        It wasn’t that long ago, relatively speaking, that the electromagnetic spectrum had been largely silent.  There were no TVs, no cell phones, no radios.  It had hardly been a hundred years, and now civilization had advanced to the point that there were even satellites beaming down episodes of Jersey Shore to the masses.  Truly, it boggled the mind just thinking about it.  What if they had a spaceship, flying through the vast reaches of space, and they suddenly began to receive radio signals from an insignificant planet on a lonely branch of the Milky Way galaxy?  Perhaps they had come to investigate.