It’s interesting that from the star’s perspective the light is immediately hitting the objects, yes those objects might have 200 million years of random chance and (possibly) free will determining their positions when the light hits

I'm not a physicist, but I believe that's the exact insight that led to special relativity. It goes something like: If your moving at 1,000kmh next to a jet moving at 1,100kmh then the jet is moving at 100kmh relative to you. Eventually people realized those wasn't the case with light. No matter how fast the observer is, light still moves at 299,792,458m/s. Einstein figured out that if the speed of light is fixed despite relative motion, then time must slow down as you move faster. So from the perspective of a photon no time has passed since its departure.

Time does not pass for photons. So yes, that is exactly what GP is saying.

There's also a different thing that GP might be hinting at, which is that by convention we assume that the speed of light is the same in all directions, but there are other conventions we can use as long as the round-trip speed of light agrees with that which we've measured (and yes, we can only ever measure the round-trip speed of light, FYI). Another convention is that all the light we see takes zero time to get to us but the light we emit goes out at half the speed one would expect with the standard convention (known as the Einstein synchronization convention). So instead of "light we see from Alpha Centauri is 4 years old" or "we see Alpha Centauri as it was 4 years ago" we can say that we see it as it is right now, but this is not a very commonly used convention.

I'd really highly recommend the Uncle Albert series of novels by Russell Stannard:

https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/visiting-uncle-albert/

The intuition you can develop about special and general relativity from these books is pretty amazing!

Yep, this is what he saying, but this is not what photon does. Photon must perform different amount of wave cycles to reach 1 meter or 1 trillion metters. These cycles can be counted.

Except that's not from the frame of reference of the photon. At the speed of light, the Lorentz transform shows that 1) Time stops completely, 2) All distances in the direction of travel collapse to zero. So in a very real sense, "from the photons perspective" it never exists and the point it is emitted from and the point it is absorbed at, are the same point.

Experiencing time and having mass are linked in a very deep way. Objects that experience time, i.e. have some kind of state evolution, must have mass, this is how we know the neutrino has mass even though it's smaller than we can measure, because we measure them oscillating between the various flavours of nutrinos.

This is also how the Higgs mechanism gives rise to "rest mass" in most particles, by constantly exchanging weak hypercharge with them. This oscillation back and forth gives them mass.

I.e., that bit they refer to as the photosphere, effectively the radiating 'surface' of the sun, is the source of the solar photons that strike us here. That trip takes about 8 minutes.

You are totally right!

I knew HN would nit my nit, well done!

The photons were created a long time ago in the core. It takes thousand of years for it to reach the surface, and THEN it takes 8 minutes to get to us.

Photons are not created on the surface but in the core where the environment has the higher pressure needed for the physical creation of the photon and the photon takes about that long to work its way out.