You Are Being Observed By Aliens From The Future.

Spacetime is funky like that.

Courtesy of NASA.

So here’s the thought: when we think about space, say the distance between stars, we speak about that distance in terms of lightyears. A lightyear is, as the name suggests, the distance light travels in a year’s time, or 365 days, or 525,600 minutes, if you’re a Jon Larson fan. Considering light travels at a crisp 186,000 miles per second, that distance is somewhere in the range of 5.88 trillion miles.

To recap: a lightyear is a distance of 5.88 trillion miles — or rather, about 63,574 times the distance between Earth and the sun. It is a categorically ginormous distance.

So it is no surprise then, that with the Milky Way being about 100,000 lightyears across, and the observable universe being billions of lightyears across, that light coming from those regions would be as old as they are far away.

On a micro scale, it’s a bit of a mindflock (really testing out this name here) to think about. Technically, everything you see has already happened, and what you see is simply the final result of your eyes and brain coordinating to process that light information bouncing off the rods and cones inside the cornea. There is a minor delay between reality and what you experience, no matter the distance of the thing you’re observing. We can observe this process, audibly, when sound travels over a long distance — there is a delay between the event that creates the sound, and the sound itself reaching your ears. Obviously, the process of light reaching your eyes to give you sight is extremely rapid — often microseconds rapid, as we are able to react to the things that we observe in what we’d call “real time”. But “real time” isn’t even real time. It’s only what you experience, the moment you experience it.

But on a macro level, things get really interesting. Let’s start local, with our own star: the sun. At a distance of 92.49 million miles away, it takes light about eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. That means if the sun were to go cold at this very moment, we wouldn’t know about it for another 8 minutes, when the last little bit of light and heat from the sun reaches us. Remember, a lightyear is over 62,500 times greater than that distance. So, for example, light from the sun’s closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, would take about four years to reach us, since that star is about four lightyears away from us.

Now, with the James Webb Telescope launched, we will soon be able to get an even closer look at stars like Alpha Centauri, and an even closer look at what kinds of planets could be orbiting them. With hundreds of billions of stars in a 100,000-lightyear span, it is statistically probable that we are not the only life-bearing planet in our galaxy, barring the universe.

All of that said, as I sit here writing this and you sit here reading it, I wonder: who will be observing this moment in time? Whoever they are, they won’t be doing it for quite some time. If there is an alien race out there with their own James Webb telescope of equal or greater strength, and they had that telescope pointed at our little blue marble at this very moment, they would most certainly not be seeing this moment at all. 

Depending how far away their star is, they could be seeing anything from the election of Trump, to World War II, to the fall of Rome. They could be seeing the construction of the pyramids, or hell, they could even be seeing the Earth as it was before the first hominids left Africa.

Whoever is seeing us now, they are doing it from the future, whether it’s four years, forty years, or forty thousand years.

To them, I just want to say: glad you could see us. Sorry about the mess.