And then there are the people who come up with these ideas. Ideas like this, that could be dismissed out of hand as being impractical for any number of reasons. But thanks to people like Von Eshleman who sat down and did the math we know roughly what we need to achieve to make these crazy ideas real.

A solar gravitational lens is still in impractical territory, but pieces like blocking out the sun's light, precise spacecraft positioning, and now high performance engines are developing. Who knows, if one of our other telescopes finds a planet that we really really want a closer look at maybe we'll get an actual image of it showing continents and oceans in our lifetimes.