Can anyone find flaw with this logic of future technology?

It’s most possible with a satellite, but real tme will always be an issue, light travels at the speed it does, so amplifiction doesn’t matter and transmitting a video feed would take a long time too.

It won’t work I’m afraid as it would take 250 years to transport the telescope 250 light years moving at the speed of light, the fastest speed possible. Looking back at the Earth you would then see it as it was the day you left.

The big flaw is obviously not being able to travel faster than the speed of light. However it would still work for those who live in the future. If we set out today at the speed of light, we could travel 250 light years, and start broascasting back. In 500 years time, people would have a window in to the past.

If you wanted to get even more creative, you could drop off a telescope every 5 light years, then you could switch back and forth in 10 year jumps.

I saw a documentary not too long ago where they talked about slowing down light. Using super cold gas they have managed to actually stop light in its tracks. They can slow it down, stop it, accelerate it, and put it back up to full speed. So, in theory, not only would your idea work, but maybe we could put a telescope in high orbit today, and start buffering the light so to speak. Maybe we could delay the light without the use of great distance.

We know of no way to achieve faster than light travel for anything. Even mass-less particles such as photons are bound by the speed limit of light.

Physics would seem to indicate that accelerating anything with mass to a speed matching light would be impossible. E = MC^2 tells us that as you add energy (E) to accelerate something closer and closer to the speed of light, its mass (M) increases at M x (C squared) where C is the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. This means an object having mass gets far more massive as more energy is applied to accelerate it, and if it reached the speed of light, it’s mass would be infinite. We will, however, be able to observe exoplanets sometime in the foreseeable future.

Plans are currently on the drawing board with NASA for a large array of space based telescopes all capable of being coordinated to form a super high-resolution image of planets orbiting distant stars. This plan moves us well beyond seeing the dot as they move across the face of the star or observing the wobble their gravitation produces on their star. It will take us to a point where we can observe the planet simply by the starlight it reflects toward Earth.

We then can compare the spectrographic signature of the reflected light to that of the planet’s star, and tell what sort of atmosphere it has and whether it possesses water. We will be able to measure its orbital distance from its star and knowing the star’s mass and temperature, calculate whether it is in the habitable zone for human life.

Of course, this is still a far cry from a Google Maps view, but it’s a step in that direction, and it’s going to actually happen within the lifetimes of many of us. So what you are suggesting is most definitely possible in a century or so.

I talked to a buddy of mine who studies this stuff. Basically he’s an all out physics master, studying his doctorate up at Michigan State. He has literally studied some of the topics in this, to great extent.

Anyways, his primary flaw with the idea doesn’t involve traveling faster than the speed of light. As he put it there are theories out there to get around that by basically “folding” space.

The primary flaw as he sees it, is that telescope technology at that distance will never be able to resolve something as focused as that. By 235 light years away, the light you would be receiving (which would be incredibly difficult to separate from the sun’s light anyways) would be on the scale of several photons a second at best. Nowhere near the quality needed to say, see the Revolutionary War in real time via a google maps type program.

Think of it like this, if you started filling up a balloon from a single point, the balloon would expand. But it has no new material, it’s exactly as much balloon as it was the second you started filling it. But it’s expanding exponentially. Every bit it expands, the thinner the balloon becomes, it starts to discolor even. If you could keep the balloon from popping, at some point it would become so thin, you wouldn’t even see it. The light from our planet works in the exact same way. For that matter, so do radio signals.

So the primary flaw is that our telescope technology will never achieve those levels of resolution at that distance. So we apparently need an alternative technology to that :).

I think so but not in my lifetime. Seeing as scientists at CERN have evidence of a Neutrino traveling at faster than light, I think there are many more unseen, undiscovered elements of our universe that will reveal ways of doing the unimaginable.

@tedd Floding space and wormholes are not theories, they are SWAGs. They are currently nothing more than science fiction. The most massive black holes known are not massive enough to warp space sufficiently to even cause mass-less photons to travel faster than the speed of light. There is no proof any wormholes exist, and the physics underlying their possibility also suggests they would be impossible to navigate, and would collapse on anything entering them.

Sure, there may someday be a theory that will make FTL travel possible. But none exists to date. And if we ever manage to undo the work of the Universal COP (Causal Ordering Postulate) who enforces the speed limit of light, we’ll have a can of worms to deal with in logical impossibilities. You could travel back in time and kill your father before he was able to conceive you. Therefore you could not have existed in the future to travel back and carry out this dastardly deed. That’s why the COP is named as “he” is. Enforcing the universal speed limit maintains the existence of cause preceding effect.

@ETpro lol….. Knowing my buddy and the accolades he has to his name… as in he is legitimately up for a nobel prize… I’ll take his word first.

@tedd Show hime that answer, spelling errors and all, and ask him if that is not so. If he can point out an error in what I said, I would like to know what it is. I don’t like to cling to wrong ideas about how the universe seems to work.

@ETpro The gist of his response is that while we right now assume with our current “laws” of physics that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, there is nothing that says we “can’t” bend space and circumnavigate vast distances through that means. Right now scientists really have no idea how to do this, as our technology is nowhere near that level.

Also important to keep in mind is that our “laws” of physics are very much more theoretical in many cases. For example, quantum physics basically contradicts Newtonian physics. You can even technically disprove that E=MC^2. Physics on this level is all still very theoretical. But in theory there is no reason that we won’t be able to surpass the speed of light, even if it’s “cheating” by use of folding space.

@tedd Good. That’;s what I was saying, just worded differently.

wouldnt it take 235 years to put the satilite there? (if we got something to travel at the speed of light)

@mowens Unless all the laws of physics suddenly change, yes.

@mowens For the sake of the argument, we would find some means of traveling faster than light. Read above posts a bit, we went into this in detail.

@tedd / Westy I hate you. :)