I hope that in a billion years we will have time lapse videos of how Earth changes :-).
1E+45 photons from sun per second
1.49598E+11 distance to sun in meters
6365000 earth radius in meters
2.81229E+23 surface area of solar flux at earth orbit
1.27276E+14 surface area of earth exposed to sun
4.5257E-10 ration earth area to solar flux
4.5257E+35 photons hitting earth per second
6.49E+15 one light year in meters
1.947E+25 meters in 3 billion light years
4.76367E+51 surface are of sphere 3 billion ly across
9.50046E-17 photons per m^2 at 3B ly
1.05258E+16 m^2 per photon
57883255.23 radius in meters for mirror to reflect 1 photon/second
57883.25523 radus in km (Only 10x larger than Earth!)
Then given a reasonably competent engineer to make a descent mirror with no aberration and a good telescope on a clear night away from the city, and a good bit a patience, you could watch a replay of the last 3 billion years.
> 1 photon/second
Perhaps your eyes are better than mine...
Given sufficient resolving capability, you could theoretically zoom into that slice and see earth as it was 2x the distance in light years ago. Realistically it would be a dusty noisy mess, but there are photons coming back to earth after bouncing off in the direction of the center of our galaxy 50,000 years ago.
https://www.universetoday.com/110682/can-light-orbit-a-black...
Of course, with 3-body things get much more complicated. For a third body to pull photons out of a photo sphere, fascinating and I can imagine it happening, but I haven't seen any sources along these lines.
If you wanted more detail, you could shoot every 10,000 years, running a bit over 4 hours.
Humans would appear in this long version of the film, in the final 0.667 seconds, or the final 20 frames. The 2,000 years since Christ's death would be a blur on the final frame. All of human history for the past 10,000 years would almost fill out that frame.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would appear 3 minutes 33 seconds before the end.
The Cambrian Explosion, about 27 minutes from the end. That's the history of all multicellular life.
At one frame every 100 years, the film would run 17 days 8 hours and change.
And at a frame every decade, 300 years a seconds: 5 months 3 weeks.
YouTube sees 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. If that were to corrspond with our movie of Earth's history, you'd need 150,000 years to upload all of it.
Space is big, as you may have heard.
Time is long.
Regards plant life generally, one rather stunning realisation for me is how recent many of the now-dominant forms are.
Grass is younger than the dinosaurs. Flowering plants evolved during their reign. The major crops of the world (wheat, maize, rice) are all largely human-engineered, through artificial selection over the past few thousand years.
There's a lot of competition in the primary-producer niche.
Ididntdothis, we won't do that :)
Granted the persistence of humans provides quite a bit more, and implies the survival of (some) culture as well, which might matter more.
I’ve seen this claim before. Where does it come from?
Humans have 23† pairs of chromosomes covering 21 thousand genes; bananas have 11 pairs, triplets, or quads†† covering 36 thousand.
† Usually, but there is a surprisingly high frequency of different chromosome counts
†† I only found out about triploid and tetraploid chromosomes today, don’t expect me to know anything
If you count the exome, which is not highly conserved because it doesn't play much of a role that we know of other than coiling, it's more like 1%. So "50% of our DNA" is not accurate, it's our genes.