I think it's based on the mountain from the old Paul Bunyan/Pecos Bill era stories. The mountain was so tall it took a man 7 days to see it's top, but 7 men could see it in a day. It seems obvious that the more eyes or devices there are to do the looking, the faster you can see something. I would imagine that if we got everyone on Earth to look in the same direction at once, we could see things that haven't even happened yet.
And that's why they won't let me teach science classes.