@badastro Phil Plait doubtlessly knows all this, so this is very much a "yes, and..."

Those of us who are amateur astronomers can guess just how extreme the size needed must be, even without knowing the exact numbers. We look at, say, Mars, and even with a big telescope (by amateur standards, that is -- let's say 20 inches or 0.5 meters in diameter), we're doing well to see Earth-continent-sized regions of the planet as distinct entities, and then mostly because of color contrast, not specific surface details. Under some very specific conditions, you can see smaller things, but again only by virtue of contrast. The smallest thing you can see on Mars with large amateur gear is Olympus Mons (and it's not recognizable as a mountain, just as a differently colored dot), which is roughly (in linear dimensions) the size of France.

That's for a planet a few light-*minutes* away, just to see things at best on the scale of an extremely large mountain. For millions of light years, and things on the scale of a T. rex, you realize you have to scale things up by an almost unfathomable amount even before you reach for the calculator.