How does light store and transfer HUGE amount of data yet it’s still the fastest thing in the universe?

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I’m not sure if I worded my question correctly, but let me try to explain more.

If we use a giant telescope to look at another planet 10 light years away from us, we would be looking at how it was 10 years ago. The thing I don’t understand is how does light store and also transfer all the information about that planet (or all the “data” that ends up in our eyes) and yet it’s still the fastest thing.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

How does it “store” the data? It doesn’t. The light is just in transit for 10 years.

How does it carry such a huge amount of data? There is a huge amount of light.

So a billion billion billion photons leave a sun and hit a planet and bounce off towards us.

The photons travel for 10 years.

10 years later, we collect the photons in a telescope. Each photon bounced off a different part of the planet, and so gives us a tiny bit of information about that part of the planet. Add together a billion billion billion tiny bits of information, and you get a lot of information.

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