i'm not expert. i have a back yard observatory with a 12 inch and an 8 inch SCT telescopes.
there is a limit to how far information can propagate. but with wider and wider scopes we can deal with the wave properties of light and how those waves get wider and wider as you go farther away. (see the inverse square law)
so, we could probably see a human hair on the moon, but the mechanism to do so would be the size of a city like LA or something.
the best way we have to deal with that is actually interferometry. you take measurements of the light wave emitted by a source at several points along it's wave front and infer what the source would look like closer up.
it's very fuzzy but gives us pictures of some very large very far away structures in the universe.
so, maybe if we had enough telescopes pointed at the moon, we could see fine structures like that? but my feeling is that a lot of that information on that scale is just lost from the perspective of each scope, so you really need to capture all of it at a weirdly large scale.
there is a limit to how far information can propagate. but with wider and wider scopes we can deal with the wave properties of light and how those waves get wider and wider as you go farther away. (see the inverse square law)
so, we could probably see a human hair on the moon, but the mechanism to do so would be the size of a city like LA or something.
the best way we have to deal with that is actually interferometry. you take measurements of the light wave emitted by a source at several points along it's wave front and infer what the source would look like closer up.
it's very fuzzy but gives us pictures of some very large very far away structures in the universe.
so, maybe if we had enough telescopes pointed at the moon, we could see fine structures like that? but my feeling is that a lot of that information on that scale is just lost from the perspective of each scope, so you really need to capture all of it at a weirdly large scale.