I’m sure you already know this, but information can also travel a large distance in one hop, like when I look up at night and see a star. Or if someone 100 years ago took a picture of a star, and I look at the picture now, information has traveled 110 years and 10 light-years in just two hops.
But anyway, your discussion seems reasonable AFAICT for the case you’re thinking of.
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.
I’m sure you already know this, but information can also travel a large distance in one hop, like when I look up at night and see a star. Or if someone 100 years ago took a picture of a star, and I look at the picture now, information has traveled 110 years and 10 light-years in just two hops.
But anyway, your discussion seems reasonable AFAICT for the case you’re thinking of.
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.