The first episode of “I Love Lucy” was broadcast sometime on October 15, 1951.  About 0.0002 seconds later, the signal glided over the rooftops of the farthest city suburbs, and headed into space. 

It’s still going.  Every day, that first installment passes through an additional 4 thousand trillion trillion trillion cubic kilometers of the cosmos.

Given that stars in our galactic neighborhood are separated by about 4 light-years, it’s easy to figure that roughly 10 thousand star systems have been exposed to “I Love Lucy” in the past five decades. That may suggest a high Nielson rating, but the chance that extraterrestrials are now hooked on 1950s television is low. Look at it this way: Carl Sagan, who was singularly optimistic about such things, figured that the number of technically competent societies in our Galaxy was a million or more.  That’s a lot.  But even so, it would imply that only one in every few hundred thousand star systems would actually boast such a society.  Consequently, there’s little probability that hairless gray guys are puzzling over the domestic difficulties of Lucy and Ricky, a fact that no doubt will disappoint the advertisers.

The widespread use of television on Earth is a phenomenon of the last half-century.  But the cosmos is three times as old as our planet.  So there could be galactic civilizations that have been churning out sitcoms for thousands of years or more – time enough for the signals to reach our world.

This possibility was evidently on the mind of Abraham Loeb at Harvard University, who recently noted in the New Scientist that a radio telescope being built to study distant galaxies might also be able to pick up ET’s TV. The so-called Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), a telescope consisting of 25 thousand tent-shaped antennas spread across Holland and Germany, can be tuned to frequencies under 250 megahertz. This is a spectral range far below what’s usually searched by SETI, but it’s the band in which much of your local television is broadcast.  And maybe theirs, as well. 

So how realistic is this?  Could LOFAR really pick up “I Love Zork”? 

Next page: Big and Brawny

• All About SETI
• Shadows and Silhouettes: Looking for Transits
• Images: Venus Transit Gallery
• Detecting Other Worlds: The Transit or 'Wink' Method
• Way-Out World: New Technique Finds Most Distant Planet Ever
• Mercury Transits Sun, Images on Web