since she was a child, she listens to radio emissions from space hoping to find evidence of alien life. Science Advisor to the President David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) pulls the funding from SETI because he believes the endeavor is futile. Arroway gains backing from secretive billionaire industrialist S. R. Hadden (John Hurt), which allows her to continue the project at the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.Four years later, with Drumlin seeking to close SETI, Arroway discovers a signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers, apparently sent from the star system Vega some 26 light-years away. This announcement causes Drumlin and the National Security Council led by Michael Kitz (James Woods), to attempt to take control of the facility. Arroway's team then discover a video picture buried in the signal: Adolf Hitler's opening address at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Arroway and her team postulate that this would have been the first television signal strong enough to leave Earth's atmosphere, taking 26 years to reach Vega and then transmitted back from there.The project is put under tight security and its progress followed worldwide. Arroway learns that the signal also contains more than 60,000 pages of indecipherable data. The reclusive Hadden secretly meets with Arroway to provide the means to decode the pages, found when they are arranged in three dimensions rather than two-dimensional pages. The pages reveal schematics for a complex machine which is determined to be some kind of transport for a single occupant.The nations of the world fund the construction of the machine at Cape Canaveral. An international panel is assembled to choose a candidate to travel in the machine. Although Arroway is a frontrunner to go, her hopes are scuppered by Christian philosopher Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a panel member whom...