Paleontolgy with Space Telescopes

[CDarwin]

This is just a silly and I'm sure not very original idea of mine, so I didn't think I should dirty the astronomy board with it, but have you ever considered the potential of telescopes for future paleontology?

 

Obviously this would require technology far beyond that which we posses now, but wouldn't it be possible to move a telescope out far enough into space so that the light reaching it from earth would have reflected off of it millions of years ago?

 

If the telescope was then ridiculously powerful, could you not see individual animals on the surface from millions of years in the past? That would be profoundly nifty, don’t you think?

[foodchain]

This is just a silly and I'm sure not very original idea of mine, so I didn't think I should dirty the astronomy board with it, but have you ever considered the potential of telescopes for future paleontology?

 

Obviously this would require technology far beyond that which we posses now, but wouldn't it be possible to move a telescope out far enough into space so that the light reaching it from earth would have reflected off of it millions of years ago?

 

If the telescope was then ridiculously powerful, could you not see individual animals on the surface from millions of years in the past? That would be profoundly nifty, don’t you think?

 

Its not an original idea, it may be in the context of you generating it independently though. I don’t think such is possible really, being first you would have to catch up with said light, and I don’t know how you would do that, then there is the idea of whatever the light has interacted with for instance since leaving earth at a particular moment in time.

[iNow]

Obviously this would require technology far beyond that which we posses now, but wouldn't it be possible to move a telescope out far enough into space so that the light reaching it from earth would have reflected off of it millions of years ago?

In order for this to be successful, you would need your telescope to reach that distanct vantage point BEFORE the light from millions of years ago does. It would have to travel faster than the speed of light, and hence would be travelling back in time. Until you can get your telescope to travel faster than light, you'll just be looking at light which bounced off of the Earth at some point AFTER you launched the telescope.

[SkepticLance]

And of course, according to current understanding of physics, it is in fact impossible to travel faster than light.

 

An article by two NASA scientists about ten years ago in Scientific American stated that the maximum potential speed that could be achieved using any means known to be possible would be 0.2c, or one fifth of light speed.

[swansont]

You'd be fighting the diffraction limit for the resolution of your image. (this is part of the "ridiculously powerful" criterion) You want to see 2 million years into the past, using ~500 nm light, and resolve things down to just a meter. Your telescope lens needs to be about a light-year in diameter, according to the Rayleigh criterion.

[geoguy]

This is just a silly and I'm sure not very original idea of mine, so I didn't think I should dirty the astronomy board with it, but have you ever considered the potential of telescopes for future paleontology?

 

Obviously this would require technology far beyond that which we posses now, but wouldn't it be possible to move a telescope out far enough into space so that the light reaching it from earth would have reflected off of it millions of years ago?

 

If the telescope was then ridiculously powerful, could you not see individual animals on the surface from millions of years in the past? That would be profoundly nifty, don’t you think?

 

Good question, however:

 

No. Technology today or in the future is still limited by the physical properties of the Universe.

 

Here is another forum with lots of discussion on space and related issues:

 

http://uplink.space.com/ubbthreads.php?Cat=

[CDarwin]

Well... this is why physics isn't my subject. Thank you for all the responses. You're all so eager and helpful. It's inspiring.

 

I think you're all neglecting warp fields and wormholes, though. You can move faster than the speed of light with one of those.

[iNow]

It's inspiring.

 

I think you're all neglecting warp fields and wormholes, though. You can move faster than the speed of light with one of those.

 

Well, of course. I mean, with all of the experience we each have using this mode of travel, I think we just took that as a given.

[SkepticLance]

To CD

 

Warp fields and wormholes are a lovely idea, but sadly there is no evidence that either one can do the job. There are good theoretical reasons why no matter, energy or information can travel faster than light. In spite of lots of research, no one has succeeded in doing it. Even the recent 'success' with quantum tunnelling did not in fact permit anything to travel faster than light.

 

We cannot exclude the very remote possibility that one day it will be done. However, with today's science, it appears totally impossible.

[CDarwin]

To CD

 

Warp fields and wormholes are a lovely idea, but sadly there is no evidence that either one can do the job. There are good theoretical reasons why no matter, energy or information can travel faster than light. In spite of lots of research, no one has succeeded in doing it. Even the recent 'success' with quantum tunnelling did not in fact permit anything to travel faster than light.

 

We cannot exclude the very remote possibility that one day it will be done. However, with today's science, it appears totally impossible.

 

It was a joke.

[Fred56]

Apparently all that you need to do is build a large negative-energy (whatever that is) generator and move it to the desired destination (however many parsecs that might be) and bob's your uncle. Something like that anyway.