Time in a Space Bottle

My wife and I watched the movie Contact the other night, with Jodi Foster. It was interesting to see it again, but today I was sitting at my computer, waiting for some code to compile, when a thought occurred to me.

In the movie, they portrayed that the distant alien intelligence sent back a television transmission to Earth that supposedly was one of the first broadcasts, showing Hitler announcing the opening of the Olympic games. I thought to myself, how did they get that footage for the movie? Was it fabricated? There weren't any video recorders around at that time, so was it film?

But that wasn't the interesting thought that I had. The interesting part followed.

What if someone wanted to capture those original broadcasts on video tape? It actually should be possible. Right now. Even later in the future.

Think about it. Everything we have ever transmitted from this planet is streaming through space at the speed of light. Eventually, those signals will (and already have in some cases) reach distant stars and planets and other celestial bodies or pass through distortions in space. It seems entirely conceivable (and probable) that those signals could be reflected under certain conditions, turning the signals around on a return trip back to Earth.

Years later, if we had a powerful receiver pointed at just the right spot in the sky, we could receive those reflected signals, and listen to what was on the radio, or watch what was on the television, fifty years ago. In a sense, we could say that we were watching live, because it wouldn't be a recording. In every sense, it would be the original transmission. Because it IS the original transmission!

These days, we could capture those signals on to tape or other digital media, clean them up, and sell them on the Internet for a profit. At least, that's probably what humans would do with it.