What must aliens think of us when they pick up our TV signals?
Abstruse Goose decided to figure it out:
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I wonder what Lrrr from Omicron Persei 8 would say?
Tip o’ the brain slug to David Woods.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 7:12 am
Where’s “Cop Rock”?
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:30 am
I bet Spock is siting at home (40 Eridani) in front of the TV anxiously awaiting the finale to TNG
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:30 am
@ Strahlungsamt,
Aliens will definitely attack us if they see that rubbish!
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:38 am
I wonder if the residents of Aldebaran think humans see only in black and white. (Assuming that they see and see in color).
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:48 am
Oooh, I had hoped a link to our wiki on Lrrr for that one: http://theinfosphere.org/Lrrr
I guess we can’t win every time.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:50 am
If they’re watching those old BBC programs, then humanity has hope.
Mrs. Slocombe, rest in peace. (I’m one of your fans.)
And of course, if (extraterrestrial) aliens had internet connections, they’d be flooding BA and we would have one hell of an internet congestion.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:50 am
I’m moving to Fomalhaut. I loved Night Court!
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:51 am
Actually, I heard that the signals would be drowned out not after awhile.
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:02 am
Or not. Remember that Futurama episode where aliens attack because they missed the final episode of Single Female Lawyer? That final episode of Battlestar Galactica may doom us all.
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:10 am
Oh boy, the Vegans are about to discover the wonders of the Macintosh rather than the hyperspace inter-dimensional virtual computer they’ve been using for millennia; not to mention the cool pastel fashions of Miami Vice and they will be fighting with death rays to get sweaters like the ones worn by Cosby! Oh wait, the Polluxians are about to get hooked on Dallas, waiting for that “who shot JR” episode when one lucky individual who correctly guesses the answer will win an all paid round trip on the hyperdrive to Castor!! The Alpha Centaurians are now hooked on “Lost”, debating about the island and who should end up with Kate!!! Oh no, just think what they’ll think once they get a taste of Jerry Springer and reality TV … NOooooo :-0
Suddenly, our popular choices in entertainment just got kinda … embarrassing :-/
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:15 am
Lrrr would probably say, “WHY IS MY HOME PLANET CONSTANTLY REFERRED TO BY ITS BAYER DESIGNATION?”
And he makes a good point.
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:22 am
To Phil and American bloggers,
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 am
They better be taping those lost Doctor Who episodes!!!!
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:24 am
Thank the heavens america do not represent earth, in cultural terms.
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:29 am
I’ve always wondered, whenever the subject of aliens and human broadcasts comes up: I can’t even tune in to broadcasts that originate in other parts of our own planet, so how would aliens in a different solar system be able to tune in to them? It’s true the signal is reaching them, but not necessarily in a usable form.
In any case:
“Single Female Lawyer
Fighting for her clients
Wearing sexy mini skirts
And being self-reliant.”
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:57 am
If they are planning an invasion, any episodes of Galactica 1980 will deter them. They dare not face Dr. Zee
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:58 am
I always wonder how likely it is that any aliens that pick up TV signals will be able to deduce how to decode it into an actually viewable format? With radio I would think it is it’s really easy to see the signal wave on the carrier wave and extract the sound contained, but how hard would it be to figure out the signal is TV is an image, with a specific resolution, frame rate, embedded sound tract, and everything else. I think it’s doable, but at the same time, I see the difficulty we have decoding lost languages right here on Earth, with simple, finite, unencoded alphabets.
I also wonder hoy much of our culture will be gone and forgotten because future archeologists won’t be able to decode any of our digital media.
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:09 am
@15. Adrian Lopez
for 1, you have a planet in the way of other countries signals
2, you have you countries signals overpowering other countries if they are on the same frequency by a significant amount
3, you are probably right because the inverse square law the signal will probably quickly fade into background noise
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:13 am
Easily. Analog signal is uncompressesed, and it does not require much IQ to infer that pattern
25 x per second BIG_PULSE
~300 x
SHORT_PULSE
some analog signal
SHORT_PULSE
some analog signal
….
is not likely to be something else than 2D analog field
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:14 am
Pfffft! All the really cool aliens have cable.
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:36 am
It’s like a TV Guide for space.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:06 am
Most of them, like me, is wondering when the full TV series of “Get a Life” and the film “Highway to Hell” will be released on DVD.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:36 am
Since we are not getting any signals from them I am afraid they are still in pikaia/dinosaur/neandertal times (so to speak).
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:54 am
I would imagine the Earth’s noisiness in TV signals would have gone off the scale when satellite TV was invented, as each satellite requires a tight-beamed feed pointed up from the ground to rebroadcast back down. That feed signal obviously carries on past the satellite off into deep space, and propagates much further than simple UHF tower signals from the ground. However, an ET listening to it would only hear a massive burst of TV for a fraction of a second once a day as the beam sweeps over them
July 3rd, 2009 at 11:22 am
Vampira. (I believe I already mentioned my geezer status.)
July 3rd, 2009 at 11:38 am
Capella has always been my favorite star. I’m glad they have the Beatles now.
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Uh, looks like he forgot Hitler’s speech at the 1936 Olympics.
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:22 pm
You can stop wondering. The overwhelming majority of our digital media is so fragile there will be little if anything left to decode. Hard drives start failing after 3-5 years of good treatment (yeah, I have some that are still going after 10 – but they’re the minority), DVDs and CDs seldom last 10 years, thumb drives and such are unlikely to last much more than 10-15 years.
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
“DVDs and CDs seldom last 10 years, ”
I have CD’s from the 80’s that still play.
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Maybe it’s scaring them away; they know we watch such things on TV and that we have nuclear weapons, too!
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
[...] I see the superb graphic on Obtuse Goose (after being pointed to Phil’s Bad Astronomy post by Greg “Weird Things” Fish), showing the local star systems to the Solar System [...]
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
As long as hard drives keep being used, then data will be copied (without loss) onto new drives as old ones fail. That lossless copying is one of the main reasons digital media is so popular, anyway.
How long drives last under good treatment is irrelevant to archeology. The question you should be asking is how long they’d last while not being used at all – which is plenty long enough.
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:25 pm
The creatures of Alpha Centauri only have four years to convert to digital.
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:40 pm
What??? No SIMPSONS???
How else will marauding aliens know Earth is populated with snarky yellow skinned blobs with misshapen heads and giant blue hair?
July 3rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
The larger issue is that broadcasting is a vanishing technology as some commenters alluded to. No more “TV astronomy” for our neighbors.
July 3rd, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Damn. Babylon 5 has already reached its home star system of Epsilon Eridani. That means the real inhabitants have finished watching the fifth season and are even now preparing to destroy the Earth in revenge. I knew they should have stopped when Ivanova left. Fools!
July 3rd, 2009 at 6:48 pm
While this seems to be a staple in Sci-Fi stories, I remember reading somewhere recently (possibly here) that thanks to the normal inverse-square drop off in signal strength, regular broadcast TV signals are down below the RF noise level of the sun before they even leave the solar system, and they’re below the 3K background within a lightyear or two. So unless the aliens already know the signal is there, and have incredible signal processing ability to separate out the broadcasts from the background, there’s no reason to think they’re listening to us. Even if they are, how are they going to sort out the thousands of individual programs that are all being broadcast at the same time?
- Jack
PS – “Contact” is my favorite Sci-Fi movie of the past decade (and yes I know it’s 11 years old).
July 3rd, 2009 at 6:54 pm
I read that the whole TV signal thing was a myth; That the signal breaks down after a while & becomes indistinguishable from background noise.
As for retaining media, it’s not the endurance of the medium but whether or not humans desire to keep the media at all. Remember that the BBC purposely destroyed a lot of it’s media. When television supplanted radio, a lot of the radio drama was haphazardly destroyed. When color cartoons began becoming dominant, black & white cartoons were thrown out because distributors thought that they’d never be able to turn a profit on them again. How many websites are gone forever because the operator simply decided they didn’t want to maintain that website?
July 3rd, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Phil, this does remind me of the very funny Galaxy Quest.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I always wondered if it would be possible to pick up a useful signal that far out. I would guess that the signal would degrade to nothing over those kinds of distances.
Phil, could you shed some light on that for us ?
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Not to mention, they’d be rolling on the floor and laughing out loud when they see some of the sci-fi programs.
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:20 pm
And if you scroll it up and down really, really fast you get a pretty cool hypnotic thing going with it too.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Radio waves do not travel forever in space. They have a limited power to them, and as the sphere increases in size leaving the Earth, the power is scattered too widely across the surface of the sphere and eventually the signal is too weak at any point to be detected.
Earth’s signals barely make it out of the solar system and go to no other stars.
The Skeptologists so far are fairly non-scientific and uninformed.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Wow, AnonymousToo, it took a lot of guts to say that.
[rolleyes]
In fact, the radio waves do travel forever, and the Earth’s radio does make it to other stars. It can be detectable, but you’d need a big dish. Power has nothing to do with how far the radio travels, just how weak the signal is. That’s why we can detect radi waves from gamma-ray bursts billions of light years away.
But I guess that’s just me being uninformed.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:24 pm
And of course, if (extraterrestrial) aliens had internet connections, they’d be flooding BA and we would have one hell of an internet congestion.
They’re still on dial-up. Give it a few years.
July 4th, 2009 at 12:19 am
You know, I feel sorry to the hypothetical aliens who are hypothetically watching WWII for 6 years. I mean really, it is about people politically maneuvering, maiming, and destroying each other.
@BA
But isn’t the reason we can detect GRBs is because the energy is all concentrated into two bursts instead of spreading out all around? Anyways, how big must the dishes be to detect the signal from the nearest star?
July 4th, 2009 at 5:47 am
#27:
Exactly. Where’s Hitler?
He’s our interstellar emissary after all…
July 4th, 2009 at 8:06 am
It is indeed fortunate for our reputation in the universe that those signals are subject to the inverse square law, making them disappear into the noise within a few parsecs.
It is unfortunate that life on Earth was exposed to those signals. My analog TV has never made more sense than it does now; finally: reality TV.
July 4th, 2009 at 8:57 am
I remember an episode of “Amazing Stories” back in the 80’s where these kids I believe were trying to build their own satellite dish and ended up picking up a TV broadcast from a nearby star system where aliens were doing an imitation of “I Love Lucy”.
@Naked Bunny – You got room for a passenger? I loved “Night Court” too.
I wonder if the Grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli have planned their first Star Trek convention yet?
July 4th, 2009 at 9:51 am
You can stop wondering. The overwhelming majority of our digital media is so fragile there will be little if anything left to decode…
Which leads us to the question, where will all this be twenty, fifty years from now? Who will be reading these (digitally-compiled) entries of ours many, many years from now? The august critic Roger Ebert reflected on a similar question in his blog Ending up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must, causing him to write,
Personally, I think this is another example of the seemingly dual state of things. In a way, man’s work seems important; but then at the same time, it isn’t. We can only cherish the present; and therefore, thanks, BA and bloggers, for sharing knowledge.
July 4th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Sorry, wrong link to Roger Ebert’s blog. Here’s the correct one:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/02/ending_up_in_a_kind_of_soundle.html
July 4th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Night Court yes!
But keep in mind that Data repeatedly appeared there disguised as human Bob Wheeler from Yugoslavia, wreaking havoc on our judicial system.
Coincidence?
I think not . . .
July 4th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Here’s what Lrrr would (did) say:
July 4th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
The Sopranos and Spongebob Squarepants are NOT bound for Procyon — because they were distributed via cable, not over the air.
July 4th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
@Grumpy,
Are you saying the cable companies don’t transmit their signals via satellites?
wiki.answers.com/Q/How_does_cable_television_work
electronics.howstuffworks.com/cable-tv.htm
Or were you just joking?
July 5th, 2009 at 1:06 am
Unfortunately for us – the earliest and most consistent messages that leaked from earth were the Nazi propaganda of the 1930s – not the best introduction to our society…
July 5th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I wonder if the aliens would be able to distinguish between the factual and fictional programmes. Not necessarily thinking it’s all real like in Galaxy Quest. Maybe they would think WWII was a TV drama? What about movies based on historical events?
@41. Surely the aliens would have their own far-fetched science fiction too.
Then there’s the matter of what they’d think of our ‘adult films’.
July 5th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
@Grumpy
The Sopranos and Spongebob Squarepants are NOT bound for Procyon — because they were distributed via cable, not over the air
The Sopranos was on free-to-air non-cable network TV here in Oz so they’re bound for somewhere for sure. Not on any regular schedule though so the aliens may have to wait some time for the finale.
July 5th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I sure hope that the aliens are not on Aldebaran – but is they are, man are they in for a surprise when Star Wars comes along
July 7th, 2009 at 6:18 am
@ 59 David Dechel : Aldebaran Vs Alderaan.
One is a real star, an orange giant in front of the hyades open star cluster.
The other is a fictional planet looking very similar to Earth that was home to Princess Leia and destroyed by Darth Vader’s Death Star in the original ‘Star Wars’ movie.
There is a difference!
BTW. Aldebarran (or its system) is probably not inhabited because :
a) having probably formed before the sun it may well be relatively metal poor & thus unlikely to host exoplanets.
b) If OTOH Aldebaran formed after the Sun then to have already evolved to orange gianthood it would have to have been much a more massive – and thus shorter lived star. Very likely too short-lived to have allowed enough time for intelligent life to evolve.
&
b) having swollen to become an orange giant, it will have rendered any hypothetical planet in its old main-sequence stage “habitable zone” way too hot and uninhabitable many millions of years ago. Indeed, this would have happened during Aldebaran’s sub-giant stellar phase when it first left the Hydrogen burning “dwarf star” main-sequence.
Yes I know you were joking – just thought I’d point that out…
Incidentally, the same logic applies to almost all the other giant stars out there – Arcturus, we know, is a very ancient star thus probably metal-poor & planetless, Capella started life as a binary of A or B-type stars each being twice as massive as the Sun or more. Betelegeuse and Antares at 15-20 solar masses are wa-ay too massive to be considered and so forth. Pollux, OTOH, at 1 and a half or so solar masses and with a known exoplanet in a circular Jupiter-like (590-day) orbit might be an exception to this rule …
July 7th, 2009 at 8:30 am
I would just like to note that, since Omicron Persei is a binary consisting of a B1 III and a B3 V orbiting each other EVERY FOUR-AND-A-HALF DAYS, the two are going to be WAY too close together for planets in either of their comfort zones to be orbiting either one of them individually.
However, a planet far enough away to be in the comfort zone of the pair taken collectively COULD be in a stable orbit. The B1 III is awfully luminous, after all.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:27 am
For British folk, I’ve come up with a UK version at http://blogs.sundaymercury.net/weirdscience/2009/07/et-watching-uk-tv.html
As I’m sure you’ll want to know who is watching Tiswas!
July 9th, 2009 at 3:41 am
What would Lrrr say? “I will DESTROY YOU!”, of course.
July 11th, 2009 at 2:47 am
Like to watch Stargate Atlantis episodes and also Lost. I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.