<mix...@bigpond.com> wrote: > > >Even if the producer felt that way, the programs arriving on earth would > >have left Alpha centauri five years earlier, and there would be no way of > >knowing how much is in the pipeline. > > That's why it is pointless without FTL communications. >
I would not say pointless. Not at a distance of 5 LY. As other people here pointed out, there was profitable trade between Europe and East Asia when the round-trip took a year or two. (It took that long mainly because of trade winds, I think.) 5-year latency is short enough to live with and still make some meaningful commercial contracts . . . Although I guess it is a 10-year round trip, a contract is meaningless. Call them agreements. Exchange programs. You can still exchange ideas and help one-another progress and do scientific research, for example. At a distance of 20 LY I think any outward transmission from Earth would be philanthropic. It would not benefit the people here. Any question they might have would be answered too late. Any collaboration in research or the arts would take too long. I expect we would continue broadcasting, as a favor to the pioneers in other star systems, not with any hope of profit or benefit to ourselves. Not in the short term of one human lifetime, anyway. I suppose eventually a message coming from Sirius A might be of some use to us. It might be a smash-hit movie or novel. The theme of romantic life on the frontier is always popular. Drifting ever more off-topic . . . Long term communication at great distances (and long time spans) is problematic because of linguistic drift. All languages change inexorably. The rate of change varies, depending on living conditions. People who go off into the wilderness in small groups tend to preserve their dialect. That is why American English is older than British English, and why we still pronounce our "r" in words like "car". People who went into the American wilderness in 1700 sounded strange to the British by 1800, whereas those in Boston continued to be influenced by changes in Britain, and they too dropped their "r." In Cambridge, Mass you "paak your caaa in Haavard yahd" (Park your car in Harvard yard). Broadcasts from 400 LY away will sound like English circa 1600 does to us. Like Shakespeare. With many words we no longer use, and many that have changed in meaning, such as "brave" meaning "beautiful, wonderful." Brave in the modern sense makes the famous quote from the "The Tempest" "O brave new world" quite different from what Shakespeare had in mind. He used that world a lot. Try looking for "brave" here, and you will see it has little to do with courage; i.e., "brave utensils," "a brave lass" and a ship being "tight and yare and bravely rigg'd": http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/full.html (By the way, the last person who used the word "yare," and used it perfectly, was Lauren Bacall. She practically embodies it.) A lot of people have trouble understanding Shakespeare. See the reviews here: http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Coriolanus/70175130 - Jed
