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Let us play with the Aliens Steal Our Cable TV trope and assume that...

  • aliens living about 15 lightyears away can listen in on human radio and TV-broadcasts

  • their technological advancement is such that they keep doing this to present day (i.e. they are now listening to things broadcast in 2008)

  • technologically they about on par with humans, no more than 50-odd years apart in development in various areas

  • they are smart enough, and close enough to humans in their thinking, to be able to tell apart drama, entertainment, news, and documentaries

My question...

What is the limit of what they would learn about us humans from these broadcasts? What important aspects of humans and humanity does not make it to radio and TV broadcasts, and thus might surprise these aliens when they come to visit and learn the full truth?

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    $\begingroup$ Your edit made this too broad, as you were asking two different questions at once, so I've rolled it back. If you want to ask how your alien society could stop their own broadcasts from being beamed out into space, you need to ask that as a separate question. $\endgroup$
    – F1Krazy
    Commented May 23, 2023 at 12:49
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    $\begingroup$ (1) Modern digital TV cannot be received at a distance of 15 light-years, unless we are speaking of a solar-system-sized radiotelescope, waaaay beyond our technological level. (2) The vast majority of human knowledge is never ever shown on TV, because television is primarily entertainment, and serious discussions of philosophy, mathematics, science or technology are not. The medium is fundamentally unsuitable. Have you ever seen a TV show discussing any mathematics beyond, generously, mid-18th century? Any in-depth discussion of technology? The aliens wouldn't even learn how to make pencils. $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Commented May 23, 2023 at 13:28
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    $\begingroup$ @AlexP there was a brief slice of time when broadcast TV was used for educational stuff up to graduate level... late night stuff when normal people were asleep, but teachers and lecturers might record it. Didn't survive past the introduction of DVDs. I suspect the aliens could learn about pencils, though ball-points would probably remain a mystery. $\endgroup$
    – Starfish Prime
    Commented May 23, 2023 at 13:58
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    $\begingroup$ "A smart species would know better than to assume Seinfeld is a documentary" doesn't necessarily follow. There's a vast amount of cultural and psychological context that might make it clear to you that it isn't a documentary, but humans have issues identifying whether stuff written by other humans mere centuries ago necessarily refers to real events and people or is at least partially fictional. Doing the same trick for a completely alien mind and culture sounds nightmarishly difficult. $\endgroup$
    – Starfish Prime
    Commented May 23, 2023 at 14:05
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    $\begingroup$ @AlexP Educational radio and television was a thing for most of the "pickupable" era of broadcasting. Proper school lessons or university courses broadcast for the express purpose of remote learning, so most school knowledge they could obtain. Let's just hope they never come across this though: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You $\endgroup$
    – biziclop
    Commented May 24, 2023 at 16:00

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There's quite alot that they'd miss out on.

The ISO standards are largely inaccessible to them. This stuff's easy to find on the internet now, and back in the day it no doubt was faxed from place to place, but it would never have been broadcast in meaningful ways. Even when transmitted over RF, those would almost certainly be point-to-point terrestrial links, or satellite transmissions that work much the same.

Science programs and documentaries probably inform them of the details of basic units of measurement, which after they were aware of those they might manage to pick up more nuance from both fiction and news programs.

You'd think they'd have it easier with human culture, which even fiction itself must provide alot of information about. And they'd also be able to infer that there were aspects of human life that modesty (they probably have an analog of it) just makes us unwilling to depict on video. Given how vague we were about how reproduction occurs (I Love Lucy is probably the first program to depict it, I think), they're going to guess that this the case about sex/copulation.

But it's not just that... when was the first time you ever saw vomiting onscreen? I can't pin it to a particular date, but it's definitely post-2000, and something you tend to only see on premium shows (a development I personally find uncomfortable, this isn't what I meant when I said I wanted tv to be more realistic!). It's not shameful, and it doesn't involve sex or defecation. But it is still mostly absent from corpus of broadcasts. (Note: This one might require research, I think cartoon depictions go back further, though I can remember no specific examples.)

History's going to be hit-and-miss, with our propensity for not-very-accurate historical fiction. Some eras and eras are woefully under-represented. No one could fault them for believing that the wild west was thousands of years long and covered 80% of the planet's inhabitable geography, when it was probably not even half a century and covered a tiny corner of one of the smaller continents.

Economics and how civilization organizes itself? Some of the news programs will give hints and clues, and maybe some documentaries might show the inside of a factory from time to time. But will they be left to guess how we transmit electricity, or who generates it and what they expect to receive in return for it?

Even if some program was broadcast that provides the information in question, was our planet even aimed in the right direction when it aired? It rotates once per day, after all, and if the timing were wrong, they miss out on night-time programming from North America for weeks/months at a time.

Only the most newsworthy events might be reported on evening news in both the US and Europe, after all.

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  • $\begingroup$ I really like this answer! One of my 2 favourites. I would like to say, they would likely understand that electricity is generated via transmission lines. I'm sure that a number of documentaries about electricity would've aired And, the fact that only some parts of the earth would be emitting their evening news in the right direction at any one time, that is an interesting idea that I hadn't thought of! Of course, i assumed there'd be garbled transmissions and weak transmissions, but that some wouldn't even be sent in the correct direction is something I failed to consider! $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 8:18
  • $\begingroup$ Whoops, I mean "...understand HOW electricity is generated, AND that it is moved between locations via transmission lines..." $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 8:54
  • $\begingroup$ @Katy Sure, they understand that it's probably copper or aluminum wires. But are we burying the stuff? They see the big high voltage towers in some movie background, can they figure out that those are HV and not telecommunications (likely, I think, based on dimensions, but still uncertain). Humans at least, would have two plausible or semi-plausible theories about that imagery, and a dozen crackpot theories. $\endgroup$
    – John O
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 21:49
  • $\begingroup$ Well, once again, the number of documentaries produced would clearly show them the way their electrical system functions. They would then be able to tell that wires with very large insulators suspending them would be for higher voltages- hell, with some older power lines counting the number of discs would give you an approximate voltage, and that point may well be touched on in a documentary about some megaproject. Underground power, they'd know it exists but I doubt they'd know EXACTLY what is used as an insulator on earth, other than their own deductions on compatible materials $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 26, 2023 at 6:16
  • $\begingroup$ @Katy It's difficult to explain to someone who has grown up in the post-internet age. Documentaries were primarily a Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon thing in North America. They were on UHF only, hardly ever on VHF (and thus weaker signal). They might be shown twice a year that first year, then once again 3 or 4 years later when they had nothing better to toss into the schedule. And, to top it off, were primarily focused on wildlife/biology. If you don't know why "Mutual of Omaha" is relevant, not much of it will make sense. $\endgroup$
    – John O
    Commented May 26, 2023 at 14:54
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They could have any gaps that would serve your story or world. There is so much going on in television that the alien researchers would never be able to watch it all.

I guess they would first focus on documentaries that have children as their target audience, like the german show "die Sendung mit der Maus" (the show with the mouse). It has easy languange and focus on a single topic at a time, for example "how pencils are made", making it much easier to understand for aliens.

So I would assume a profound knowledge of manufacturing process and entry level technology. Even documentaries targeted at adults do not go very much deeper in on scientific topics.

And ofcourse they would know our anatomy veeery well.

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  • $\begingroup$ I like this thinking, despite the fact that they are a tad bit smarter than us they have to watch kid's documentaries to understand basics and maybe even watch kid's shows to learn language basics I would assume due to the volume they'd have a way to record all they receive and then skim over what is useful. I'm sure there's an IRL analog for researchers watching many TVs. Unintelligible info gets put on a cheap-yet-slow backup storage for potential later technology to decrypt, and the rest would be sorted by subject, how much info it has (kid's doco vs uni broadcast), and other metadata $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 8:35
  • $\begingroup$ "...and then skim over what is useful" I dont think that is as easy as it sounds. They are studying multiple foreign cultures in a foreign environment speaking multiple foreign languanges. how could they automate a process that would decide that greys anatomy is not as important as a documentation about making pencils when you dont know what pencils are and what hospitals are and what soaps are. $\endgroup$
    – datacube
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 16:50
  • $\begingroup$ Not really skimming over it system-wide, just at the antenna control booth. Those responsible for decoding the signals and saving them would be watching many signals at once, and those which are unreadable would be cast aside for later, and the rest would be labelled and left for specific researchers to decode (linguists, engineering experts, historians, and whoever else is relevant for a certain show) $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 26, 2023 at 6:10
  • $\begingroup$ My fault for being unclear with that previous comment, I am sorry for that. But yeah, no automation, this is far too important for them to be shoving it through automation, all just manual work here (except for maybe some semi-automated image cleanup software, to make the footage easier to interpret) $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 26, 2023 at 6:20
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They would not know how far our scientific knowledge goes beyond what is shown in popular science shows. If you just watch some popular science show you can guess that the presenter (hopefully) has a deeper understanding of the topic than what they explain but how much more they know can't be gotten from the TV show. No modern science books and even less scientific papers are shown in full detail on TV.

Similarly they don't know the full story of essentially any work of literature. They would know of their existence from discussions and also the plot of some major works that were made into film but they wouldn't know the full text of even a single book.

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  • $\begingroup$ Interesting! I know that there are some ancient greek books that we know were famous but have never gotten even a partial copy of. $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 8:10
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These isn't a lot they wouldn't know

All kinds of stuff used to be shown on TV. Once I came across a reality show about a man running a waste recycling business. I remember I was amazed that anybody would actually be willing to spend any time watching it, but apparently enough people did to justify making that program. Most aspects of human life and society are going to be covered on TV. How much sense the aliens would be able to make of it is a different question.

Something that would make life difficult for the aliens would be that most TV programming is fictional, and even the supposed reality shows are often scripted. The aliens would of course realise what is and isn't fiction, but they could have difficulty figuring out how far from reality our fiction is. They could end up with a somewhat distorted view of human behavior.

I think the biggest gap in the aliens' knowledge would be purely factual technical information. They would know what technology we have and what it does but not exactly how it works. For example the aliens would know about computers and what they do from TV but they wouldn't know exactly how they work, except in the broadest sense. You don't normally have TV programmes explaining in minute detail how to print circuit boards or how logic gates work.

Also, this only goes for countries with a lot of TV broadcasts. The aliens would know a great deal about life in US and Europe, but very little about life in Somalia or North Korea.

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  • $\begingroup$ This is great news! They'd have enough info to know what they're doing (and thus do their own thing), but they wouldn't know everything! They have broad strokes of how everything works, a lot of culture from both documentaries and fiction, and not much more. The fact that reality, reality TV, and fiction have a very blurred boundary could be fun to work with. $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 8:09
  • $\begingroup$ I want to add, your question is one of my 2 favourites. Only reason I marked the other as "correct answer" (rather than marking neither) is because their answer covered more points (thus might help future readers more), but I loved both and I wish I could mark both as the "correct" answer. Thank you very much. $\endgroup$
    – Katy
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 8:24

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