With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with different photons all around carrying "how this location looked X years ago". "All" you have to do to know what happened is find the right photon to see whatever it is you want to see.
https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
"pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from you to remote servers and back again."
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
Storing data as acoustic waves gave a higher capacity in practice, as propagation is slower thus fitting a larger number of symbol per time unit.
I understand that we'd have to account for the movement of objects, of course, but with computers, seems like a small hurdle...
By Greg Egan, so highly recommended.
It's a beautiful nightmare, isn't it?
> whether two spatially separated events occur at the same time – is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame.
But What I don’t understand about this is why is “time” framed as observer based? In my mind, the events do happen at the same time and just are unable to be observed as such. I feel like time is a figment of our imagination, it’s just a measurement. In my pea brain time makes sense more as a constant and the other things are something else that impacts the latency of observance