If there were anybody there with the ocular receptors to see them, that is?s
It’s my boyfriend’s question. He’s been reading a lot on WWI lately and that the extent of the trenches was much greater than he had before understood. You can see forest fires from space sometimes, right? Could you see large trench areas, or would it have been indistinguishable from the regular brownish terrain?
In a lot of areas, you can pull up a sattelite photo that shows your own house in pretty good detail. So yeah, I would say that a WWI trench could be seen from space no problem.
Can the remains be seen today?
With the “naked eye” or not?
I don’t think it would be possible to see them without very powerful magnification.
With the “naked eye”, obviously - I know I can see my house from Google Earth. So if I went up in the Space Shuttle, or on the Moon, in 1918 or so, would I see anything different? (Assume I had taken some pictures up there in 1910 for comparison.)
Eye characteristics and everyday life
That’s about 30 to 60 meters at a distance of 100 km.
Trenches weren’t that wide, but you might pick them up as darker lines against green vegetation when you include the dirt thrown out of the holes to make the trenches.
Taking 100 km as the lower boundary of outer space, and “the ability to resolve a spatial pattern separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc” as normal visual acuity, I calculate that the smallest object a person would be able to resolve at that distance would be about 14.5 meters wide. Now how wide were the trenches?
Space Shuttle - probably (almost certainly) not. Moon - no way.
Those high resolution photos of your house that you see on Google Earth are from a plane flying overhead, not from satellites.
We were thinking about large trenched areas - battlefields, in other words, not just individual trenches. I know some trench systems were very large and expansive - I’d imagine there would be large previous-fields that were now brown dirt, at any rate. Mud.
Whoops, I made a mistake. That should be about 30 meters wide, which is more in line with Squink’s answer anyway.
Based on these figures, I would guess that some major World War I battlefields were large and long-lasting enough to have been visible to the naked eye from low earth orbit, but I think you’d really have to know what you were looking for.
Yeah, looking at some pictures of the Earth from space, a whole lot of it is indeed brown.
There’s a common phrase, “…seen from space…” as well as “…seen from outer space…” and they are so poorly defined as to be useless.
How far away do you want to be?
For a 3rd grader, the shuttle is in space–even outer space.
For an astronomer, you might need to be quite a bit farther.
What does the bf consider “space?” Once you decide that, you can figger out if you can see an object of x dimension at y distance.
In certain places and/or under the right conditions, certainly. But not in general.
For instance, I’m currently regularly travelling back and forth on the Eurostar and, with an interest in history and archaeology, have been curious to see whether any remains are visible en route - the train runs north-south up the eastern edge of the Somme battlefield. Despite having a good idea where the trench systems were and using good maps, I’ve yet to be convinced that anything is now visible along this cross-section of the front. There are about half a dozen of the smaller (postwar) graveyards to be seen, but otherwise nothing. And that’s someone looking who wasn’t expecting to see more than a few “lumps and bumps” in the fields.
Someone walking the same territory on foot might very well be able to pick out stuff, but any surviving features in that area must be fairly subtle.
Well, yeah … Most of the world was black and white back then. And the bits that were colour were pretty grainy.
Too subtle for me to see in the area south of Montauban, via Google.
Sorry to deviate, but I’ve never used Google Earth. Does anyone know if they use rectified images?
I believe that those often aren’t satellite photos but photos taken from aeroplanes. The BBC talked to one such pilot who works for the Ordinance Survey recently.
Yeah, and no sound, either. People either wrote letters to each other, read newspapers, or waited for those title cards to come up after they spoke.
About 6-10 ft wide, and about 8-12 ft deep, judging from most of the photos I’ve seen- there’s usually enough room to fix the bayonet to a rifle and still be able to move along the trench or climb over the top.
An SMLE or Mauser 98 with a bayonet fixed comes out at about 6’ in overall length, which is very unwieldy in a trench; soldiers going on trench raids used to prefer either just the bayonet (18" long for the Pattern '07 bayonet used by the British, and quite nasty in its own right), handguns (especially the .455 Webley and the Mauser C96), sawn-off shotguns (very popular with ANZAC troops, I’m told), and also entrenching tools with sharpened edges.
In short, there’s not a lot of room in the trenches, so I doubt individual trenches would be visible from space- the the trench system as a whole (stretching as it did from Switzerland to the English Channel) was quite wide (certainly more than 20m or so), and would be visible from orbit if you had some kind of Sopwith Space Shuttle to potter around in, avoiding orbital Archie barrages and wisecracking with Biggles, Algy, Ginger, and Bertie… 
Later on, after they invented sound, it turned out that a lot of people back then sounded like Blair Underwood when they read letters. 
More recently, it’s also been discovered that President Ulysses S. Grant had an e-mail address; President@anachronism.com.
Why yes, I did shamelessly steal that from Duckman, why do you ask?