There’s a way for you to look back in time. The way you do that is by looking farther out into space. This is possible and the reason has to do with the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This is a law. The speed at which information can travel is restricted by this limit. We see things because light gets reflected off objects, travel to our eyes, which then process that data into an image formed in the back of our brain. So if I stood about a foot in front of you, you see the light reflecting off my face arriving at your eyes at the speed of light. No matter how insignificant the distance is, that light has to travel the distance between us to reach your eyes, and that takes time. So you see me not as I am now, but as I was about 1 billionth of a second ago.

If we take this analogy and apply it to distant objects far far far out in space, we would experience a similar consequence. Cosmic objects many light years away have to travel extremely long distances before the light they emit reaches our telescopes/eyes. The longer the distance, the more time it takes, hence we see that object as it was farther back in time. Though we may not be able to look back at our own past within the planet Earth, we can certainly peer back in time to the far reaches of the cosmos, and even to the instant of the creation of space and time.

It may be very likely that a distant species in a galaxy many light years away are looking at our planet not as it is in 2011, but perhaps as the dinosaurs were roaming the Earth or as the Ancient Greeks were building their civilization.

**UPDATE: BREAKTHROUGH. At the particle physics laboratory CERN in Europe, experiments have shown neutrinos traveling about 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light! The experiment has been repeated and conducted carefully, but confirmation results from other labs repeating the experiment are still being awaited before making a more definitive claim. If this proves to be true, it would be a HUGE discovery for science and may perhaps change some of the ways we think about modern physics, which relied on the postulate of light’s universal speed limit.

VIDEO: How To Look Back in Time, Moonbows, and Ice Volcanoes (Short)