Replaying the past...

Our moon, is about 240,000 miles away; it takes light about
1.3 seconds to travel from there to here. If something happened
on the Moon--if it were hit by a big asteroid--we wouldn't see
the explosion until 1.3 seconds later. The Sun is much further
away than the Moon--about 93 MILLION miles. When light leaves
the Sun, it takes 8 minutes to speed through space and reach
Earth. If the Sun were to magically vanish, sunlight would
continue streaming through our windows for 8 blissful last
minutes, and the Sun would shine in its normal place in the
sky. Finally, we would see the Sun wink out--480 seconds after
it actually happened. Why? After the Sun, the nearest star is
24 TRILLION miles away. Light must travel for 4 YEARS to cover
that distance, so we are seeing the star as it appeared 4 years
ago.

That being said; If we were to put a satellite 6 Trillion miles
into space (1/4 range closest to star after our sun) and direct the
lens towards earth we would now be viewing Earth as it were one
year ago. If it were possible to zoom in on a close enough scale
to an area of interest we would be able to watch what ever it were
we were interest in. (Terrorist attack, Assassination, whatever).
Something like this would have been great in the case of JFK.

I would love to hear your thoughts�

--Andrew817

the problem with this is that the transmitting of information to and from a satellite cannont be done faster than the speed of light, so we couldnt see the product of these pictures for the same time.

Yup, Dunkle is right, but I like the way you are thinking. Just need to find a loophole to make your theory work. Keep posting

that loophole just might end up being a wormhole. if you believe in the existance of such things, this is the direction to go. unless of course you can figure out how to accelerate past the speed of light.

Now we're thinking........nothing is impossible.

I read or saw somewhere last week that there is a new theory that says the universe is more like a big cylinder. You know, kinda round. If I can find the article I will post back.

Correct me if im wrong, but doesn't that entangled electron thing make it possible to transmit information instantaneously? Which is why Einstein found it so troubling. You change the quantum state of the electron where you are and it changes the state of the entangled electron whereever in the Universe it is.

Better informed people feel free to enlighten me.

Yes, entangled qbits are the way to go.

Once we've got quantum computing out of our pants and into the sun, that will assuredly happen.'

Imagine it - streaming high res visual colour webcams on mars. In orbit around jupiter. In the Kuiper belt. Lag would be a thing of the past. We could be anywhere in the universe and communicate with earth instantaneously.

The reason we can't do it now is reliant upon a few things.

The first, we don't have the power to accurately watch what goes on on the surface of an earth-sized planet a trillion light years away. We COULD, repeat, COULD set up an advanced satellite system around earth that kept track of places we wanted to be able to watch in the past and then record it in our local sattelinet, then send the signal on a high frequency towards our beacon/receiver a light year away, and it would use entanglement to get back to us instantaneously.

There's problem 2 - the 'instantaneously' barely exists yet. We're just beginning to understand how quantum teleportation/entanglement works.

Problem 3 - location and co-ordination. Keeping perfect track of where to aim to hit a satellite a year in the future as you quickly shoot around the earth which shoots around the sun wouldn't be extremely easy.

Long and short: Good idea. Happen eventually, but not for a while.

In a similar boat: This is likely how Von Neumann probes will eventually work. We send them, they map, and then use quantum entanglement to get back to us instantaneously. They map as fast as they can map, and we get a large scale picture of the universe that modifies itself in real time. Won't that be simply beatiful? All we'd have to do is have instructions built within the network for a communications droid and some standard reception equipment - if there were any repeating signals out there we could track them, create a comms/friend droid, and meet our new species through a two way instant monitor/microphone or even smellogram.

What a world we'll see. What a world.

Neat idea. Teleport a probe about 10000 light years away and have it look back at the earth and record the information, then beam it or the recorded data back. You would need quite a bit of magnification to see anything too useful though, but if the technology to teleport the probe was there, magnification would just be a cost issue.



[edit on 4-7-2004 by perseus]

woah hold on now.

I think the idea with the light from the sun is true, but your talking about light!

To actually zoom in on real "time" life, and people... the poeple would have to be the ones moving at the speed of light. right

first posters idea is good though,
So actually somewhere way way out past the star closest to the sun, is the very fist images of our earth! so if you could shoot a camera out to that image (that is still moving) you could see the creation of earth and see the dinosaurs walking around

Also, I'm no physicist but I wonder if it would be possible to use quantum entanglement to assemble light speed or faster than light objects. Any informed thoughts on that?

perseus: If we were to construct a faster-than-light or lightspeed object, it may have a lot to do with quantum entanglement. However, we don't have any means or any actual theories on moving faster than light with quantum entanglement, only about some teleportation. Maybe quite a while after our quantum revolution concerning entanglement will come something like what you're proposing. It would be great though.

Qlone: ..What?

To actually zoom in on real "time" life, and people... the poeple would have to be the ones moving at the speed of light. right

No.. No they wouldn't. I don't think you understand the concept. Light, moving at the speed of light, would reflect on what you wish to view on earth's surface, then go up and hit the atmosphere, and any light that made it through would then travel, at the speed of light, out to the probe. The light would come in a fairly constant stream, and assuming that the camera placed out that far could zoom and follow the light, yes, it would work. I forgot about spread though, a lightbulb here is invisible from the moon because its rays spread out as they travel, leaving you less to focus on. A large collector might be able to pick up a few here, but .. oh well. You might be able to send it in laser form as I mentioned from a local satellinet. Yeah, that's how you'd do it.

Anyrate, onto more:

first posters idea is good though,
So actually somewhere way way out past the star closest to the sun, is the very fist images of our earth!

Nah, not the star closest to our sun. That would only be 4.6 or so years ago. You'd have to go a little over 4 billion light years away.

so if you could shoot a camera out to that image (that is still moving) you could see the creation of earth and see the dinosaurs walking around

Yeah. The camera doesn't have to move other than changing direction to maintain its focus on the earth.

in my mind for it to work the zooming in of the lens would have to be a wormhole
we can see the light from the sun but we can also see the physical entity, I dont understand the concept of how you can get a image of a detailed moment in history from light

and if you did shoot out to the light trillions of miles away it would just be old light, just like the 8 minutes of sunlight. that first minute becomes the oldest minute if you shot closer to the sun you would just see newer light

and if you did shoot out to the light trillions of miles away it would just be old light

Yes, that is what we are discussing. The ability to see light that reflected off the earth long ago effectively allows us to see what happened in the past. We are not talking about actually traveling into the past.

The trick is getting an object light years away quickly, and getting data back fast enough, for it to be useful.

[edit on 4-7-2004 by perseus]

Doesnt the light refracting off the earth scatter at a certain point making it allmost impossible to zoom in close when your that far away?