The Ocean Floor Is Covered in This

How do we send signals across, say, the Pacific Ocean? Surely we don't have fiber optic cables running across thousands of miles of open ocean, but we do. Engineers for telecom companies, which to be honest, I haven't historically spent much time thinking about, have linked the continents of the world by doing this incredible set of things. They load up their ships with thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cable wound up in reels. They start burying the cable on land near the coastline at a place called a landing site in New Jersey, Florida, Oregon, Alaska, California, Hawaii, you name it. Then a ship will use an underwater plow to dig a trench about a meter under the ocean floor. It'll pull the fiber optic cable through that trench and then bury the cable. When these cables need maintenance and repair, occasionally due to the wrath of angry sea creatures, they use underwater robots. Talk about infrastructural feats of humanity. Now, how does light traveling through a fiber become information? Now, if we were living in the 1840s, you would send short flashes of light for dots and long dashes, and someone at the other end would write it all down and translate. A Morse code of light, if you will. But we live in a post-modern muggle era. So, we have electronics and computer chips to do the flashing and blinking and translating for us. So, you can send information using light without controlling the direction. All you need is a radio tower and everyone nearby can tune in and rock out to some foo fighters. But if you can confine and guide the light, you can make the signal go much farther. This is how the various servers of the internet send information back and forth. They use fibers made of extremely pure glass, sometimes as thin as the width of a human hair. These are called optical fibers or fiber optics. We're confining light here with a clear material. It's cool. Light travels about twothirds the speed it would in the vacuum of space, but still about 200,000 km per