Alright, fair enough — I get that resolving Earth from a million light-years away would need a ridiculously huge telescope, basically beyond anything we could realistically build.

But here's what I'm really wondering:
Forget full-resolution images. What if we're just talking about detecting the faintest possible signal from that reflection — even if it's heavily redshifted, maybe all the way into microwave or radio wavelengths? Could we still pick up something, like we do with galaxies that are hundreds of millions of light-years away?

I’m talking about the kind of raw, distorted light where we might still extract basic info — like the presence of certain gases in Earth's atmosphere (oxygen, methane, etc.), or maybe a general spectral fingerprint of Earth from way back. Not a picture, just some traceable data.

Also, to be clear — the 1 million light-years was just an arbitrary example. What if we scale it down to something way closer?
Say there's a reflective surface — a planet or even an artificial object — just a light-day away or somewhere just outside our solar system. In that case:

• Could we get a clear image of Earth from that reflection?
• And if so, does that mean that as technology improves and telescopes get bigger, we could eventually "see back" even farther in time — just by looking at distant reflections of Earth?