Yes, no matter where we look, we are always looking to the past.
We can only see any object or anything only if light from that object reaches our eyes. The light coming from any source that you can see must have reached your eye. If it didn’t hit your eyeball, you wouldn’t see it. You must understand the details involved how we see the objects.
Light has a finite speed of 299,792,458 m/s or 3*108 m/s. Since, light has a finite speed, it takes a finite time to reach a finite distance. So, there is always a time-lapse whenever light travels from any object to the observer's eyes. When you are looking at a train approaching you on the tracks about 1 km away, you are actually looking at where it was 3.3 micro seconds (approximate) earlier. And hence by the time you perceive the train as 1 km away from you, it would have actually come closer to you.
If light left a distant star and traveled all the way to you, did it take time to get there? Yes, it did. If it’s far enough, the time becomes significant. It may even take a thousand of years to reach your eyes. That light left years ago from the position where the star was and what was going on with it. The energy traveled in all directions at the speed of light till you happened to be in its way. Your brain interprets the energy and paints a picture based on that information. Because the information left the star years ago, it came from its previous position. This makes us see the past. The closer the object, the less in the past you will see.
The events that generated that light happened as long ago as the number of Light Years away the object is. If you want to really have something out of the box, think about this:
Most light we see in the universe is emitted from a star. The light generated by the nuclear process a star emits is from deep inside the star so, it takes a thousand of years to reach its outer surface to be emitted into space for us to eventually see. All the celestial objects are thousands of miles or even lights years from our earth. So, all the objects we see in the sky even through telescope are the past positions or the energy emitted from them in the past.
But if someone from other planets see our planet they will see our past, but they can't see the dinosaurs roaming unless they have an unbelievable technology. It is because of the energy emitted from the reflected object is far less than the light from a source. Thus, there will be only be change in the position of the objects what we see but not the live things happening inside the planet or any celestial objects. Thanks to Albert Einstein for his awesome theory of relativity.
Yes, we are all time travelers and doing it every day!!!
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