There was a fern, on an island, deep in the Tethys Sea. The fern lived only on that one small island... and the whole landmass now, every scrap of evidence is beneath the Himalayas, cooking into unrecognizable granite.
Someone had this sci-fi idea about aliens that set up probes that just watch planets with life, so you'd have a record of everything you missed... photos and scans of all the creatures from the dawn of time...
I've never wanted anything more intensely in all my life than that imaginary database. And if we are "good" if we ever have the tech in some fantastic future it would be the least we could do...
@futurebird I dream of this. Imagine one day we make contact with someone that has 8k video footage of the carboniferous, dinosaurs, the building of the pyramids! And the thing is, that light actually exists right now, just x million, x thousand light years out...
Though I think the problem is much worse than distance... since the light spreads out... diffuses. We'd need to send out an array of tiny camera probes to sample light from many places... might be able to confirm the location of continents...
But doesn't FTL imply time travel? So, maybe the solution is that.
This is basically why apertures have to be big for diffraction-limited telescopes (in practical terms, for space telescopes).
At this point, it's really interferometer arrays, rather than single telescopes. There WAS a JPL proposal for the "Terrestrial Planet Finder", which was going to be a free-flying array of optically-aligned space telescopes.
Don't know what became of that (I lost touch around 2003).
@TerryHancock
Aren't black holes supposed to express the information they absorb at their event horizons? Reflected light from Earth contains information. If we could find a 4.5 B year old black hole (Sirius A* might do--its event horizon would be a nice, big aperture) and develop a suitable readout device... @futurebird@annaymone
@annaymone@freequaybuoy@futurebird
yeah, imagine looking back at the earth right after the mass extinction - basically @keeseycomics 's comic. (although @keesey would point out his comic is right after, the extinction happend in living memory, but 65 mya is technically 1 million years later, but ok )
@futurebird
them: how much of the water you drink used to be dinosaur pee?
me: how many times have you eaten atoms of calcium that were once the bones of some weird endemic animal whose fossils all got eroded away, and will remain forever unknown to science?!!?
No, not extrapolation. I'm talking about a probe that watches a planet for 100s of millions of years just recording data and samples and photos in a huge database that would be a gift for any intelligent civilizations with an interest in ecology.
@futurebird
geology: a library,
but,
there's no librarian
the books
unwatched
come alive
shuffle around
wrestle in big piles
crush each other
some get ground up
some melted away
some set on fire
so many lost forever
so many distorted
by the dark lens of time
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