Possible dumb question

Say in the future we devolp a way to travel past the speed of light,and we set up say a HUbble telescope like insturment in some far off region off the universe and point it at earth

Would it be like seeing the light from stars millions of yars ago? i.e. see earth in its infancy,etc ?

Yes.

There are no dumb questions.

thats incredible. Its unlikely I will live to see that day, but I can alays hope.

There are no dumb questions, only dumb people.

(as a teacher I once had was fond of saying)

The light we see from stars is millions of years old.

[edit on 24-3-2006 by HowardRoark]

Wow Howard...this is the first non 9-11 post I've seen from you I think. Anyway, even if we could travel at the speed of light, we would have to travel millions of years to get there to set the telescope up. So, after millions of years we'd only be seeing the light that has basically followed us from when we set out. So, we'd be seeing present day earth (the light from earth from when we set out)...not infant earth.

Now, if we could stargate there instantly, then yes, we could see the infant earth.

I think that that is why Darth_Revan said, "a way to travel past the speed of light..."

Still we'd have to go millions of times faster than the speed of light for this to work. And no, it's not a dumb question. It's just that for this to work, we'd have to instantly be millions of light years away(actually billions if we want to see infant earth...I think it's estimated at 4.5 billion years?).

Yeah, we would. We would also need a telescope with the resolution to be able to pick out the Earth. Of course, that would be the least of our worries if we were to be able to develope the technology to go that fast.

THere has been numerous theories and even Sci-Fi authors who have used this idea. It is limited by having a way to go superluminal, at many times the speed of light, and then having a means to take high resoultion photos of object thousands of light years away. Some sceintists think about using a black hole to help magnify the images.

Think of this. An intelligent being living on a planet 50 light years away from Earth would just now be receiving television broadcasts of the Howdy-Doody show, the Army/McCarthy hearings, and other evidence of “intelligent” life here on Earth.

Why not just jump a few million miles and then turn around to see yourself prior to jumping?

Then duck as you seem to fly straight into yourself.

If you could go faster then light you could in theory go back in time. Not just see light leaving earth in the past that you over took but actually go back in time yourself.

The faster you go the slower time gets for you if you hit LS time would in theory stop for you. If you went past LS then time would start to move backwards.

I dont think theres even enough energy in the entire visible universe to move a single atom to LS though. Phenomena like Einstein-Rosen Bridges that allow faster then light travel might be possible means of time travel.

The theory I know about with regards to travelling into the past revolves around exceeding the speed of light. However as this is 'impossible' there is a theoretical way to achieve this using our current understanding of physics.
The space around a black hole is in motion and apparantly moves around the outside of the event horizon, so if you travel at the speed of light in this warped space you can actually exceed it (speed of light) in relation to the surrounding space, but not within the warped space, so you would in effect travel faster that light and go back in time.

I heard that theory before its not a bad one since your letting a natural phenomena do the really hard work for you (bending spacetime). If I understand it right your basically doing near light speed laps very close to a Blackhole in its warped space.

Man in a few million years humans might be able to do some really interesting stuff.

Here's something you haven't thought of, You and everything in this galaxy are moving at 1.3 million miles/hour every second of your life toward an object called : The Great Attractor.



archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu...

csep10.phys.utk.edu...

Most of the theroies or ideas of going faster then light need to ignore the relativity issues and time dialation effects. Just as sceintists used to think you couldn't go faster then the speed of sound because of the equations developed required you to divide by zero. Our current knowledge of the universe really has no idea how things behave when they go faster then light.