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"If a tree is cut down in the rainforest, and is used to make paper to print a book, and the book is really bad, and there's nobody that will read it, do you still hear a sucking sound?"
Charlie in Dayton, A.AsC.

I felt like that when Bo and Constantine got voted out.

What were you Yanks thinking?? #-o

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

...watching American Idol...

...thinking...


Why do the words "contradictory terms" and "oxymoron" come to mind here?

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"If a tree is cut down in the rainforest, and is used to make paper to print a book, and the book is really bad, and there's nobody that will read it, do you still hear a sucking sound?"
Charlie in Dayton, A.AsC.

OK - I understand......

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

Don't worry. Original broadcasts of the first Star Treks as well as The Munsters made it out there long before, not to mention the reruns.

Once they saw how smart Kirk was with Corbomite, not to mention Hermann Munster's indestructibility, they likely thought twice about launching the battle fleet.

Actually, I love the symbolic, overlapping radio-TV broadcasts speeding through space in the opening to the film version of Carl Sagan’s Contact.

Perhaps a species making such ridiculous shows deserve to be extinct.

In his novel "Contact", Sagan asserts that the first radio signal strong enough to be detected from outside the solar system was the broadcast of the Noremburg Rally in 1938.

Actually, Sagan uses the TV-broadcast from the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
I've got the book right here.

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Join the Illuminati

That's the last signal you hear as the camera pans far away from Earth in the opening sequence of the film. (I've got the book and the movie here too.) :wink:

At least I got to the correct dictator and decade. I read the book at least 20 years ago, so forgive me if I forget the details.

is there any actual evidence that he's right?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

It's at least in principle possible. It was one of the earliest high-power (well, relatively speaking) general television broadcasts, though I've been unable to find specific numbers for the power levels used around that time. Looking here, though, suggests that the detector would need to be a pretty impressive one to pick up even present-day broadcasts at the distance of Vega.