If only we had a telescope the size of our solar system, we could view a planet 2000 light years away, with enough discrimination to determine if there was a civilization there, 2,000 years ago.
Any ideas on how to make a telescope that big?
That project is on the Dyson sphere scale.
There isn’t enough material in the solar system to build a structure that can span it. Making it so it can be focused adds a few magnitudes of difficulty to the project.
But it would be totally super duper cool. I’d wait in line a few hours for my turn to peer into the eyepiece.
Where did you come up with that idea and the numbers you used?
I was off on a tangent, chasing random headlines or taglines, on the web, as they caught my attention. One I read a bit of was about an earthlike (in some respects anyway) planet whose sun is a star 2,000 light years from us. I think it was the same article that had various sizes of telescopes that would be needed for various distances. The one for 2,000 light years was the size of the solar system, but that would enable good enough resolution to see signs of towns, settlements or other indicators of a civilization. But of course that would have been a civilization as it was 2,000 years ago, by our time.