ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Modulation sphere

Imagine you are standing in a playground and you want to play catch with your friends. Your friends are scattered all around the playground, running and playing. But you want to make sure they can hear you when you yell, "catch!" So you stand on a hill in the playground and shout as loud as you can.

In the same way, when we want to send information like a song or a video from one place to another place very far away, we need to make sure the information can be heard loud and clear. This is where a modulation sphere comes in.

A modulation sphere is like a big bubble made up of sound waves that we use to send information like music or videos to faraway places. We first take the information we want to send and change it into electrical signals. We then use these electrical signals to create sound waves that we send out as a big bubble or sphere. The sphere gets bigger and bigger as it moves away from us, just like a real bubble.

But how does the information get inside the sphere? Imagine the sphere is made up of lots and lots of tiny little balls bouncing around like a bouncy ball pit. And each of these little balls is carrying a teeny, tiny piece of the information we want to send. When the sphere reaches its destination, the little balls open up and release their pieces of information that get put back together like a puzzle. And just like that, our song or video or message has traveled a very long way and been heard loud and clear thanks to the modulation sphere!