You always see an object as old as its distance in light-years

[adultinnovation]

1 light-year away → see 1 year into the past
1,000 light-years → see 1,000 years into the past
300,000 light-years → see 300,000 years into the past
66 million light-years → see dinosaurs


—if Aliens living 66 million light years away had telescopes powerful enough to resolve Earth’s surface from 66 million light-years away, they would see dinosaurs walking around right now.

They would literally be watching dinosaurs live (from their point of view).

Not recordings.
Not guesses.
Actual ancient Earth in real time—from their perspective.

They would be able to see dinosaurs for as long as dinosaurs actually existed on Earth—not just a moment—millions of years from their point of view. 🦖🌍

The image wouldn’t suddenly “break up.” It would change gradually as newer light arrives.

Think of it like a continuous movie, not a snapshot 🎬

Earth is constantly sending out light in every direction. Every moment:

Light reflects off Earth’s surface
That light carries an image of that exact moment
Each moment creates a new “frame” of Earth’s history
Those frames travel outward in sequence, like frames in a movie

So if aliens were 66 million light-years away, they would receive:

First: light from about 66 million years ago → dinosaurs alive
Later: light from 65.9 million years ago → still dinosaurs
Much later: light from 66 million years ago at extinction time → dinosaurs disappearing during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event

From their perspective, they’d watch millions of years of dinosaur history unfold.

[Mahadeva]

Originally Posted by adultinnovation

1 light-year away → see 1 year into the past
1,000 light-years → see 1,000 years into the past
300,000 light-years → see 300,000 years into the past
66 million light-years → see dinosaurs


—if Aliens living 66 million light years away had telescopes powerful enough to resolve Earth’s surface from 66 million light-years away, they would see dinosaurs walking around right now.

They would literally be watching dinosaurs live (from their point of view).

Not recordings.
Not guesses.
Actual ancient Earth in real time—from their perspective.

They would be able to see dinosaurs for as long as dinosaurs actually existed on Earth—not just a moment—millions of years from their point of view. 🦖🌍

The image wouldn’t suddenly “break up.” It would change gradually as newer light arrives.

Think of it like a continuous movie, not a snapshot 🎬

Earth is constantly sending out light in every direction. Every moment:

Light reflects off Earth’s surface
That light carries an image of that exact moment
Each moment creates a new “frame” of Earth’s history
Those frames travel outward in sequence, like frames in a movie

So if aliens were 66 million light-years away, they would receive:

First: light from about 66 million years ago → dinosaurs alive
Later: light from 65.9 million years ago → still dinosaurs
Much later: light from 66 million years ago at extinction time → dinosaurs disappearing during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event

From their perspective, they’d watch millions of years of dinosaur history unfold.

There are probably people here who don't know this for some reason (for example, they didn't go to college), so pasting the LLM post here uh I guess makes sense?

[OldJeff]

But......

Would they see Jesus riding one ?

[adultinnovation]

Originally Posted by OldJeff

But......

Would they see Jesus riding one ?

Jesus was not alive with Dinosaurs so thats not possible

[ZTT]

This is what you would say to a four year old, not a college student, if you were someone who likes to make a point about light travel in one sentence then repeat it 60 more times in increasingly more useless ways.

A better way (IMO) than dinosaurs vs aliens slop is to simply point upwards and say to a four year old:

'See these beautiful stars twinkling in the night sky? Due to how long it takes the light from them to reach us, we see them as they were years ago, not now. Amazing right?

By now those stars may have all disappeared and we don't even know it. Just a cataclysmic series of violent explosive deaths leaving us floating rudderless and alone in the cold dark void, awaiting our own inevitable demise, engulfed in the raging fireball of our expanding sun, leaving us nothing but a charred, lifeless rock. Want an ice cream?'

Originally Posted by adultinnovation

Jesus was not alive with Dinosaurs

Any ChatGPT or four year old can tell you birds are dinosaurs, so nyah.

[NatalieK]

time is irrelevant when you´re with doc Brown


considering a light year is distance and not time, logically, 66 million light years away, is just such a long way, you´d not see dinosaurs, maybe looking through something showing faster than light, tachyons. Yes, proven nonexistent, but then so is the little green man...


just my

[Duced]

Classic misunderstanding of outbound paleophotonic decoherence bandwidth.

What you're describing is just a straightforward consequence of Earth's legacy biosurface radiance shell propagating along the causal manifold at c. The "dinosaurs right now" bit only sounds weird if you're still thinking in local-frame presentism instead of doing the basic retroluminous offset correction.

At 1 ly, you're sampling Earth's emission state from t−1 year.
At 1,000 ly, t-1000 years.
At 66 Mly, congratulations, you’re sitting right in the late Maastrichtian optical buffer and pulling live-feed saurian frames off the outgoing terrestrial scattercone.

That is not speculative. That is literally how unresolved historical photon drift works.

People get tripped up because they imagine there's one "picture" of Earth flying outward like a postcard. No. It's a continuous stratified radiance stream. Every second Earth dumps another full-spectrum surface-state packet into the vacuum. Those packets stay sequential unless you introduce ridiculous amounts of gravitational shear, medium scattering, or amateur-tier chronophase handwaving.

So yes, an observer 66 million light-years out with obscene angular resolution and enough signal recovery to compensate for inverse-square collapse could absolutely watch pre-KPg Earth in apparent real time from their reference frame. Not a reconstruction. Not a simulation. Raw delayed photons. Live dinosaur throughput. 🦖

And it would not "cut out" after one frame either, which is where non-junkies always faceplant into the epistemic drywall.

They'd first receive an interval of Earth-output corresponding to ~66 million years ago. Then the next interval. Then the next. It’s a serialized emission archive. A movie, not a snapshot. If you stay locked on target and your paleoluminal integration stack doesn’t melt, you can keep watching as the biosphere advances toward the K-Pg boundary.

So from their end the stream would look something like:

saurian baseline locomotion
continued megafaunal surface activity
increasing terminal Cretaceous instability
impact-era extinction cascade
post-event ash-loaded radiometric ugliness

The only reason this sounds fake is because humans are used to thinking of "the past" as gone, when in reality it's just been exported.

This is first-semester stuff unless your chrono-optical manifold was calibrated with AliExpress ferrite again.

[JesseQuinn]

Originally Posted by ZTT

'See these beautiful stars twinkling in the night sky? Due to how long it takes the light from them to reach us, we see them as they were years ago, not now. Amazing right?

By now those stars may have all disappeared and we don't even know it

I wrote a poem about that once, how what we see when we look up is memories of light

then delved into how we are actually made of dead stars, which can be explained in one sentence (supernova unleashes the elements of the exploded star into the cosmos, some of which lands on earth where it's used by every living being on it)

how wild would it be if one looked up, on clear night, to view the lights of a star so far away, and have it be dead with the elements from its supernova inside ones own body?

De Grasse Tyson and Wilde put it more eloquently tho, and I like your description better

[cordoba]

What if it was cloudy?

But this would be my biggest wish if aliens ever do make contact - that they have been recording everything on Earth with their huge telescopes for thousands of years, so we might get to see Julius Ceaser and his Roman legions conquering Gaul and stuff.

It might not even require telescopes on planets light years away either if the aliens/UAPs have always been here.

https://www.space.com/space-explorat...esearchers-say

[adultinnovation]

Originally Posted by cordoba

What if it was cloudy?

can't see through clouds......