Ask HN: Telescope as a Window to Our Past

[ram1981]

This is for the physics nerds out there. If Hubble telescope can see a past event of a distant planet, can the earth’s past be seen by a Hubble telescope placed in a distant planet? The answer is most likely yes. So my follow up. What if there is a mirror like object on that planet that reflected the light back onto earth? Can Hubble then become a window to our past? And can we essentially manoeuvre Hubble to pick up past events “live”? It’s almost like having a drone above us but feeding us images from the past. Sorry about the long question :(

[lgl]

This question or variations of it are not too uncommon and you can find some answers for this on stackexchange, reddit, quora, etc with a bit of googling [0].

tl;dr: Theoretically yes, practically no.

0 - https://www.google.com/search?q=mirror+in+space+to+see+the+p...

[ram1981]

Thanks. I just didn’t use the right Google search strings. This helps

[rman666]

It would be easier to build a time machine. Search Google for plans.