Space Time Entertainment
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Someone asked me the other day why the technical staff has such a fascination with ancient earth entertainment. He was of course referring to the seemingly endless obscure references to old 20th century earth television shows that seemed to always pop up in conversation. Or the frequent use of images of characters from those old shows. I explained that tech duties on a large ship can be somewhat boring and this is just a way to break up the monotony.
Actually the truth is that tech personnel use references to old earth television shows as a form of code-speak. Most ships staff don’t have a clue what engineers do and except for the required PICO they pretty much just ignore the tech staff unless they have a problem. So anything a tech can do to keep non-techs at bay they happily employ.
The next question that is always asked is “where do they get copies of those old shows” because many 20th century archives have been lost to backup media degradation
You can again give boredom in this instance the prize for finding a way to entertain yourself while on duty and in this case it was a group of engineers working on the original deployment of the TDAA. There is no other duty more tiring and trying than deep space sensor array deployment. You are in deep space for months at a time and more often than not you are in uncharted areas. It can get pretty boring way out there.
The TDAA is basically a passive system linked to inter-dimensional transmitters that are in turn linked together to build a sector sensor array. It also requires lots of testing and re-testing to ensure a stable system and that is where a group of engineers found, what they like to call “Space Time Entertainment”.
During one status test they ran frequencies in blocked increments that covered frequencies outside of the parameters of the TDAA’s design protocol. They used this process to better tune the TDAA by having the computer address the unwanted frequencies and develop variable filters. It was during this test than they noticed that they were recieving a large amout of unknown data and decided to record and store it for later review.
If you are following me so far you probably already have an inkling of what those signals were and where they were coming from. That ‘s right they were picking up television broadcasts from earth and in this instance they were from the 1970′s!.
The TDAA was able to capture the very weak but steady signal from earth because it was deployed over several sectors and the engineers were able to filter and then coalesce the multiple signals into one. As soon as they discovered that they were able to successfully collect old television broadcasts they set up a permanent recording system. In essence because of the distance from earth they were receiving broadcast television signals from the past, several hundred years in the past.
The engineers who discovered the signals were heralded as heroes from earth’s archaeologists for the wealth of unedited information.
Like my colleagues I enjoy occasionally watching some of the broadcasts but one thing I don’t think I will ever understand is program re-runs and commercials. But we all agree that the longest running sitcom Fox News was the funniest thing ever put on television.
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