[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by octothorp

Hey, I've got a hypothetical question: let's say that you developed: a) a super powerful telescope that can detect earth-sized planets even billions of light years away; and b) faster than light space travel. You should be able to mount your telescope to your spaceship, travel 4.5 billion light years away, and then turn around and observe the creation of the earth, correct? Is there anything wrong with that scenario, other than that such a telescope and such a spaceship are both almost inconceivable?

Compltelely ignoring relativity and how traveling faster than light might affect how the light from the earth travels, ie is no longer constant wrt the observer and hence you could catch up with and pass it, then yeah, that's exactly what you'd see. Of course that's just one opinion. It would be equally valid to say, that for you to do that, the laws of physics would have to be different, so who knows what you'd see?

But, take away the starting somewhere and traveling away from it, and you have exactly what we do now, we look at things they way they were a long time ago.

That's why you often hear about things like the Hubble Ultra Deep field in terms of how LONG ago they are looking back, right along side how far away the objects are.