The speed of light can seem fairly slow when you’re talking about communicating across galaxies.
FM broadcasts and the earliest television programs from, say, half a century of broadcasting have reached a distance of 50 light-years, or about 294 trillion miles, from Earth.
The nearest star is about 4 light-years away, and there are on the order of several thousand stars within the 50- light-year range. So the earliest episodes of I Love Lucy are washing over a new star system at the rate of about one system a day.
Any civilization on the receiving end would need a very large antenna to pick up the broadcasts, about the size of Manhattan, but scientists suggest it could be done.
But the chances that one star in a few thousand had some sort of civilization might be a big overestimate.
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