Story Bone (from and for Dan)

Here's a Bone from a long-time friend, Dan, who reads this blog but seldom comments. *Cough*

Anyway, Dan read a news story about a TV broadcast specifically programmed for aliens, Cosmic Connexion. This isn't Univision, this is Errai-vision or whatever. Bascially, it'll take about 44 years for the signal to reach Errai, a star in the big dipper. If memory serves, this is our closest neighbor with a known planetoid system and a star like our own. Now, we could discuss the concept of just how long a show stays on the air, (I think MASH was 10 years, and that was considered a very long time), or what aliens might think of summer re-runs, if they would be at a point that they would be able to receive and process such a signal (after all, TV is less than a century old and we've already changed technology for it twice (color and now HDTV) or any of the other silliness. But Dan would like to call out what a conversation would be like that is 50 years until you get a response. And that civilization would be the equivalent of our own, so no major advances in medicine (always a dubious thing in SF), no major tech transfers (which is also not necessarily so, as different events could lead to different conclusions which make the same tech possible, such as if we had gone with direct current instead of alternating current, our economy would be different, but our tech maybe the same). Anyway, so there it is. Almost a hundred years in between saying "Hi" and having "How are ya?" being delivered.