Too bad that it does not seem to work on mobile. I did not find any way to move around (add arrow buttons? Are we supposed to move around?) and if I double tap I change the direction in which I am looking but not very predictably. Maybe my phone is too slow.
Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
61–70 of 189 posts
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#62This is awesome. I always think about this. As humans, we are very limited in what we can perceive and experience. A higher form of entity could have a completely different way of viewing nature and the world. 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 d…
Cogito ergo sum is still the only "barrier" for self-awareness, aka real knowledge.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#63Feels like W goes back (instead of forwards like in an FPS), and S goes forward. Is that intended or just my keyboard being weird?
EDIT: ah, by setting 'Speed of light' parameter to 40km/hr I find it a bit more intuitive
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speed of light is unbelievably slow, not even as a cosmic scale, but on earth. We cannot play competitive multiplayer games globally, without 300ms ping. I dream of a world playing Black Ops 2 on a original PS3 in 2026 getting into a lobby because latency is low.
How do you arrive at 300ms?
For a city that is far away from anywhere:
https://wondernetwork.com/pings/Auckland
Your real world latency is going to be worse.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#65This is awesome. I always think about this. As humans, we are very limited in what we can perceive and experience. A higher form of entity could have a completely different way of viewing nature and the world. 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 d…
Of course, this is what the end of Men in Black shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec
But let me tell you another possibility. What if there is no nature, but just our perception of it.
Yea, tree falling in the forest and all that...stated more explicitly..
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#66Feels like W goes back (instead of forwards like in an FPS), and S goes forward. Is that intended or just my keyboard being weird? EDIT: ah, by setting 'Speed of light' parameter to 40km/hr I find it a bit more intuitive
You're not controlling an FPS character walking, you're controlling the 'throttle' of how fast you're moving fwd or backward. Holding it down increases speed.
Forward means light is hitting your eyes faster, making it look like the distance the light had to cross is condensed, meaning it looks further away.
Moving backwards slights the light hitting your eyes, to the point where you're moving away from the light, so everything goes black.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#67This is awesome. I always think about this. As humans, we are very limited in what we can perceive and experience. A higher form of entity could have a completely different way of viewing nature and the world. 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 d…
Of course, this is what the end of Men in Black shows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec But let me tell you another possibility. What if there is no nature, but just our perception of it. Yea, tree falling in the forest and all that...stated more explicitly..
That is also very much possible, we can never know. Or maybe we can in the future. Only time can tell
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#68Too bad that it does not seem to work on mobile. I did not find any way to move around (add arrow buttons? Are we supposed to move around?) and if I double tap I change the direction in which I am looking but not very predictably. Maybe my phone is too slow.
There is a mobile version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49638121
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the photons aren't travelling in a direct path down the fiber like water down a pipe. They're bouncing off the interior walls of it at like a 45 degree angle billions/trillions of times before it reaches the other end of the cable. I know there are many other mundane technologies that can be described in sci-fi-ish way, but for some reason I'm particularly amazed by fiber transmitters being compact and cheap enough…
Not just that but your average russian or ukrainian used expendable munition UAV that uses a singlemode fiber spool uses the cheapest and most mundane of fiber transceivers. There's no requirement for data rates above 1 Gbps, so ordinary SFP optics (not SFP+ or anything) are used, and the distances involved means it works fine with a extended range 1550nm to 1610nm reach thing that can nominally handle 40 to 80 km of…
You can get a pretty good 1080p60 video at only 6mbps. Depends on how well the sender is encoding I guess, but it shouldn't be too much more than that.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#70Hmm, by some bug my back arrow first slows me down from approaching c, but then will sudddenly spead me back up (while going backwards), so I get stuck in a dark world. (Firefox on Linux).
Edit, maybe it's because the speed shift is so coarse I cross past 0 km/h from back to forwards and reverse too fast...
Other than this, very very nice. Love this kind of thing for developing intuiting outside the normal range in which we experience the laws of Physics. Well done.