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You don't need mirrors, you just need to get in front of the photons. A time machine or warp drive will do :)

Also the past is the only thing you can perceive, there effectively is no now.



Is there a science fiction universe that explores a hypothetical warp drive that lets you travel very far relatively quickly, but the travel is only possible with simultaneous backwards time travel that's proportionate to the distance traversed? So you can hop across star systems but can't do a roundtrip A -> B -> A without significantly shifting time from the point of view of A backwards (irreversibly from the point of view of the traveler).


Consider:

- I leave Earth and travel 1ly at speed c

- I arrive one year later

- An Earth telescope will see the destination as it was when I left

- It will take another year to see me arrive

So in a way that's already happening because I'm traveling quite quickly - twice as fast as it seems from Earth's perspective - and I arrive in what appears from Earth to be the past.


Relativity is so hard to wrap you head around.




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