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)
I think this is plausible. The only problem is finding the inhabited planet to look at. But the telescope itself is kind of already in the heads of people. We would send one or probably several spacecraft into the far reaches of our solar system and use the sun as a massive gravitational lense.
It would just take ages to get a new target into focus.
*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:
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How would the probes travel faster than the light information from way back when?
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How high were you when you guys came up with this idea?
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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…
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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 :)
You mention “the builders”, and that brought me to this series. Ring a bell?
I found it!! By Jack McDevitt
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.
But we can’t see planet surfaces yet. The most we have achieved is seeing a dark smudge in front of a light smudge.
Most planets are detected either by the star wobbling a little due to the planet pulling on it through gravity. Think a light smudge going a pixel to the left and then a pixel to the right.
Or by detecting a star getting slightly darker when a planet passes in front of it. This lets us guess the composition of the atmosphere when we filter the star light through a prisma and analyse which wavelengths of light we have a smidgen less of.
It’s amazing what we can do. But we’re still a far way away from actually seeing extrasolar planets.
OP’s criteria is for an equal (equivalent) alien civilization.
If they were to have what we have, they would be able to detect (infer) atmospheric composition filled with the byproducts of industrialization. It’s not ideal, but IMO we’re halfway there. I can’t recall the system’s designation, but there was some hubbub about one where the Sun’s light was interrupted by some huge mass which seemed to not follow an irregular (hypothetically artificial and intelligently controlled) orbit. I can’t wait for the tech to improve, this is exciting stuff.
For tis topic I love the discussion of Rational Animations. Here is one of the videos of the topic:
Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens.
