Originally Posted by JGordon

The answer is yes, but in asking this question I believe you are seriously underestimating the number of images something like this would produce. I believe the formula for this is (W*L)^C, where W=width of image in pixels, L=length of image in pixels, and C=number of possible colors.

So for a 1000x1000 pixel image with only 16 colors (the number of colors that some of the first color computers were capable of, you would do (1000*1000)^16. This gives you 1.0x10^96. That's a 1 followed by 96 zeroes.

By way of comparison, the universe is ~13.7 billion years old. If you were to look at 1 image per second, the universe has had only ~4.3x10^17 seconds since it began. So you would need multiple billions of times of the age of the universe to look at all of the images created even if you were only using 16 colors. I don't think you'd ever be able to write a computer program that could sort through that kind of information.

But theoretically, yes it would create pictures identical to past and future events. It would, however, also create an image of me murdering my mother with a gun at the moment I was born, or Hitler standing proudly over the corpse of George Washington. So you'd never be able to tell what were 'real' photos and which just happened to resemble possible events.