What do distant observers see when they look at Earth?
Briefly

What do distant observers see when they look at Earth?
"When you view anything at all in the Universe, you're not seeing it precisely as it is right now: at the moment you experience seeing it. The speed of light, even though it's the fastest speed that any signal can travel throughout the Universe, is still finite. No matter how close or distant an object is, you're only seeing it as it was a particular amount of time ago: at the moment the now-arriving light was emitted from the object you're observing."
"Every observer in the Universe, so long as they haven't spent a large amount of time traveling close to the speed of light (or in an extraordinarily large gravitational field, such as just outside a black hole's event horizon), will perceive "right now" as the same instant in time relative to the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years after that creation event."
Light propagates at a finite speed, so any visual observation captures the source as it was when the detected photons were emitted. For nearby objects the light-travel delay is often negligible, but increasing distance corresponds to looking deeper back in time toward the Big Bang. Observers who have not undergone extreme relativistic travel or experienced strong gravitational time dilation will share a common "right now" roughly 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. A distant view of Earth therefore presents past states of the planet. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is currently about 168.7 AU from Earth and lies beyond the Solar System's termination shock.
Read at Big Think
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