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)

  • madame_gaymesEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • funkajunk@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      2 questions:

      1. How would the probes travel faster than the light information from way back when?

      2. How high were you when you guys came up with this idea?

      • madame_gaymesEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        1. 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…

        2. We weren’t, and that’s probably why we didn’t question the idea too much 😅

    • MintyFresh@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 days ago

      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!