For example if the Betelgeuze system had a planet, with a theoretical large telescope on that planet and looked back at earth. It would see life and civilizations from the 15th century a.d. (~500 light years distance)
*Watching 17th century* “oh man, this July season of France is going to be epic!”
A while ago a coworker and I had an idea for a sci-fi novel that was similar in idea to this.
Essentially humanity sent out these probes that were in effect giant mirrors (pointed at Earth) that reflected light information back to us. The further out they go, the further back in time we get images/video of. We never went anywhere with it, but I thought it would have been neat to explore what happens to immediate political tensions since hard evidence of more recent events, never seen before, would return to Earth first before we even found out the origin of our species.
2 questions:
-
How would the probes travel faster than the light information from way back when?
-
How high were you when you guys came up with this idea?
-
Who knows! It wasn’t going to be hard sci-fi necessarily, but more food for thought. Not everything in sci-fi has proven scientific stuff behind it. They travel faster than light in Star Trek and Star Wars…
-
We weren’t, and that’s probably why we didn’t question the idea too much 😅
-
-
I just spent ten minutes on Google trying and failing to find it, but there’s a novel that uses that basic premise. Humans find this network of observation satellites and are able to tap into the feed and basically watch earth from the 1300’s on. The builders are long since gone. Most of the novel is the crew trying to catch up to this museum ship that the network is uploading to.
Was a really good one if anyone knows the name of it.
Edit I found it!
If you do find the name, could you post it here please? It sounds like it could be good :)
Awesome, thank you :)
You mention “the builders”, and that brought me to this series. Ring a bell?
I found it!! By Jack McDevitt
Awesome! Thanks for that, always adding new sci-fi to my library
Oh snap! That does sound eerily similar. Probably written before we had our idea, and I’m sure it is far more well written than what I could have done.
I’ll keep my eyes open for it!
What do you mean if? We’ve been doing that for years, and so far as I understand it, the only reason that we haven’t found any is that there are millions of solar systems to check.
Then they would see the Earth at whatever detail was possible for them and nothing would be any different. Looking at another planet is like taking pictures of remote areas of our planet with satellites orbiting Earth, the animals and planets being phographed are inlmpacted in no way.
If you are asking about how it would affect the alien species to know people exist it would be necessary to understand their culture and biology first.
Well…we know for fact that other planets exist with life. We don’t know WHAT life. It might be a bunch of animals that are similiar to cows or birds. But we know the planets exist, and they have living vegitation on the planet, which would indicate other life.
We just don’t know what.
Sorry to be the “um, actually” guy, but life on any planet other than Earth has not been confirmed. There have been some signs that there MAY be life elsewhere, but nothing conclusive.
As a layperson, there seems to be a general consensus that, given the vast nature of the universe, life on other planets may be likely. We just can’t say “for a fact that other planets exist with life”.
I’ll be happy to be proven wrong if you’ve got a source.
I just remember reading about it every few years. They’ve found several earth like planets. One I read about in 2014 said it was so similiar to earth that they unofficially nicknamed it “Earth 2”. They found another earth like planet that same month, but it’s size was so different that they made the joke it couldn’t be Earth 3, but based on size it might be Earth 5 (with the joke being the planet was like 2 earths combined).
But our technology was good enough to see the planet is green and blue, indicating life. But our technology wasn’t good enough to zoom in to see what that life looks like. But we know it’s out there.
