If we were far enough from earth, could we see the dinosaurs alive?

In theory, yes.

In practice, it's much harder, because the earth is so small and 65 milllion light years is a long distance. For perspective, all the visible stars in the night sky are within about 1,000 light years of us. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years away. If some aliens (or wormhole travelers) want to see dinosaurs, they're going to need a big telescope. We can barely even resolve planets in our own galaxy, and I don't think there is a single known extragalactic exoplanet, but I could be wrong.

But let's not reality get in the way of our adventure, after all, we've already assumed wormholes exist. So how big does this telescope need to be? Astronomy is hard, and gets harder the further away you look, because you need bigger and bigger telescopes to get the same resolution. We can use the lens resolution equation to find an approximate size for the lens.

  Angular resolution = 1.22 * Wavelength / Lens Diameter

So pick a wavelength in the visible spectrum- how about 500 nanometers since that's right at the transition between blue and green, and a distance of 65 million light years. The angular resolution to resolve the earth would be:

 Earth Radius/Distance = 1.22 * Wavelength / Lens Diameter

Solving for the lens diameter gives about 5.8x1010 meters, which is about a third of the distance to the sun. This is big- this lens would fill up about half of Mercury's orbit.

But you wanted to see dinosaurs, not just the earth. If you want to resolve a dinosaur as one pixel or so, then we use the same equation again, but put in the size of a dinosaur (maybe 10 meters?) instead of the earth radius. This lens needs to be 4.4 light years in diameter- where once again I am surprised at the neat tidbits Wolfram has built in, like the length of an adult triceratops.

Anyway, you're going to run into a problem here because when you start putting a lot of mass in one spot space starts to curve a lot, and eventually it's going to collapse into a black hole. For something with the density of glass, which is about 2.5 grams/cc, you're going to hit this point fairly quickly. In fact, a ball of glass 14 light minutes in radius will have enough concentrated mass to collapse into a black hole.

Tough luck.

/r/askscience Thread