Bored Like a Zap
If you are currently sitting there feeling bored, please take a moment to consider the plight of the Zaponians.
The Zaponians live on the planet Zap, which orbits a fairly unremarkable star somewhere in the Virgo Cluster—a massive cosmic highway sitting roughly 65 million light-years away. They possess a piece of technology known as the Super-Intergalactic Planetary Observation Lens—a telescope so absurdly powerful it can zoom right past our atmosphere and focus on a single blade of grass.
Naturally, the Zaponian scientific community is utterly bored to tears by us. Because of the stubborn, immutable speed of light, the image currently hitting their lens left Earth 65 million years ago. They aren’t watching you browse the internet or complain about the weather. They are staring at a damp swamp where a Triceratops is chewing on a giant fern.
And they’ve been watching versions of this same show for over a hundred million years. To a Zaponian tech-operator, Earth is just that broken, low-budget channel that only broadcasts large, dim-witted reptiles wandering aimlessly through the mud. Every morning, the chief astronomer logs on, sighs, notes down 'Still lizards,' and switches the monitor off.