This deserves many more upvotes than you’ve had. I guess most people here just don’t get the reference.

Oh yes. It seemed like science fiction at the time, and when my office upgraded to a fax machine which printed on plain paper rather than the heat-sensitive stuff on a roll, that was actually pretty exciting. We still had Telex at the time, and it was only a few years since the inland telegram service had ended (you could still send them internationally).

I know just enough about the light spectrum and the red shift to understand why this is funny (thanks Prof. Brian Cox!), but it underlines how shallow my knowledge is. So much cosmology, so little time…

I’ve had a few QSOs though amateur satellites. I bought a dual-band antenna from a company in the US and used a cheap Chinese handheld and my 20 year-old FT817 for the uplink and downlink. There was a surprising amount of activity, really tricky to make myself heard.