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"We have long studied your puny Terran broadcasts and analysed every detail of your primitive speech. Now, take me to your leader. Take me to ... Tinky Winky."
Dave Langford, SFX
For about a hundred local years, Earth has been a noisy little mudball when it comes to radio signals. A very common plot amongst science fiction authors is to depict aliens as having made contact with Earth culture via stray TV broadcasts.
One bit of science that these writers surprisingly get right consistently is that radio signals propagate at light speed. Given that on TV distances are conveniently measured in light years, it's an easy conversion formula: aliens 40 light-years from Earth are just now getting TV signals sent in the 1960's, thus the visitor that shows up, having skipped the intervening distance via Faster Than Light Travel, will talk and dress like a flower child in an attempt to fit in. Hilarity Ensues, or it provides a vital clue to the protagonist that something isn't quite right about this guy.
There are several problems with this concept. First, while an AM or FM audio signal is mathematically easy to decode back into a sound wave, a TV signal is very complex; it's essentially a set of instructions to tell a receiver how to shoot electrons at a screen to make David Hasselhoff's rugged suntanned face 29.97 times a second (for NTSC as generated in the US, Canada, Japan and some parts of South America, because they use 60hz electrical power). The UK uses PAL which does 25 times a second (because they use 50hz electrical power). Russia, some former Soviet Union countries, and France use SECAM, which is also 25 times a second, but its color coding is not compatible with PAL (thus, an attempt to decode a SECAM signal with a PAL receiver will result in a black-and-white image, and vice versa). In fact, VCRs, DVDs and TV sets have to be built either specifically for each of the three television systems or having additional circuitry to be multi-system.
All that complexity and incompatibility is just here on Earth, where all the effort of signal-matching can result in a guy in Omaha, Nebraska trying to figure out what is going on in a Japanese game show that doesn't make sense to Japanese people in Japan.
Unless an alien can puzzle out the nature and workings of an Earth-style CRT, and emulate the behavior of one (as modern sets do to interpret old-style signals) it can't make a visible image out of it.
Secondly, a TV signal is not all that powerful. Add to that the inverse-square law, which says that doubling the distance cuts the signal strength by 75%, and the fact that all stars put out radio waves on every frequency, and it's very unlikely that those I Love Lucy episodes made it to Omicron Persei 8 intact, instead they'd be swallowed up by white noise.
As mentioned in Life After People, television and radio signals which were once thought to be capable of transmitting information over interstellar distances actually decompose into static within one or two light years according to research done by the SETI project. Therefore, if they are correct, aliens cannot steal cable unless they actually come within that distance.
Thirdly, you'd think aliens would be aware of the speed of light as well. Fourthly, the period the aliens attempt to emulate often is not the actual culture of the period, or even the actual culture depicted on TV during the period, but the Hollywood History version of the period.
Totally ignoring the fact that "cable" does not use wireless transmissions. It is cable, not "broadcast" TV.
Regardless, misunderstandings and misinterpretations about Earth culture and human behavior from tiny snippets of old sitcoms are comedy gold, and the concept keeps coming back up. Compare Alien Arts Are Appreciated.
Examples
Anime
- A major plot point in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, starting with the Miss Macross pageant and culminating in the battle against the Bodolza fleet. It neatly sidesteps the distance and signal strength issues by having the transmission come from the titular ship, and the Zentradi warships chasing it are (in astronomical distances) a stone's throw away.
- In the Sentai anime Shinesman, the ditzy female villain once asks about the heroes, but she's got the completely wrong idea about them. A nearby mook admits, when a smarter villain asks, that they didn't have enough footage of the actual heroes so they had to fill in the blanks in their report with examples from a sentai tv-series.
Film
- Spaced Invaders has Martians hearing Orson Welles' famous reading of The War of the Worlds and thinking that the rest of the army is on earth, so they go to find them.
- Explorers.
- The Thermians in Galaxy Quest take the fictional events of old television shows seriously, calling them "historical documents." Besides thinking that the main characters really are space explorers (as opposed to the actors who played them), they weep for "those poor people" stranded on Gilligan's Island.
- Justified by the fact that it is explained that the Thermions have no concept of acting, or even pretending (they were only recently introduced to the concept of deception).
- So they never saw any Behind The Scene footage, ever?
- Or, you know, watched the credits?
- Picking holes in Galaxy Quest is tantamount to picking holes in Swiss cheese. Just roll with it.
- In Contact, the extraterrestrials in the Vega system receive a transmission of Adolf Hitler's opening speech of the 1936 Olympic Games; the aliens send the signal back to Earth, combined with a sequence of prime numbers and blueprints for a spacecraft.
- The scientists of the film also point out that the aliens could not possibly have understood the historical context of the transmission (or even what was being said) and state that their transmitting it back would simply have been to show that it had been received (as well as to carry the blueprints). They mock the idea held by the government and military officials that it must mean they've made contact with alien Nazis.
- Interestingly, the novel screws this up. When the main character asks the aliens about this, they reply with seeming knowledge of who and what the Nazis were. It was clearly to make a political point.
- Not quite, the aliens learned didn't learn who and what the nazis were from the tv transmissions. They got that information (plus a whole stack more) from reading the character's minds (the novel sensibly doesn't try coming up with details on how). This turns out to be have been the alien's plan all along; they knew they couldn't learn much about humans from tv so they sent plans for a spaceship with a preset course so some humans would come to them, from whom they could learn about human civilisation in detail.
- They didn't know the details, but there were enough clues for them to identify the Nazis as totalitarian.
- Not by itself. After all, for all they know humans like to dress identically and march around in large rectangular formations for the hell of it, as a pastime, regardless of our political structure. For that matter, truly alien aliens might not even have a concept corresponding to "totalitarian," either because it just would not work for them, or in the sense that they can't imagine an alternative.
- More Fridge Logic, but how did they include a set of blueprints? Was it Humans steal cable?
- The blueprints were interleaved with the television signal (presumably, on the odd-numbered or even-numbered scan lines; remember, conventional TV picture signals are interlaced). Even if the aliens couldn't tell that the signal represented an interlaced 29.97 Hz black-and-white picture, they could tell that the alternating interlaced fields closely matched each other, and might thus conclude that it would be "safe" to replace the nearly-repeating fields with their data. They went to great pains to format their data in such a way that even primitive, backward savages like us could tell they were blueprints.
- Don't forget Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
- The Three Stooges in Orbit. The Martian videophone accidentally starts broadcasting Earth television, rapidly convincing the Martian Big Bad that rather than conquer the Earth, it would be better to wipe it from existence.
Literature
- In the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that are going to turn Dave into the Star Child first calm him by giving him a mock-up of a hotel suite. They don't get all the details right, though: he's disturbed when he notices drawers won't open and the books are part of the bookcase. What happened becomes clear when he turns on the TV and sees a scene from a movie set in a hotel suite exactly like the one he is in.
- Book four of 2000AD's Nemesis the Warlock is set in the Gothic Empire, populated by a race of shapeshifting aliens who received the first large scale radio transmissions of the 1920's. They promptly based their society on what they thought was Earth's pre-1914 Golden Age, particularly on Victorian society and the British Empire (even with their own version of Jack the Ripper).
- Animorphs used a version of this, albeit without the "long distance" part (but, interestingly, still using the trope as an Homage to 1980s TV): the body-snatching aliens first visit Earth in 1991, and panic upon discovering, while in orbit, news reports indicating that humans have mastered Faster Than Light Travel and Energy Weapons. They quickly realize that it's not real, and conclude that human indulgence in escapism makes us an even better target.
- Also contains a quite literal version- Aximilli steals cable, and records everything for later reference. His excuse is to screen for Yeerk propaganda (which actually works several times), more often than not, he watches soap operas and 'These Messages' which he finds more amusing than most other shows.
- In the Doctor Who novel Synthespians™, human colonists in the future do this with broadcast from Earth. It's pointed out that until they had the help of the Nestene Consciousness, the shows were so degraded it was like watching it through a snow storm.
- In the short story "On a Clear Day You Can See All the Way to Conspiracy" by Desmond Warzel, the aliens not only listen to local AM radio, they call in.
- I Married an Earthling! uses this as its premise.
- Phule's Company: In the novel No Phule Like an Old Phule, the Zenobians revere a figure called L'Vis which is actually from an old broadcast of Elvis.
- Adrift Among The Ghosts by Jack L. Chalker, in which an alien race sentenced a criminal to criss-cross space at just the right distance from earth to intercept and record historic radio and TV broadcasts. Why was this considered a punishment? Because it forced him to relive our nuclear holocaust over and over and over and over...
- In a short story by Fredric Brown, the earth is invaded by living radio waves. They actually become pieces of all the radio programs... and eat all the electricity in the world.
Live Action TV
- The Adventures Of Pete And Pete: Big Pete befriends a boy who dresses like he's from the 1950's, and who is obsessed with Johnny Unitas and the the 1958 NFL Championship Game, which is credited with putting the NFL in the public consciousness and essentially making pro football "big", which featured Unitas leading the Colts to a 23-17 overtime victory over the New York Giants.
- Star Trek's Trelane, the eponymous "Squire of Gothos", wasn't receiving radio signals, but clearly was limited by speed-of-light transmission when he thought that 18th-century fashions and behavior were the latest things for Earth people, there on his planet some 600 light years from Earth. Then again, he was merely a child from a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and might be excused from making such a mistake.
- In another episode ("A Piece of the Action"), it was discovered that the people of Iotia had based their entire culture on a book left behind by an earlier survey ship: "Chicago Mobs of the 20s." Hilarity Ensues when Kirk, Spock, Bones and even Scotty have to deal with cliche gangsters, curious local customs and slang, and the enigma of manual transmission.
- The Star Trek The Next Generation episode "First Contact" had an interesting reversal of this trope; here, the Federation monitors an alien civilization who are about to become capable of interstellar travel, and when introducing one of their head scientists to the greater galaxy notes that, among other things, they've been looking at their radio transmissions to learn more about them, causing her to comment, "I hope you don't judge us by our popular entertainment!"
- Also Star Trek The Next Generation: In one episode ("The Royale"), the crew finds a planet with weird simulation of a clichéd 70s-style gambling casino. As it turns out, aliens had accidentally made a few humans crash many years ago and tried to construct the only survivor a surrogate home based on the novel he had with him. Bad luck for him - He hated the book.
- Amazing Stories did this one in a episode called "Fine Tuning".
- In the Tales From The Darkside episode "Distant Signals," a mysterious, eccentric investor brings together the cast and crew of a 20-year-old private eye TV series, which was cancelled before it got a proper ending, so the story can finally be resolved. The investor turns out to be the representative of an alien race who had been following the show. (In the original short story, the private eye show was a western.)
- Similar to the Transformers example below, the aliens in The Greatest American Hero spoke to the main characters through piecing together radio signals in their car. Also, in the episode "Operation Spoilsport," the aliens repeatedly played the song "On the Eve of Destruction" to indicate to the titular hero that a nuclear war was about to start.
- The Strangerers, a comedy serial by Rob Grant (one half of the Grant/Naylor partnership that created Red Dwarf) takes its concept directly from this trope - the aliens assume a 1950s identity, and tumble into all manner of jolly japes as they wrack their brains to remember this strange human practise of 'walking' and mistake the lift for their hotel bedroom.
- The Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade: In the episode Visitors From Down the Street, which abounds in X-Files references, the crew of the Excalibur picks up two agents from an alien world who are looking for proof of a government cover-up. They show pictures of Mount Rushmore and old Earth blimps. The government obtained these pictures from Earth and leaked them, while denying their existence at the same time, in order to create those conspiracy theories and distract the public from the ongoing war. They also dress in Earth fashions from 200 years go (ie: from the time period at the time of the show's shoot.) The main government agent upholding the conspiracy credits and thanks the Human for cigarettes as he smoked one in victory. Captain Gideon ordered probes loaded with the Interstellar Encyclopedia and sent to the alien world to crack the cover-up.
Web Comics
- Schlock Mercenary is probably the lone example to go for plausibility. Aliens with FTL travel probe the radio spheres created by inhabited planets. They're not even trying to decode the signal, just confirm the presence of one to study its most distinctive feature: Every radio sphere in this section of space is in fact a radio shell, hollow...
Web Original
- In Agent to the Stars, not only is this trope played straight, it's the basis for the story. Having received Earth's TV broadcasts, the aliens decide that the real power on Earth is Hollywood, and make their first contact with Hollywood's biggest agent.
- Wait, it isn't?
- In addition to their beliefs in the power of Hollywood, they're also unpleasant to human senses in many ways. In other words, they smell really bad and look really ugly. They would not get a good reception if they just landed on the White House lawn and their agent is intended to thwart the typical human reaction.
Western Animation
- Futurama, as usual, played with an old Sci Fi chestnut. Lrrr, of the planet Omicron Persei 8, 1000 light-years from Earth, commonly watches modern-day Earth TV. His first appearance, with an invasion fleet, was because Fry thrashed WNYW's transmission console, cutting the signal when the Grand Finale of the Ally Mc Beal-esque program Single Female Lawyer was being broadcast.
- Lrrr and his wife Ndnd are also apparently big fans of Friends... well, sort of, anyway:
Lrrr: "This is ancient Earth's most foolish program. Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?"
Ndnd: "Perhaps they are saving that for sweeps."
- Kim Possible: Warmonga, an amazonian Green Skinned Space Babe from a race of compulsive conquerors, declares Dr. Drakken to be a figure from her native mythology based on his odd blue skin color after seeing him on a TV broadcast. The show was an American Idol parody called American Starmaker, and his appearance on it was in a previous episode. Unlike other examples, she didn't wait for the broadcast to reach her home world, she happened to be about 1 light year away on patrol when she picked it up.
- The Junkions in the animated Transformers movie apparently learned English from watching Earth TV broadcasts. Which explains lines like "Steady as she goes, Bob! Snoopy visitors get mud in the eye, by and by! Film At Eleven!", and the battle cry "Destroy Unicron! Kill the Grand Poobah! Eliminate even the toughest stains!"
- Borderline version: Both factions in the Transformers live-action movie learn to interact better with humanity by surfing the web...with questionable results. And poor Bumblebee, after getting his voicebox crushed by Megatron, has to rely in the Junkion method of communication (ie. using radio broadcasts) to talk with anyone.
- Used very literally in Transformers Animated. Bumblebee and Sari pirate cable in order to watch illegal street races.
- Scooby Doo and the Alien Invaders used this in an interesting meta-story way; an alien flower-child (due to having studied American pop-culture via its 1960's broadcasts and assuming it represented basic human behavior) became the Love Interest for Shaggy, who, having been Totally Radical when Scooby-Doo was originally on, and not having changed in the interim, was a perfect match.
- Played with in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, in which the Plutonians are literally stealing the cable of Master Shake and company. They have a cable splitter patched through a dimensional gateway to their spaceship, and use the "Universal Remonster" (a teddy bear with remote controls for arms and legs) to control it.
- Inverted in the South Park episode "Canceled", where Cartman's anal probe picked up an advertisement for the intergalactic reality show "Earth". Of course, it was broadcast in an alien language, so the scientist Jeff (Goldblum) had to translate it into English.
- On Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the Plutonians literally pirate the gang's cable hookup thanks to a "Fargate".
Other
- Dave Barry makes fun of this in several in his columns. The best example is when he theorizes that aliens developed a fondness for bad tv commercials and threatened the government to keep playing them, which is why so many bad commercials are on air.
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