If Pluto at minimum is 2.66 million miles away and light travels at 670,616,629 miles per hour, would the light reflect that of the dinosaurs? Or some other past event of earth? (in the likely case my mathematics are off)
Yeah
How big do you think our solar system is?
The light reflected would be about 10 hours ago or so.
Pluto is, on average, something like 5 light-hours away from the Earth.
Meaning, if you looked back at the Earth right now with a sufficiently large telescope, you’d see me eating a chicken quesadilla for dinner.
Pluto is, at a minimum (it varies a lot) 2.66 billion miles away from earth. Light travels at 670,616,629 miles per hour. So, if we divide 2.66 * 10^9 by 670 * 10^6, we get 4 light-hours. I’d estimate the range to be anywhere from 4 to 6, depending on where in their orbits both planets are.
So, no dinosaurs.
You got the speed of light right, but Pluto is (at its closest) 2.67 billion miles from Earth, not 2.66 million.
Which means it would take light about 4 hours to get from Earth to Pluto. Far too short to get anywhere close to the time of the dinosaurs.
you guys should’ve seen my math scores on the SAT.
I’m also curious as to how you calculated the dinosaur bit: 2.66 million miles is about 14 light-seconds.
Now that’s some* serious* young earth creationism!
If it was possible to make a telescope with that kind of resolution on an object that only reflects light, you’d still have to be at least 65 million light-years away. That’s about 3.82E20 miles away, putting you in another galaxy like say M85, though that’s not really far enough.
So would you then see stuff that happened 4 hours ago?
Nah, you could just be looking into a mirror floating in space a mere 33 million light years away 
I started to write a science fiction story when I was much younger that worked on basically this premise: A black hole was capturing and bending light back at us, such that with the (technologically advanced) telescopes, we could always look back at a point a specfic time in our past – in the case of the story, about 30 years, as the resolution to a “cold-case” murder.
At some point I got around to thinking about how many actual photons could make a 30-year round trip to effectively a single point in the sky, and decided it wasn’t plausible even with near-magical telescopes.
Yes, although it would be awfully dim. Ask yourself what percentage of light leaving Earth (in all directions, remember) would pass through a (say) 32" telescope sight on a planet a couple billion miles away. Or for that matter, hit the planet at all.
You probably wouldn’t have enough photons to see an actual image; consider that Earth-based telescopes can’t really make out Pluto as anything other than just a disk. Earth is bigger, and Pluto’s atmosphere is probably in that convenient “hunks of stuff” phase, but it wouldn’t be enough to make a difference.
The movie The Invisible Ray (1936) begins with this very premise.
Boris Karloff somehow knows that a meteorite landed about 1,000,000 years ago and so he uses Earth’s light reflected from the Andromeda Galaxy to pinpoint the exact location. (At the time the movie was made, the Andromeda Galaxy was thought to be 500,000 light years away).
(Just as an aside, don’t confuse this with yet another movie titled “The Invisible Ray”. That particular movie was made in 1920 and maybe it dealt with … nah that’s another topic). 
Yep. Similarly: It so happens that a light-nanosecond is almost exactly 1 foot (30 cm). So when I look at my computer screen, I’m seeing how it looked about two billionths of a second ago. And when I look at the moon, I see how it looked about two seconds ago. And when I look at Pluto, I see how it looked about four hours. It really is that simple.
Tell that to the Clam King - L Ron Hubbard used this exact plot device in Battlefield Earth - OK, it was only a couple light years, I think, but the definition they managed to get on the destruction of Psychlo was - well, it was magical!
Forget about how many photons make the trip, or how far asway you’d have to be – there’s no way you could possibly construict a telescope with enough resolution to see things on earth from Pluto, let alone a nearby star. It’s hard enough for low-orbit spy satellites to be able to make out details on earth. And nobody uses Geostationary satellites for that purpose.
When the New York Sun started running its nonsense stories about John Herschel observing creatures on the Moon through his telescope, Edgar Allan oe pointed out how it would be impossible using the magnification claimed for Herschel’s telescope (which was beyond those really achievable in his day). Shortly thereafter, George Biddle Airy, director of the Greenwich observatory, derived the limiting resolution of a telescope. It turns out that, even fior a perfect telescope, there’s a limit to the resolution imposed by the size of the lens itself, and that the wave nature of light makes it impossible to see anything finer (it all blurs together at finer resolution). There are practical limits to how big you can make your lens or aperture, and even tricks like synthetic aperture can’t be extended indefinitely. You’re not going to be able to see home movies of the earth just by lookinmg at old photons far away.
(By the way, in The Invisible Ray they were only looking at astronomical events – they saw a meteor crash onto an offly cloudless Earth. Even in that film, nobody claimed to be able to look in on human scale doings on earth.)
Anyone know what the theoretical resolution of a giant interferometry array would be? I remember reading one of those speculative fact articles in something like OMNI (back before it because new-age claptrap), where they speculated on what you could see with an interferometry array say, the size of Earth’s orbit. Or more realistically, a big array of telescopes maybe 1000 miles across.
NASA thinks they can image planets around other stars well enough to perhaps see large features like continents just with some scopes we could build in the next 30 years or so. What’s the theoretical limit?
Well, that explains my ghosting problem. Obviously, I need to start sitting even closer to the screen.
Well, except for the meaningless of nonlocal simultaneity
If looking through a powerful telescope on Pluto would one see the dinosaurs?
In a word NO. Such a powerfol telescope hasn’t been built yet, if ever!
When did dinos get to Pluto?
Some light from the sun would reflect off the hypothetical dinos but would be so dim it could not be seen from earth IF you had a telescope to do the job.
Don’t understand the question.
IMHO This should have been posted in MPSIMS
Maybe you couldn’t use it to solve a cold murder, but there are actually astronomers looking for black holes by looking for faint “stars” with exactly the same spectrum as the Sun.
spingears, no offense, but it’s perhaps a bit pointless to say that you don’t understand a question and that it should have been in MPSIMS, after seventeen other people who did understand the question have already posted GQ answers to it.