But the nature of that reply is also grounded in the plausible, with the aliens using the value of hydrogenвЂ™s atomic weight multiplied by Pi to reveal the frequency to receive a pattern of repeating prime numbers, all mathematical elements that would identify a signal as intelligent in origin. For one thing, Sagan takes care to not only work out what might have prompted a distant star system to reach out to us вЂ“ HitlerвЂ™s speech from the 1936 Olympics, the first broadcast signal powerful enough to leave Earth and have time to reach a distant star and get a reply. ItвЂ™s the way that SETI is portrayed that earns it a place on our list. Ellie Arroway, combing the skies for radio signals as a way of coping with the death of her father. Sagan first pitched his story of an astronomer who becomes the first human to converse with alien life way back in 1979, but it took almost twenty years to come to fruition with Jodie Foster in the lead role of Dr. ThatвЂ™s not surprising considering it was written by none other than Carl Sagan, whose book The Demon-Haunted World is still one of the great touchstones of rational scientific writing. ItвЂ™s an area that has inspired some frankly laughable movies over the years ( The Arrival, in which Charlie Sheen battles chicken-legged alien invaders being a good example), but Contact takes the endeavor completely seriously. In this case, itвЂ™s the SETI program вЂ“ the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Much like Interstellar, Contact uses a bedrock of hard science on which to build an emotional and spiritual drama.

Cast: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, and Tom Skerritt.

Ellie Arroway in Contact (1997), an adaptation of a novel written by famous scientist Carl Sagan. This is a potent and moving illustration of the sacrifices that deep space travel will involve. In one particularly heartbreaking scene, McConaughey breaks down in tears as he watches decades of saved video messages from his son, knowing that although he is only months away from Earth from his perspective, his child has grown old and will die long before he can return home.

Until we find a way to actually travel past lightspeed, weвЂ™re not going to know how accurate those effects really were, but by using cutting-edge astrophysics as his basis rather than just what looked cool, Nolan was already ahead of the sci fi herd.Д¬redit, too, for using the time dilation inherent in EinsteinвЂ™s theory of relativity to not only advance the plot, but to underscore the painful human drama. Though much of what it depicts is purely theoretical, such as the mind-bending finale built around the time-warping effects of wormholes, Nolan went out of his way to make sure that he was at least working from real scientific theories.ДЇor the filmвЂ™s visually disorientating representations of what it would look like to travel past the event horizon of a wormhole, Nolan turned to Nobel Prize winning physicist Kip Thorne, who put together equations that the computer effects team then used to generate their dizzying spacetime distortions. His retirement is brought to an end as he's recruited for an experimental deep, deep space mission to locate new habitable planets through a wormhole.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Joe Cooper, a melancholy former astronaut who is scratching out a living as a farmer on a near-future Earth rapidly turning into an arid dust bowl. The search for an alternative home for humanity has been the basis of many a sci-fi story, but few have been as evocative вЂ“ or as grounded in theoretical physics вЂ“ as Christopher NolanвЂ™s quantum melodrama, Interstellar.

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain.The science of I nterstellar (2014) is grounded in theoretical physics and dabbles in cutting-edge astrophysics, too.

Haunted space series