From: joe@strout.net
In article ,
Andrew Gray wrote:
> "If there is light in the universe, showing the formation of the world,
> can we use it to see the formation of the world - ie, see 'into the
> past'". The short answer to this is "yes, but it wouldn't do you much
> good" - in order to use that light, you have to be vastly far away.
>
> If we had an exceptionally powerful telescope, and it was sited several
> billion light-years away, we would be able to see the galaxy as it was
> at the era of the Solar System's forming. Getting it there is left as an
> exercise to the reader :-)
Well, here's a scenario which is rarely mentioned in discussions of this
topic. Suppose friendly and advanced ETs who live roughly 2 billion LY
away have an odd habit of constructing truly enormous, galaxy-sized
mirrors, and one of these mirrors happens to be pointed in the right
direction. By pointing our own giant telescopes at their giant mirror,
we could indeed see light from the formation of our own solar system,
without having to go anywhere.
A minor variation of this would be: the friendly/advanced ETs take
images of our solar system as it's forming, convert this into some sort
of information-bearing signal, and beam it (via a laser?) back in our
direction, just in the off chance that some curious natives evolve here
billions of years later. Perhaps all advanced civilizations do this at
some point, as a way of repaying the cosmic karma of having it done for
them.
OK, so it's ridiculously far-fetched. But from a technical point of
view, it's possible.
Cheers,
- Joe
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