Somewhere out there, Earth Is still in the pastHere’s the strange thing about looking into space, you’re never seeing the Universe exactly as it is right now.
Light takes time to travel, so the farther away something is, the older the version of it we see.
If an alien civilization were 4.5 billion light-years away and somehow had a telescope powerful enough to see Earth, the light reaching them today would show our planet around the time it was forming. No humans. No dinosaurs. Not even the earliest known life, just a young, violent Earth being shaped by impacts, volcanism and the formation of its crust and oceans.
The same thing happens on a much smaller scale. We see the Sun as it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago, and the Andromeda Galaxy as it was roughly 2.5 million years ago.
So an alien civilization 100 million light-years away would currently be watching an ancient Earth from 100 million years ago.
The night sky is essentially a collection of old snapshots of the Universe and every time we look deeper, we look further back in time.
Of course, actually resolving Earth from billions of light-years away is far beyond our current technology. But the light-travel principle is completely real.
@futurism
