We can still view these as travelling through many layers—the light waves have to propagate through many lightyears of mostly-empty space (and it could attenuate or hit things along the way). The photo has to last many years (and could randomly degrade a little or be destroyed at any moment along the way).
What makes it feel like “one hop” intuitively is that the information is basically-perfectly conserved at each “step” through spacetime, and there’s in a symmetry in how the information is represented.
We can still view these as travelling through many layers—the light waves have to propagate through many lightyears of mostly-empty space (and it could attenuate or hit things along the way). The photo has to last many years (and could randomly degrade a little or be destroyed at any moment along the way).
What makes it feel like “one hop” intuitively is that the information is basically-perfectly conserved at each “step” through spacetime, and there’s in a symmetry in how the information is represented.