The SETI Astronomer of Ellie Arroway is a colossal, pleasant nation, renowned for its barren, inhospitable landscape, parental licensing program, and unlimited-speed roads. The hard-nosed population of 8.023 billion Radio Astronomers are fiercely patriotic and enjoy great social equality; they tend to view other, more capitalist countries as somewhat immoral and corrupt.

The medium-sized, corrupt government juggles the competing demands of Healthcare, Welfare, and Defense. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Arecibo Observatory. The average income tax rate is 28.3%, but much higher for the wealthy.

The large but inefficient Radio Astronomer economy, worth 391 trillion dollars a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. However, for those in the know, there is a large, well-organized, fairly diversified black market in Arms Manufacturing, Basket Weaving, Door-to-door Insurance Sales, and Beef-Based Agriculture. The private sector mostly consists of enterprising ten-year-olds selling lemonade on the sidewalk, but the government is looking at stamping this out. Average income is 48,857 dollars, and evenly distributed, with the richest citizens earning only 2.1 times as much as the poorest.

Calling shotgun on the front seat too many days in a row is seen as a crime against social equality, international tensions are high as Ellie Arroway threatens any government with the audacity to arrest its citizens, it ain't easy to be green enough to be imported into Ellie Arroway, and a proud mining community is considering a rebellion after the Capital officially renamed them 'District XII'. Crime, especially youth-related, is almost non-existent. Ellie Arroway's national animal is the Quasar, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation.

Ellie Arroway is ranked 10,569^th in the world and 37^th in Bytes for Most Primitive, scoring 93.74 on the Scary Big Number Scale.