we know of an ancient radiation
that haunts dismembered constellations
of faintly glimmering radio stations
Less than 0.01% of
television ever
broadcast is available to watch,
said the speaker at the
conference today, aiming to change this state of affairs.
Showing figures of declining costs of
terabyte storage, and slides of a plan for networked
Digital Video Recorders, exchanging
torrent seeds to serve you anything shown any time.
On demand.
Crowdsourcing.
The only way to watch some old, lost episodes of
Doctor Who (Staring
William Hartnell,
Patrick Troughton or
Jon Pertwee) is to go to
Alpha Centauri.
He said.
And you and I know that this will of course not work, since those broadcasts crossed that distance in 4.7 years, arriving before the
1960s even ended.
And anyway, you can't go faster than the broadcast which is just
light. You can't even catch up.
You'd need a
time machine
But some
super-massive black hole somewhere might bend the signals. At an angle.
So if you head for the place where the signals will go, the third side of the triangle.
You might get there first.
Of course this will take dedication. Millions of years of travel by earth's point of view.
Probably hundreds by
yours.
Since super-massive black hole are rare and distant, galactic cores and the like.
And the signals will be far too faint by then, just part of the general background static. They're too faint for us to decode by the time they leave the
solar system, apparently.
The costs would be unthinkable. But in a sense it's possible.
Instead, perhaps
someone else out there has recorded it as it came past.
Beyond the suns that guard this roost
Beyond your flower of flaming truth
Beyond your latest ad campaigns...