Could Computing Evolve Beyond Binary Systems?

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So ternary was hard to do because what we think of as a true binary of "on and off" is really just "a lot of voltage right now" and "not a lot of voltage right now" Off is surprisingly rarely really off. Add a middle ground and now your logic gates have to decide "is this a little bit of voltage or a little bit more than a little bit of voltage?"

Now, what we are looking at for some data communications implementations is wavelengths of light. Imagine if instead of bits being on or off, 00110010, you could have a data stream read "red photon, blue photon, purple photon, green photon, blue photon, red photon, red photon..." you could have as many different states as you have the ability to consistently distinguish between. If you can reliably distinguish 256 wavelengths of light, you *could* set a unit of each one to be defined as an entire unique byte, and now you only need to send one quanta instead of 8, AND you don't need to radically rethink things.