I teach at Central Connecticut State University, and we have a communication department mentoring program. Last night, we had a meal and then we trooped over to the Copernican Observatory and Planetarium, where Craig Robinson, who runs the place, gave us a program on stars.
The first half was on other planets and other beings. I’m all for E.T. phoning home, but my mind wandered until Craig showed a photo of an old roof-top television antenna and asked, “Do you know what this is?” Of course we old people did and the students were polite about it.
And then Craig said this: As we take down these old antennas, we are — I think I got this right — discontinuing sending out our sitcoms, our press conferences, and our game shows into space, where maybe our space cousins were going to receive them one day. Imagine being judged as a planet on “I Love Lucy” and “American Idol.”
And then I came home and read this, a series of scientific musings. My favorite was this:
I went to sleep and dreamed about that. Cool, huh?
Dating Jesus 
Hi Susan.
i remember writing a letter to Carl Sagan decades ago. i saw him on an interview where he said he didn’t believe extra terrestrials had visited Earth because he believed they would have made contact. i wrote that, if i were looking at Earth, the last thing i would do would be to contact the human species. any alien advanced enough to come here would certainly be able to monitor every broadcast ever sent, and look at what they would see: news broadcasts full of war and carnage, and mostly U.S. entertainment shows.
would an intelligent alien voluntarily step into “The Lucy Show”?
I thought about that, yeah. That we really don’t come off as too fabulous a group of folks when you look at us like that. Did Carl Sagan write back?
Nice! It boggles the mind to think of time and space of that magnitude. If we were ever discovered by some other species, through “I Love Lucy” or “The Nightly News”, we may no longer exist. Or, we may have evolved into some other new species. Earth is like an electron on at atom, in a drop of water, in an ocean. We are nothing. Today, tomorrow, right here, we are everything. It’s overwhelming.
Did you dream of dinosaurs? Aliens? Were you, you?