Contact Getting the "Twin Paradox" Wrong

In the movie Contact, Ellie, who is the main character, comes in contact with an alien race. That same alien race then wants for one person on Earth to travel to them by building a ship with blueprints that the aliens send down to Earth. Eventually, with some complications, Ellie is in fact the one person on Earth who gets to go on the journey. The expedition goes swell and Ellie gets to meet the aliens. However, from Ellie's point of view in the movie, the trip lasted roughly 18 hours. Whereas the people who were watching her ship back on Earth only saw her fall straight into the ocean; which only took a couple of seconds. Now, one would say that the time differences that Ellie and the people back on Earth faced seemed true. However, the time scenarios in the movie actually portray the twin paradox to be backwards. 
In order for the twin paradox to be correct in the movies situation would be in fact if the people on Earth experienced a much longer time period than Ellie did. Ellie must have been traveling close to the speed of light, if not that. Therefore, for the people on the Earth, Ellie's trip, or in this case fall, would have seemed insignificantly slower than what was portrayed in the movie. Then for Ellie Earths time would seem to run slower as well because both Ellie and the people on Earth would be experiencing time dilation. However, when Ellie did return to Earth the people on Earth would in fact seem to be older because the people on earth were the ones that measured the "proper" time. Where Ellie experienced the time dilation. Meaning that the if Ellie felt like her trip took 18 hours, the time on Earth should have been much longer than 18 hours. 
In order to fix this in the movie nothing major would need to happen. Simply the people on Earth would just need to be finally happy that she had returned because they felt like she had been gone forever rather than her literally seeming to fall continuously for a split second.  

Comments

  1. Careful. You actually have a couple things backwards yourself. "Dilated" time is always the longer time; that's why the word dilated is used. It means wider or larger. That's the time experienced by the observers on Earth. Ellie measures the shorter time. In other words, her clock ticks off less time. That's the proper time.

    As for your ending, is there any way to treat the Twin Paradox correctly, but still retain some drama in the end? What do you think people's reactions would have been if she had been gone for days, months, or even years?

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