Friday, May 17, 2013

The Distance Past

I've sometimes made jokes about how stars a certain distance away are just now discovering things about our pop culture based on the distance the signal has traveled to reach them. Those signals travel at the speed of light, so a star 10 light-years away is just now receiving material that went out into space in 2003. This means that on August 1, they will encounter Gigli, and the tragic thing is that because any signal we send now would also travel at the speed of light, we have no way to warn them.

Someone over at xkcd drew a little star map that showed just what pop culture references beings that might or might not live at certain stars would be familiar with. Judging by that, whoever lives near Kappa Reticuli ("Here's lookin' at you, kid") Alpha Serpentis ("Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn") or Beta Trianguli Australis ("I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse") probably thinks the best of us. The worst view of us is probably held by anybody who just picked up a Will Ferrell movie. Or Gigli, but I imagine those civilizations are probably planning on exterminating us before we infect the rest of the galaxy.

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