[whatwhatwhat]

I remember thinking of this one time as a teenager. Could we see a top down view of the rise of man? The huge caveat is that you have some capability of travelling faster than the light leaving earth, so that you can then look back and absorb the rays. It makes perfectly good sense that if you could travel faster than the speed of light you could use a massive telescope to peer back at the earth and see it's past geological events -- and I mean millions of years even, not just something trivial -- or given a strong enough telescope perhaps more detail could be seen. All of the information that left the earth as light is still out there, all over the universe.

[scythe]

>Could we see a top down view of the rise of man? The huge caveat is that you have some capability of travelling faster than the light leaving earth, so that you can then look back and absorb the rays.

Easier: look at the light as it was gravitationally refracted around a black hole; some paths will probably reverse the relevant light and send it back towards the Earth.

Unfortunately the size of the lens required to actually view this is impractically huge, possibly larger than the Solar System itself -- but it's fun to think about, I guess.

[jerf]

Also, because light is quantum and not continuous, eventually you get to the point where there isn't any light. You can't just keep cutting out X% of the light and still have some there.

[whatwhatwhat]

>You can't just keep cutting out X% of the light and still have some there.

Yes you can.

[ch0wn]

All of the information that left the earth as light is still out there, all over the universe.

A very poetic point of view. :)

As others mentioned in the thread, you don't necessarily travel yourself. If you had a mirror far enough away, you could look into the past as well.

[jterce]

Right, but the mirror would have to have been placed at least as far back as the half way point to where you want to see. If you want to see back two million years, you would have had to place the mirror one million years ago.

[skarayan]

Since the mirror would be light years away, it would take light years for the reflection to come back to Earth.