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If you could use a wormhole to travel 50 million light years away from earth instantly, then look back at earth with a sufficiently powerful microscope, I belie
by user3939382 2y ago
If you could use a wormhole to travel 50 million light years away from earth instantly, then look back at earth with a sufficiently powerful microscope, I believe you could observe the dinosaurs.
- some_furry 2y ago50 million light years would not get you light from 65+ million years ago.
- elliotec 2y agoImagine seeing the exact point in time the asteroid hit!
- rapnie 2y agoThere is this sci-fi book about this, but I forgot name/author. In the book a wormhole end can be positioned anywhere in space and time history. The tech starts as an ITER-like project and then becomes available in mainstream products, and all the dirty secrets of mankind come to light.
- bsenftner 2y agoThat is Arthur C Clark's last novel "The Light of Other Days", and it even has an Elon Musk like no ethics billionaire as one of the plot driving main characters.
- gpderetta 2y agoAsimov has written a somewhat similar novel called "The Dead Past". In fact from the description I thought parent was referring to this story.
- rapnie 2y agoThank you! Yes, that is the one. I actually found it on my bookshelf just now, but in searching for "that book with the wormholes" several times before I never thought to check this one. Great sci-fi story.
- NikkiA 2y agoThe photons would be so spread out that you'd need a telescope with a primary optic bigger than anything else in the universe. And even then, you'd struggle to capture enough to have any meaningful information.
- itishappy 2y agoYou don't even need a wormhole. Light can "reflect" (ok more like slingshot) around a blackhole 25 million light years away, giving us a direct visual path to our own planet 50 millions years ago. Of course our telescopes don't have anywhere near the resolution for this right now.
- thrance 2y agoWill they ever? Surely at some point there just wasn't enough light reflected off of dinosaurs skin to reconstruct anything more than scattered dots of light.
- delecti 2y agoTheoretically you'd just need an enormous telescope to collect enough light to resolve an image. Though based on the features that modern telescopes can resolve on the moon ~1 light second away, it'd probably need a telescope on the scale of a galaxy
- bee_rider 2y agoAt some point there might be it be enough photons, though, right?
- itishappy 2y agoNope! We can detect individual photons (and measure their properties) and a mirror can (nearly) perfectly focus and collect every photon that hits it. The frequency of detection events would change with the distance, but the frequency doesn't hugely matter, one photon per week is enough for science!
- bee_rider 2y agoIt is definitely possible that I’m missing something here. But, for example, if we are trying to get an image of a dinosaur, and we’re only getting one photon per week, how’s that work? The dinosaur should have moved before the second photon is sent off, right?