Light is slow, actually

[beschizza]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/18/light-is-slow-actually.html

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[CanadianBeaver]

“Space, says the introduction to The Hitchhiker’s Guide is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely. Mind-bogglingly big it is.”

[KathyPartdeux]

Traveling outside the solar system? I’m just trying to travel outside the US and that’s been difficult enough.

[LDoBe]

After playing ~2600 hours of Elite Dangerous, I have to agree, light is pretty slow. Hell even going several hundred times C is pretty slow at times.

[davide405]

Fascinating video, and I did learn that the oft cited figure for Mars is a best-case scenario.

Off topic:
There must be some metadata in the embedded video, because BoingBoing’s ad vendor served me up a face full of non-English language ads to obscure the content.

[raines]

@KathyPartdeux

I’m just trying to travel outside the US and that’s been difficult enough.

It’s the distance between gates, amirite?

[Brainspore]

[GulliverFoyle]

[randywalters]

The fact that the speed of light is so profoundly slow – compared to the overall scale of things – is something I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around. It’s just bizarre.

I have more than a suspicion that the entities running the simulation are long overdue for a processor upgrade.

[Simon_Clift]

It is nice to see the Earth and Moon to scale, and Mars and Earth 20x scale.

… necessary reference …

They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.

[karl_jones]

[The speed of light] is, of course, why humans aren’t moving out of this solar system any time soon.

True enough, but I prefer to blame mortality: we are stuck in this solar system because of our puny life spans.

[AnthonyC]

Also: here on Earth humans once managed to build and maintain empires where it took weeks to months to get a round-trip message to the outer edges. A light speed delay, at least within the solar system, isn’t an insurmountable barrier.