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It is crazy that if we were observing Voyager 1 through a telescope, and we remotely turned on a light on the spaceship, it would still take us 1 day to see the light turn on.

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It would be about 2 days from the moment you sent the command to turn it on.

If anyone is in the mood for getting nerd-sniped: I'm curious if it would be possible to see such a light from earth (or earth orbit) using any actually existing telescope, and if so how bright would the light have to be.

I tried with a few LLMs, and they seem to agree (sometimes) around 10^15 lumens. A light wouldn't work, but it seems that a nuclear explosion close to Little Boy's would do it.

PS: The best way to get an answer on the internet is to provide a wrong answer.

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