… But still! the idea that it’s at least hypothetically possible to actually see our own past is very exciting!

We… we have tools for seeing our past. We have extensive records of imagery from as far back as we have orbital satellites. You can go on Google Earth right now and look at older maps.

I mean, I get why it would be cool to see a reflection from the past, but literally every reflection you see is from the past. At a certain distance from your reflective or distorting surface, you’re going to need major image processing to make out a clear image of the planet, so again, at that point it’s far easier to just look at recorded images or videos.

There is a much cooler idea though that you can exploit from this principle: you can use a star or other dense object in space to work like a light-lens, we could build this now but it would be a very expensive and long-term project, because we would need to send a series probes out past the distance that Voyager 1 has already traveled over 40 years. We would also need to know ahead of time what our target is so we place the probes in the right place, placing the sun between the probes and the target at just the right distance.

If you take the distorted light from around the edges of the Sun and reconstruct it, you can theoretically see details of continents and other surface features of Earth-sized planets in entire other solar systems, which would be fantastic.