Can the reverse be true too? i.e. if you are on the moon and can see what happens 1000km away, before someone else on earth 2000km away from that event, is that the future? Is that possible?
Can that then be extended to 27 lightyears into the future too?
The man in the moon is not really observing the future he just becomes aware of the event before the man on earth.
If it wasn't light that was being transmitted the man on the moon could warn the man on earth about what's happening before it's reaching him in the same way that people near the epicentre of an earthquake can use twitter to warn people further away before it hits:
http://recovery.doi.gov/press/us-geological-survey-twitter-e...
I think it is relative. Your argument considers time as a non relative entity and the past and present as static points in a timeline. So the same "event" is one man's past and one man's future. It depends on your space coordinates from the coordinates of the even if this is your past or present or how back in past.
Disclaimer: This is deduced logic and not scientific information.
To circle around a bit back to a hacker news favorite topic - this is exactly why high-frequency traders put their equipment in data centers as close to the action as possible. They're seeing the and trading on the future if your frame of reference is some data center in California.
Until just now, I always thought this was a silly practice. My line of reasoning was "What difference does a 30ms ping make?" I guess I hadn't thought about it too much though.
Now, after reading a comment elsewhere in this thread, which talks about how a cpu can execute six instructions in the time it takes the light from my monitor to reach my eyes, the data center thing seems a lot more reasonable.
Can the reverse be true too? i.e. if you are on the moon and can see what happens 1000km away, before someone else on earth 2000km away from that event, is that the future? Is that possible?
Can that then be extended to 27 lightyears into the future too?