Contact - Carl Sagan [40]
"Look at it this way: Those few minutes of television from Vega were originally broadcast in 1936, at the opening of the Olympic Games in Berlin. Even though it was only shown in Germany, it was the first television transmission on Earth with even moderate power. Unlike the ordinary radio transmission in the thirties, those TV signals got through our ionosphere and trickled out into space. We're trying to find out exactly what was transmitted back then, but it'll probably take some time. Maybe that welcome from Hitler is the only fragment of the transmission they were able to pick up on Vega.
"So from their point of view, Hitler is the first sign of intelligent life on Earth. I'm not trying to be ironic. They don't know what the transmission means, so they record it and transmit it back to us. It's a way of saying `Hello, we heard you.' It seems to me a pretty friendly gesture."
"Then you say there wasn't any television broadcasting until after the Second World War?"
"Nothing to speak of. There was a local broadcast in England on the coronation of George the Sixth, a few things like that. Big time television transmission began in the late forties. All those programs are leaving the Earth at the speed of light. Imagine the Earth is here"-der Heer gestured in the air-"and there's a little spherical wave running away from it at the speed of light, starting out in 1936. It keeps expanding and receding from the Earth. Sooner or later, it reaches the nearest civilization. They seem to be surprisingly close, only twenty-six years for the Berlin Olympics to return to Earth. So the Vegans didn't take decades to figure it out. They must have been pretty much tuned, all set up, ready to go, waiting for our first television signals. They detect them, record them, and after a while play them back to us. But unless they've already been here-you know, some survey mission a hundred years ago-they couldn't have known we were about to invent television. So Dr. Arroway thinks this civilization is monitoring all the nearby planetary systems, to see if any of its neighbors develop high technology."
"Ken, there's a lot of things here to think about. Are you sure those-what do you call them, Vegans?-you sure they don't understand what that television program was about?"
"Ms. President, there's no doubt they're smart. That was a very weak signal in 1936. Their detectors have to be fantastically sensitive to pick it up. But I don't see how they could possibly understand what it means. They probably look very different from us. They must have different history, different customs. There's no way for them to know what a swastika is or who Adolf Hitler was."
"Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's wildest dream come true."
She paused and continued in a calmer voice. "You know, I never thought Hitler could manage that Hitler salute. He never gave it straight on, it was always skewed at some wacko angle. And then there was that fruity bent elbow salute. If anyone else had done his Heil Hitlers so incompetently he would've been sent to the Russian front."
"But isn't there a difference? He was only returning the salutes of others. He wasn't Heiling Hitler."
"Oh yes he was," returned the President and, with a gesture, ushered der Heer out of the Rose Room and down a corridor. Suddenly she stopped and regarded her Science Adviser.
"What if the Nazis didn't have television in 1936? Then what would have happened?"
"Well, then I suppose it would be the coronation of George the Sixth, or one of the transmissions about the New York World's Fair in 1939, if any of them were strong enough to be received on Vega. Or some programs from the late forties, early fifties. You know, Howdy Doody, Milton Berle, the Army- McCarthy hearings-all those marvelous signs of intelligent