Contact, Jodie Foster and the Twin Paradox

The Jodie Foster film 'Contact', based on a novel by the late Carl Sagan, is one of the better films I've seen recently in terms of its strong attempt to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Although the film is, for the most part, a more grounded and realistic take on a hypothetical first contact scenario than a sci-fi romp, it is not without its flaws. In the movie, following Foster's character Ellie Arroway's discovery of a radio signal coming from the Vega system, scientists are able to decode blueprints for a near-light speed ship sent by the aliens. After the first ship is destroyed by a religious fundamentalist, the second attempt at launch causes Arroway to travel through a series of wormhole-like passages through space and to various extraterrestrial worlds. All in all, Ellie's fascinating journey through space takes her eighteen hours to complete, after which she is deposited back on Earth. Despite her successful mission, however, to the scientists operating the machine Arroway's ship appeared to simply drop through the rings and land in the ocean. The theory that comes into play in this sequence is that of the 'Twin Paradox'. As the movie poses it, Arroway's journey at near-light speeds meant that she only appeared to travel for seconds despite the true length of time being far longer. This is, in fact, an incorrect portrayal of the Paradox and human travel at the speed of light. 

In reality, the circumstances should actually have been flipped. In the Twin Paradox, the actual resolution to the paradox -- In which a twin traveling at the speed of light and a twin standing on Earth each see the other aging more slowly -- is that the twin traveling through space was the one aging more slowly. Therefore, since Arroway was the one traveling at near-light speeds, she should have appeared to be gone for much longer on Earth than the eighteen hours the experience took from her point of view, instead of the inverse. 

To fix this sequence in the film and make it work in accordance with the twin paradox, the sequence near the end would need to be reversed. It would make more sense if when Ellie returned, instead of not believing she had left at all, the people on Earth had seen her as being gone for far longer than eighteen hours, and had aged at a faster rate than her. This revised sequence could still make for an interesting finale, as Ellie would have to deal with her friends and family having aged more rapidly than her, instead of accusations that she was lying.