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

I always think how funny it would be if we discovered a crude signal from a developing civilization on a planet somewhere in our galaxy, and sent a probe to investigate. Before the probe gets there, they've had a tech revolution, developed faster than light travel and taken over the earth..

Actually,

There doing somethings with quantum particles that may one day provide instant comunication. Something about having two particles miles apart and spining one appears to cause the other to move at the same instant. This would mean that comunication between the two particles is faster than light.. in fact, instant. It could also mean that the two particles are in fact the same particle exisiting in two places at once...

Now put a scope looking back at earth from mars and set of a Nuke on earth. so the scope on mars would see something happen.

Now it would take approximately 8 min for the light from the nuke to travel to mars. So on earth the nuke goes off, and on Mars 8 min later, the martians see it happen. The martians then use this new particle comunication device to send a film to earth so earthlings can view their own past, the instant it reaches mars...

For earthlings the event would still have been 8 Minuets ago, but for martians veiwing the sceene it would only be hapening now.

Take this out 100 light years and repeat then Earthlings could watch a constant movie of their past 100 years ago and more the farther you get out there.

To see our past, one would have to exceed the speed of light. One could speculate that the same tech used to create the particle comunication device might also one day be used to Beam a telescope 100 light years or more away in an instant so that we could veiw events from any time in our past.

That would mean we would have to find a particle that exists here and at our destination that are mirrors of each other.

Or we can discover FTL travel.

I dont think we can see the future since it has not happend yet. Light particles from the future should not exist, so nothing to see.

my head hurts now

[edit on 29-3-2005 by Xeven]

Originally posted by Xeven
my head hurts now

Yeah, no kidding!

If the thing with the mirror particles pans out, who's really gonna care about seeing the past.. there's a reason disco is dead.

Doesnt it take 10 minutes for light to travel from the sun to the earth? If this is true. Wouldnt the light thats on the earth always be comming from ten mins in the past?

Right now, the farthest Earth-made spacecraft from us is the Voyager 1 space probe. Estimates from three years ago put Voyager 8.7 billions miles (14 billion kilometers) from the sun. The Earth averages a distance from the sun of about 93 million miles (149.6 kilometers).

Light from the sun takes 8.32 minutes (8 min 19.2 sec) to reach the earth at that distance. So doing some quick math, it would take 778.62 minutes for sunlight to reach voyager. Take off the 8.32 minutes from it's travel to earth and you get 770.30 minutes or 12.83 hours.

So yes, Voyager can see 13 hours into the past on Earth.

That's if Voyager would even be capable of seeing earth at this distance (not likely). And as others have said, the time to transfer data back to Earth would probably take longer than this short amount of time.


EDIT: Just wanted to add that this is in the shortest possible distance scenario, where the sun, Earth, and Voyager were along the same plane and in that order from the sun. Other more realistic scenarios would make the time longer, but not by much.

[edit on 3-11-2009 by paradigm619]