So forty years ago there's a spherical wave of radio signals that spreads out at the speed of light, getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Every year later it's an additional light-year away from the Earth. Now, let's say it's forty years later, so that expanding spherical wave front is forty light-years from the Earth, containing the harbingers of a civilization newly arrived in the galaxy. And I don't know if you know about 1940s television in the United States, but it would contain Howdy Doody and Milton Berle and the Army-McCarthy Hearings and other signs of high intelligence on the planet Earth. So I'm sometimes asked, if there are so many intelligent beings in space, why haven't they come here? Now you know. It's a sign of their intelligence that they haven't come. (I'm just joking.) But it's a sobering fact that our mainly mindless television transmissions are our principal emissaries to the stars. There is an aspect of self-knowledge that this implies that I think would be very good for us to come to grips with.
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