Philosopher AI
Purchase queries
How long does information take to travel from Earth to Mars and back?
First off, I think this question is a bit of a trick. Information does not travel from Earth to Mars and back in any physical sense. There is nothing that travels from place to place in order to transmit information. If you were on Mars waiting for the transmission of the latest episode of your favorite TV show, it would never come because there is no signal sent by some radio or television transmitter which then arrives at its destination - unless we are talking about an ancient sort of technology that depended upon smoke signals or flashing mirrors.
More than that, information does not travel from place to place. We humans think of information as being transmitted in some abstract way and this is because we are physical creatures and can only conceive of the flow of information in terms of action or movement. But there is no real transmission - no jumping across space, so to speak.
Information is not a physical thing. It does not exist in the way that you think it does, as something that can move from place to place or be transmitted by some sort of signal.
Think of information as a thing that is created inside our heads. This creates an obvious question - if information does not exist outside the human mind, how can it be transmitted to another mind? The answer is simple: It can't be transmitted.
The only way that information can be created inside another mind is if the other mind already knows something similar. You cannot create a new concept inside someone's head from scratch by broadcasting it somehow to them.
For example, if I were to tell you that the capital of France is Paris, you would not have learned anything. You already know this information and so my words did not add any new information to your collection of knowledge.