Question of great distance?

Question

Say if someone was in another Galaxy recording a video to put on youtube.Would we be able to watch it here in this Galaxy?

Answer 1

When it got here, I suppose, but at the speed of light it would still take MANY Years because other galaxies are pretty darn far away. Not in a person's lifetime, I don't believe.

The closest alternate galaxy to us is the Canis Major dwarf galaxy (about 25000 light years away from our solar system). I don't know anyone that old. Our species is what? 10,000 years old?

Answer 2

Light travels at a speed of 186,282 miles per second.  Nothing has ever been observed to go faster than light in vacuo; in fact, Einstein's theory of relativity states that nothing CAN go faster than light.  If we were to find some particle that did so, our understanding of relativity would go out the window, but for now, it's looking pretty solid.

So, assuming that someone in the Andromeda Galaxy - the Milky Way's nearest neighbor, if you don't count the Magellanic Clouds - managed to record a YouTube video and posted it on his home planet, you have to take into account the distance of Andromeda from the Milky Way, which is approximately 2.5 million light-years.  This means that if our hypothetical friend Kl'nyath a'Nolgu were to beam the YouTube video towards the Milky Way, it would still take 2.5 million light-years to reach you, by which time you would be quite dead.

Answer 3

No. The signal would be too weak to read from such a distance. And of course we wouldn't receive it until millions of years after it was transmitted, because even radio waves cannot go fast enough to cover such distances quickly.

Answer 4

No, Granted your uploading to the internet and using phone lines, cable, microwaves and satellite to move information around the world its not of sufficient power to be picked up from any distance in deep space. The form of communication preferred by our alien friends is through the use of quantum mechanics. Do a search through Yahoo or Google to see that this indeed allows for information to travel much faster than the speed of light. Einstien called it "spooky action at a distance".

Answer 5

Assuming they sent it here and the information in the signal was uploaded to YouTube, yes. However, it would take a long time for the information to get here, depending on how far away the other galaxy is. For example, if someone in the Andromeda Galaxy was taking a video of the Milky Way, they would see the Milky Way as it was 2.5 million years in the past, and it would take an additional 2.5 million years for the signal containing the video file to get here across that distance, assuming we could even pick it up at that point given that it would have thinned out into an enormously wide area of space (the initial signal would have to be very strong).

Answer 6

Not you personally.With strong enough equipment it is possible but from so far away it would probably take centuries to get here. Just think...the light from the sun..which is pretty much right there...takes 8 minutes to get to us.

Answer 7

It is thought that gravitational waves propagate at infinite velocity, in which case if they were to somehow send the video encoded in such a wave, and we were able to detect, isolate and decode it, then yes.

I doubt many aliens know of YouTube though, and we have no way of detecting gravitational waves as of yet.

Answer 8

No the signal would be much too week.

Answer 9

They would have to broadcast the video using some sort of electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves. We could pick these up in our galaxy but it would take millions of years before the video got to us. Of course, they might have recorded the video a million years ago and sent it then.