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Comment on What if there is an equal alien civilization also incapable of light speed travel but developed a telescope that could view planets like ours.

madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

A while ago a coworker and I had an idea for a sci-fi novel that was similar in idea to this.

Essentially humanity sent out these probes that were in effect giant mirrors that reflected light information back to earth. The further out they go, the further back in time we get images/video of. We never went anywhere with it, but I thought it would have been neat to explore what happens to immediate political tensions since hard evidence of more recent events, never seen before, would return to Earth first before we even found out the origin of our species.

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MintyFresh@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just spent ten minutes on Google trying and failing to find it, but there’s a novel that uses that basic premise. Humans find this network of observation satellites and are able to tap into the feed and basically watch earth from the 1300’s on. The builders are long since gone. Most of the novel is the crew trying to catch up to this museum ship that the network is uploading to.

Was a really good one if anyone knows the name of it.

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- madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You mention “the builders”, and that brought me to this series. Ring a bell?
  
  www.goodreads.com/series/41758-heritage-universe
  
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  - MintyFresh@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I found it!! By Jack McDevitt
    
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    madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Awesome! Thanks for that, always adding new sci-fi to my library
    
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- madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Oh snap! That does sound eerily similar. Probably written before we had our idea, and I’m sure it is far more well written than what I could have done.
  
  I’ll keep my eyes open for it!
  
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- Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If you do find the name, could you post it here please? It sounds like it could be good :)
  
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  - MintyFresh@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    www.goodreads.com/book/show/382161.Chindi
    
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    Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Awesome, thank you :)
    
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funkajunk@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
2 questions:

How would the probes travel faster than the light information from way back when?

How high were you when you guys came up with this idea?
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- madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Who knows! It wasn’t going to be hard sci-fi necessarily, but more food for thought. Not everything in sci-fi has proven scientific stuff behind it.
  
  We weren’t, and that’s probably why we didn’t question the idea too much 😅
  
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