Science has developed technology that will allow human beings to see 11 billion years into the past.
When will they develop the technology that lets me see where I left that important thing my wife gave me last week? That thing that was so important I put it someplace where I'd never forget it but now she's asking me about it and it's not in the place where I thought I put it? Come on, Science! When are you going to do me a solid?
Knowing how things were happening in a galaxy in the universe's boondocks in 11,000,000,000 BC at 4:00am (local time) may somehow - someday - be important but let's talk practical applications, shall we?
The universe is filled with a dense yet invisible plasma of data; billions of years worth of light photons, radio waves, gamma rays, x-rays, whatever-rays; the flotsam and jetsam of nuclear fusion, interstellar collisions, and the rise of civilization on at least one of the blue-green marbles knocking around the circle of this and our neighboring galaxies.
Imagine being able to capture, analyze and image that data.
I recall once reading about radio waves emitted from earth and how life forms on other planets might learn about us from "Friends" episodes broadcast to the cosmos. Not just "Friends," of course. I don't know how many light years it will take for the ending to "Game of Thrones" to arrive on Ceti Alpha VI but we may want to start planning for an alien invasion now. You just can't "last minute" something like that.
And there are all those photons of light that have bounced off the planet for millenia. Could we capture those outbound images and finally see exactly how the pyramids were built?
How was Stonehenge built?
How were the Nazca Lines drawn?
What happened to Amelia Earhart?
Was Atlantis real and how did Donovan know about it?
Did Jesus really look like Daryl Hall?
Yes, you're going to need a massive amount of storage and the compute power necessary to extract, correlate and map the data into images (I'm reminded of the Guardian of Forever in "The City on the Edge of Forever"). And people are not going to like the answers (spoiler alert: Jesus did not look like Daryl Hall) but…
Aren't you curious?
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