Could we see Earths past if we looked from far enough away

i was thinking like, what will happen another 1000 years later? will we have the ability to explore the whole galaxy with the "worm theory"? are we able to colonize other planets? izzit something like starwars or star trek story then? it could be amazing, but doubt we could live that long to see.....

Originally posted by stargazernate
That's the beauty of an apparently-infinite universe: It's more useful to ask, "what isn't out there?"

One of my college astronomy texts had a deep field picture (i.e. of nothing in particular) taken by some ground observatory. All you can really see in the 2 x 3-inch pic are thousands of blue-white dots/pixels. According to the caption, the pic was something like a tenth-degree of arc across, and every dot was a galaxy.

Now, if that's not freakin' amazing, I have no idea what amazing is.

What came to mind right away when I first saw it was, "Given this, how can anyone believe life exists nowhere else?"

If I can find this pic, I'll post it with references...

Yeah, those kinds of things make me misty-eyed when thinking about, with how small we are.

Even Star Wars and Star Trek each take place in one galaxy, though.

Thanks for the replies people.Its amazing how little questions like this tend to fry ure head.Give me till early Sunday morning when Im a little worse for wear and I will try and take this all in(I feel my head works better after a few Vods).

"bamming up" - there's a Sweet Sixteen (the movie) word if ever there was one.

"Could we see Earths past if we looked from far enough away"

Probably not, because light shining onto a thing, and it being percievable, do not have anything really to do with the manifest universe as it is in fact constructed.

Consider the amount of lifeforms for example that don't bother with eyes at all, light is only relevant to seeing-beings, it illuminates the solid and not so solid things of this world, but whether you can see them or not really has no connection to time and space.

"Ok lads n lasses iv been thinking about this for ooo about 5 mins.What would happen if we used the farthest from earth telescope(or sent a telescope millions of miles out)and looked at earth.Would we see our past since it takes light so long to travel these distances."

Yes.

Siunce light travels about 186,000 miles per second, if your telescope were that far away and if you had a magic telescope that could see Earth clearly, you would be seeing it a second younger thatn it actually is.

If you were out at the orbit of Pluto, you'd see the Earth about eight hours older, and if you were near the star Alpha Orionis (Betelguese), you'd see the Earth as it was around 1450 AD

Not to throw anything out of whack, but - all that we can percieve is by sensory-input, so it's really a guess at best that even with such a magic telescope that the Earth would be viewable as it was 1 second before, at such a distance.

How could it be checked for verification? You'd need really long arms so you could check that it feels the same as it looks, or if it feels like one second different between looks and actual positioning of objects therein.

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With entangled particles it might be possible to see the future past. For criminal investigations and recording future history. Send out some satellites to pick up the light or other waves.

You could get instant feed back once the light hit the receptors.

Maybe to look into the actual unrecorded past perhaps you could get some kind of reflected waves from something out there. If you had some aggregate number of oort cloud bodies that were bouncing back EM waves maybe you could get a resolved image of the past Earth.

The trouble with both is you would only see surface events on clear days [nights?]. Sometimes you would only see clouds.

You could however pick up all that old Radio and TV programming.

Fiber McGee and Molly anyone?
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Originally posted by duff beer dragon
"bamming up" - there's a Sweet Sixteen (the movie) word if ever there was one.

"

Yep Im from the same area as most of the actors.I was even Martin Compston's postman for a few years.

Originally posted by Jehosephat
just think, an alien with such a telescope 500 light years away could see us in the middle ages.

Hrm. I need to sit and think about that for a while.

That's a captivating thought. Temporal viewing as opposed to travel.

Hrm. An artificial distortion theoretically could achieve the same thing without the required distance could it not? Theoretically?

Meaning you could practically be on top of the event in another time, hovering for example.

And the distortion would certainly be bi-directional I'd imgaine. So those in the past (for example) might get a glimpse of the viewer.

And record it as something like this...


Or those viewers may even make clandestine contact (as with world leaders) to change their own history and our future.

Hrm.

If you would have to get very far from the Earth, the clouds and Earth's atmosphere would have absorbed the light and therefore you would not receive it at such distances.

Hallucinated surely if we(or THEY)had the tech to build a telescope or whatever to see from so far away it would penetrate the clouds and atmos

To look into the past you need travel no further than your local library or spend enough time on the web researching.

The written word is the greatest time traveling device ever created. You can see what happened in 1412 or 3 AD if you study enough. Yes, you will need to sort the crap from the truth and take in account all the conspiricies involved in world events but if you look deep enough you will find the truth.

What I don't get is even if you could uses a telescope in deep space to look back, why would you want to? It would seem like a monumental waste of time and resources to me. (Could you get sound with the show?)

It doesn't matter where you are, or when you are or what you are or even why you are. All that matters is who you are, and only you can decide that.

Love and light,

Wupy

Originally posted by E_T
So in this we use one clock for everyone involved. (time of "stationary" reference clock)

So if we travel to the point that has light froma thousand years ago (at the speed above), a thousand years will pass on earth, and the rest of the universe, and when we get there, we will see what exactly? Becuase the light that was at that point has had a thousand years during which it will have travelled.

But I must be misunderstanding something here, because by this reasoning, when you get to a point 1,000 light years from earth, if 1,000 years have passed on earth, then you will see, yourself leaving???

Interesting question. Very precision optics CAN and do pick up visually the density changes in the air caused by sound. Supposing you had a powerful enough supercomputer running the correct algorythms, you could probably infer and re-create some of the sound, and dubb it to the film. The only problem I can see is that this kind of photographic equipment must be very sensitive and very controled. Looking through the Earth's atmosphere, through all the turbulance and density changes, I doubt that we could opticaly detect the vibrations.

I don't know if anyone said this, but I did try to find out, I just didn't see it. Everything you see actually happened in the past. Nothing is simultaneaous to two different observers for this very reason. Light takes time to travel. So even when your buddy is standing next to you, it is him in the past that you see, no matter how insignificant the delay is.

Originally posted by mrwupy
To look into the past you need travel no further than your local library or spend enough time on the web researching.

The written word is the greatest time traveling device ever created. You can see what happened in 1412 or 3 AD if you study enough.

Fair enough MrWupy,but you have to admit it would be sweet seeing it with your own eyes dont you think.




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Now just imagine if we were able to look at Earth's past from a powerful telescope.. If we sent it far enough we'd be able to see Earth's evolution and perhaps find out if God created man, or if indeed Man created god. We would be able to see the devasting impact of the astroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Just imagine watching battles that we have only been able to read in text-books.. Trojan Wars, Punic Wars, etc..
Also, imagine if we viewed Mars from a telescope million of light years away... We would be able to see if life ever did exist on the mysterious planet and perhaps find out if man came from Mars.
Though sending a POWERFUL telescope double or triple the speed of light may not seem plausible, just imagine all we could acomplish. Personally, I think it would be well worth the funding.

Yes we could....but only if:

1) We would be able to send this "telescope" you speak of away from earth faster than light.

2) Or make it appear at the distance which corrosponds to the time of earth's history which you wish to observe, without it having to traverse space by conventional means(i.e. sending it through a whormhole).

Neither of these phenomena have been proven, infact 1 has been disproven, so as it stands viewing yesterday is impossible. (imo)

It wouldnt matter if you send a telescope 5 trillion miles away from earth at the speed of light times 10 because Time does not travel only light does so if an alien is looking at the earth from 10 trillion miles away he is going to see the light from the middle ages but he will see modern day time. So it really doesnt matter.

hmmm. Light takes time to travel. So if your observing earth from a distance of 5,000,000,000,000 miles you would see earth as it was: (5,000,000,000,000/186,000)/(60*60*24)=311.131 days ago. Thus, if you were on earth and wanted to observe what happened 311.131 days ago you would have to appear at 5,000,000,000,000 miles instantly. Or intercept the corrosponding point at a velocity greater than that of light. As you can not intercept what is faster than you! Imo

[edit on 29-3-2005 by noyhcat]