the.com/signal transmission
one thing whispers, another listens, and physics fights you the whole way there.
means the process of sending information encoded as a physical signal, electrical, optical, or radio, from a source to a receiver across some medium.
from the concept scaled with the telegraph in the 1830s, where Morse proved you could turn distance into dots and dashes, and it became a science in 1948 when Claude Shannon quantified exactly how much noise a message could survive.
speed limitnothing beats light, not even your wifi
real enemynot distance, its noise and attenuation
digital trickerrors get caught by redundant math, not luck
space lagmars messages take up to 24 minutes one way
for instance
voyager 1 downlink — still phoning home from 15 billion miles, 1977 to now
transatlantic cable 1858 — first telegraph signal crossed the ocean in minutes, not weeks
fiber optic backbone — undersea cables carry over 99 percent of intercontinental internet