Hacker News Reader

Comment by andr3w321 | Hacker News Reader

I find it sort of ironic that everyone here thinks this would be awesome, but are completely opposed to hovering predator drones observing our every action 24/7. Obviously it's all a matter of who has access to the data, but essentially the data would be the same.

View on HN

Even disregarding the resolution problems as brought up by ebilsten, and assuming we have some magical tech that would allow us spy-satellite-like capabilities with this... we'd still be looking at Earth decades in the past.

I for one could not care less if historians centuries in the future want to observe me through a black hole. Its effects on freedom and civil rights is basically nil, unlike predator drones.

Azimov explored this idea in his short story The Dead Past

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

In Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" (awesome book, btw! I don't think he's planning on writing the remaining 2 in the trilogy, though :() they have machines that do exactly this, letting them monitor ancient history up to a decade ago: anyone, anywhere on the planet. The catch is that the builders of the machine actually have access to real-time monitoring, but pretend this isn't the case to avoid public outrage.

The data is not the same - they vary greatly on spatial resolution and latency. Better than 10cm resolution with effectively 0s latency (in the drone case), and ~5,000-12,000km resolution (assuming you can get back only a couple of pixels from a MACHO) with yrs of latency are two very very different things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com