Why is everything black when I turn around at high velocity?
Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
191–200 of 218 posts
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#192Why is everything black when I turn around at high velocity?
Because the doppler effect shifts all light coming from that direction to infrared, which your eyes can't see.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#193Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you arrive at 300ms?
light is 186k miles per second, the other side of the globe is 12.5k miles away - so 67 ms / 130ms+ round trip in optimum conditions. Add more for network hops and consider that fiber is not quite as fast as vacuum. 300ms feels extremely optimistic coming from my perspective of someone living on an island in SE Asia
Simply send your cable through the center of the earth and boom, latency reduced by ~1/2. Remember me when you make billions of $ from my idea.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#195Sidenote but this page took control of my cursor, and would not relinquish it even after I navigated away! This is on firefox.
Sounds like an extraordinary bug worth reporting to Firefox! A page is not supposed be able to hold the cursor when it is not in the foreground.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#196Some time ago I had the following shower thought: "the Speed of Light is pretty slow" How i got there: The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big. Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C,…
On YT there is a video of a flight through the solar system at the speed of light starting at the Sun. It's a pretty boring video. You see very little movement and change over time. After 8 minutes Earth slowly passes by. After 44 minutes you reach Jupiter and the video ends.
If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system) https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsys... has a button at the bottom right for 'C' which scrolls to the right at the speed of light on that scale.
https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/SS/SolarSystemModel.php?scale=10... lets you make scale model calculations (useful if you're building one). The default model scale has the speed of light at 67.06 mi/h (107.9 km/h). This puts Earth out at 14.16 miles and Alpha Centauri at 2,581,000 miles away.
I personally like the "Sun is 5 inches" scale because that puts the speed of light at 323.1 ft/h (10x garden snail speed) which is 1.46 miles/day... because that puts Alpha Centauri at 2,354 miles away... which is a conceivable distance.
If you go to a scale of the sun being 500 inches (about 110000000) and the speed of light is 6 mph, Alpha Centauri is 234,600 miles away - the distance to the moon. It also lists the scale distance to the center of the Milky Way 1,327,000,000 miles) and Andromeda (137,400,000,000 miles) which are in the unconceivable range.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#197Sidenote but this page took control of my cursor, and would not relinquish it even after I navigated away! This is on firefox.
I'm using Firefox, can't re-produce. How did you navigate away without first freeing your cursor? I just pressed escape like the browser message said to, but then obviously at that point the cursor was already free so I couldn't test whether navigating away would free it. Closing the tab with Ctrl+W does also free the cursor.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#198I don't understand movement: "W" makes me appear to move backwards, "S" makes me appear to move forwards. When I use space to stop, I move back to where I started. Is this a bug or am I just really confused?
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Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#199Some time ago I had the following shower thought: "the Speed of Light is pretty slow" How i got there: The closest major galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda, and is 2.5 million! light-years away. And this is the CLOSEST galaxy, the universe is extremely big. Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C,…
Wow…that makes sense. I’ve had the initial similar thought but never investigated further, thank you for this.
Re: Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At 99.999% C, the traveler would take ~11,000 years if we add more 9s, is it possible to reduce that number to within a human lifespan?
Yeah, it is and the math get's really counterintuitive to grasp since humans (at least me) have trouble thinking in exponential terms. If you accelerate at 1g constantly for 1y you travel 0.5 light years. You do that for 10.5 years and you reach the center of the milky way. You do that for another 4 (~14 total) years and you are in the Andromeda galaxy, and you do that for another 10 years (~24 years total) and you r…
> You do that for 10.5 years and you reach the center of the milky way
But that would be pretty pointless without taking the time to decelerate :)