Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?

A Slower Speed of Light (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40332586 - May 2024 (59 comments)

What if we could reduce the speed of light - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309517 - March 2021 (1 comment)

A Slower Speed of Light (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169262 - May 2018 (15 comments)

A Slower Speed of Light - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731749 - Nov 2012 (105 comments)

"A Slower Speed of Light" Game Trailer - MIT Game Lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714779 - Oct 2012 (1 comment)

When I say data rates are way below 1 Gbps, it's because commonly you've got two things going on, a UART serial bridge from operator to flight controller board (same idea as what is implemented in RF with ExpressLRS, TBS Crossfire or similar), this is at most a Mbps or two. Then a possible live video feed over IP which will be easily under 50 Mbps.

The only thing a little bit out of the ordinary about them is that they're often bidirectional single strand optics with the prism built in, and tx/rx on different wavelengths (like 1550 and 1570, or 1550 and 1610, or whatever). Basically same thing that somebody lighting a very low cost metro dark fiber circuit might do to use only 1 strand for a gigabit or 10 Gbps link.

Just a thought experiment for you guys: imagine a bacteria that survives inside humans. It doesn't even know what a human is. For the bacteria, its entire world is simply the environment in which it lives. It doesn't know that we are living beings actively trying to maintain ourselves and survive.

Now, suppose a harmful bacteria enters our body, makes us sick, and we take medicine that kills all of them. From the bacteria's perspective, it could look like a natural disaster or some unexplained event in which they all suddenly get wiped out. They have no idea that a living being called a human actively tried to eliminate them using something called medicine, which was engineered specifically to kill them.

Similarly, what if our world, or nature itself, is part of some higher-level entity that we simply exist within? What if the reason for our deaths, natural calamities, and other events is something completely beyond our perception? Whatever we do, we may never be able to understand what is actually happening at that level, just as bacteria may never be able to understand that humans exist.

One thing that could potentially support this idea is self-regulation. We see self-regulating systems throughout nature, and these patterns seem to repeat at different scales. We ourselves are self-regulating organisms, and nature also has countless cycles and mechanisms that regulate themselves.

Maybe these patterns continue at scales we cannot perceive. We can observe certain things at the scale of humans, but we still don't fully understand what happens at the nano scale or on the scale of the universe. Perhaps there are higher levels of organization and self-regulation that we simply don't have the ability to perceive yet.