It should have gone something like this:

Ellie Arroway continues her advantage in meeting the advanced beings out there. The machine built in Japan is no longer usuable since it appears it was a one-time use machine. However, Ellie has paired up with one of the great mathematical minds in understanding how the wormhole travel/alien machine works. The machine is too advanced to understand, but they are able to show that the tunnel pathways taken by the machine were encoded in the machine. Ellie goes before the U.N. and announces that based on the locations of 'tunnels', her and the mathematical buddy (played by Matt Damon - who else??) were able to decipher that a tunnel can be accessed near the planet Mercury (tensions build when the argument is that they might miss the tunnel and barrel into the sun...). Any case, what do you think? Humans were meant to use the tunnels ourselves and that our first official contact with a civilization comes by our using our own rockets to travel to one of the planetary systems that look like earth. The aliens encountered by Ellie never formally introduce themselves. I guess summer has gotten me used to sequels.

• correction - harvey1 - July 9, 2003 - 19:18 UTC
• the psychology of the aliesns continues to elude us tho? : ) - carefuluniverse - July 10, 2003 - 19:07 UTC