One of my teachers brought this up in one of my classes before. He said that the first airwaves are still traveling somewhere in space. The funny part is that Hitler is among the first airwaves to ever have been made so if there is any life out there that's what they will hear first!

The new theory is that they don't get far before the back ground noise of space destroys them. based on what we now about how far waves can travel before being destroyed/absorbed or 'scattered'. In example: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2001-10/1004021546.Eg.r.html It is highly possible that most of our transmission are scattered or disrupted or all but destroyed at or around 2 light years out from us. Signal strength drops - at twice a distance away you are talking about 1/4 of the power - at ten times the distance the strength of the signal would only be one hundredth as great. Pioneer is about 66 AU away, we can still detect its signal with the Deep Space Network - but we know exactly where to look and we know on what frequency it is on. One light year is 63,239.73 AU So Pioneer is almost a thousandth of a light year away (roughly). All broadcasts before Hitler's Olympics speech (where all he said was: "I proclaim the Games of Berlin, celebrating the eleventh Olympiad of the modern era, to be open.") are most likely already lost. The power of transmission of the 1936 Olympics was very high in order to impress the world. You can figure it has traveled 73 years. IF it was strong enough to have survived intact, it would have reached a distance of or about 73 light years. Earlier transmissions have traveled or could have traveled farther. December 12, 1901 is the day Marconi transmitted and received the first radio signals. So you figure that if it was powerful enough to have survived as anything worth mentioning, it would have traveled 107.3 years or that distance in light years. Edit Addition: That 2 light year distance may explain why we are not flooded with Free Radio Pleadies, or the C&W or blue grass music of Alpha Centuri (assuming the Centurians like blue grass). It is possible that 'normal' transmissions used for planetary purposes (radio, TV, cell phones, blah) are not strong enough to travel across the great vastness between stellar systems thus we don't hear anything.