There are a lot of problems with the idea that aliens could get our Television messages. First, while an AM or FM audio signal is mathematically easy to decode back into a sound wave, an analog TV signal is very complex; it's essentially a set of instructions to tell a receiver how to shoot electrons at a screen to make David Hasselhoff's rugged suntanned face 25 or 30 times a second. Let's not forget that if you want to see the color of that suntan, there are three ways to go about that: the quadrature amplitude modulation of NTSC (USA, Canada, and Japan), the frequency modulation of SECAM (France, Mongolia, and much of the former USSR), and the quadrature amplitude modulation switching phase every other line of PAL (most of the rest of the world). VCRs, DVD players, and TV sets have to b