Something I was reading this morning made me think about duration and vision again. Astronomers have found Himiko, a “massive and mysterious gas blob” (The Age) that is 12.9 billion light years away from earth. A distance which means that what they see is a part of the universe when it was just 800 million years old. (New Scientist)
“ ‘The farther out we look into space, the farther we go back in time,’ said author Masami Ouchi of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private research centre, who led a team of researchers from Japan, Britain and the United States. ‘Astronomers previously had identified extended gas blobs of a similar type seen at a distance when our universe was two to three billion years old.’ ” (The Age)
It is awe inspiring to imagine this image, which has been in transmission between a distant mass and the eyes at the end of a telescope for almost 13 billion years. It's vision that takes billions of years in duration.
The implication, which is obvious at a huge scale like this, is that every time we look at something, we see it in the past. So it seems that the duration of vision is not only a result of the delay between reception and cognition, but also to do with the speed of light (as well as, possibly, the intermediary apparatus used to capture it).
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