Observing the past

[Wonderlust King]

So ships in Star Trek can travel many times the speed of light. So lets say they traveled to some arbitrary planter lets say, 300 light years away, and started construction on an enormous telescope pointed directly at earth. Would they be able to see 300 years into the past? If so it would be an interesting tool to study the history of the earth. Past mystery's could be solved, you could just mount one of these telescopes on a ship and it could fly to what ever range it desired.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

A Final Unity utilized that idea. You had to fly to a certain point in space to observe a sun before it went super nova or something like that.

 

[Crewman47]

Can you imagine if 300 or 400 years down the way our future generations are doing that just now, that's assuming they have FTL spaceflight by that time and can get 300 to 400 LY's out to do this.

Now assuming they are doing this how about we all go outside and give them all a big wave just to show them we all know there watching.

 

[Forbin]

I've often imagined pointing the sensors directly at a specific planet you wanted to study, then fly straight at it from, say 1,000 light years distant. You could then watch and record that planets history over the last 1,000 years.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

I've often imagined pointing the sensors directly at a specific planet you wanted to study, then fly straight at it from, say 1,000 light years distant. You could then watch and record that planets history over the last 1,000 years.

And now imagine, you keep moving towards that planet fast enough. You could fast foward to get past the boring stuff!
Or keep moving away at light speed to get a still image.
OR keep flying away faster than light to rewind.
Could be pretty hilarious actually.

 

[Deks]

That kind of a method for observing history might be a better option instead of resorting to time travel and polluting the timeline to do it.
While I agree that certain details will be left out in such a fashion, however, acquiring general information would be more than enough for a long amount of time.

 

[Dayton3]

I've wondered about this as well.

For example, in the year 2163, using a gigantic gravitational lense telescope set up 200 ly from Earth to see if JFK was really shot by Oswald.

Don't think that would work.

Even at the maximum conceivable resolution, the light traveling from Earth would never be enough to allow those kinds of things to be resolved.

Even discounting the effects of clouds and other weather.

 

[Ronald Held]

What is the atmosphere going to do to anything not at a planetary scale object?

 

[Timo]

The writers generally try to tapdance around the issue of sensor resolution, but applying this type of past-observing would force them to decide once and for all whether individual humans can be seen across interstellar ranges.

In "Unification", Starfleet was able to zoom in on Spock who was on Romulus. Did they achieve this across several lightyears (given that Romulans wouldn't exactly welcome a Federation camera in their space)? Or did Starfleet use a covert camera on low orbit above Romulus, or perhaps hovering not too high above the cities? The latter might be the more consistent interpretation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

I've often imagined pointing the sensors directly at a specific planet you wanted to study, then fly straight at it from, say 1,000 light years distant. You could then watch and record that planets history over the last 1,000 years.

And now imagine, you keep moving towards that planet fast enough. You could fast foward to get past the boring stuff!
Or keep moving away at light speed to get a still image.
OR keep flying away faster than light to rewind.
Could be pretty hilarious actually.

I like the way you think!

 

[Ronald Held]

Timo, I say a covert camera in low orbit.