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

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

#211

Post by thwarted »

Terr_ wrote: post #140
santiagobasulto wrote: post #90

Some 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,…

In terms of comparisons to human lifespan, I think this one is interesting: If you can somehow accelerate/decelerate at a constant human-acceptable 1G, time dilation means almost anywhere is reachable in a human-lifetime. That coincidence(?) could easily become false if we are accustomed to lower accelerations or lesser lifespans.

This is a really interesting video that explores this topic, pointing out that at near light speeds, the entire universe becomes accessible in a single human lifetime.

The Overview Effekt: Time Dilation Visualized

https://youtu.be/8FT-oz9aZU4

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

#212

Post by [deleted] »

TZubiri wrote: post #42

cool idea, but being vibe coded doesn't inspire much confidence on whether the math or author subject understanding is correct. As such I wouldn't base my understanding on the subject on this as-is. Which is a shame as, if it was actually hand coded I might actually use this to learn relativity, something which would otherwise be out of my reach. A note on source code, I think committing the actual javascript code an…

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by chungy »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #193
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but IPv6 only these days. I never set up dynamic DNS.

Can you explain for dummies how... a normal person with a normal web browser should access this?

Have an IPv6 connection.

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

#214

Post by nvalis »

eyeundersand wrote: post #186

Sidenote but this page took control of my cursor, and would not relinquish it even after I navigated away! This is on firefox.

Same for me in firefox. Even with the website closed I get a popup of "dmitrybrant.com controls your cursor" from time to time or if i hover over the top of the URL bar. Visiting the website again and explicitely pressing Esc, then closing the page worked to get rid of the message.

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

#215

Post by apothegm »

dinfinity wrote: post #177
HDBaseT wrote: post #44

Earlier 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.

Still not as unbelievably slow as signals in our body. If you hook up a fiber connection from a button to an LED, then stub your toe on the button, the fiber can be thousands of kilometers long and you'll still (via the LED) see that you've stubbed your toe before you feel it. This is of course assuming instant activation, a direct connection and no additional latency from network hardware.

The LED will display it first, but will the signal reach your visual centers first? And how about the time for your brain to process that signal and make you consciously aware of the visual vs. the way the pain signal is forwarded to conscious processes?

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

#217

Post by hodder »

MPSimmons wrote: post #216

I assume someone has considered whether the apparent expansion of the universe is spaghettification as we enter an event horizon?

Cosmic expansion happens uniformly rather than through a local gravitational pull.

In physics, "we" use the raisin bread analogy where when you bake the bread, the raisins are all getting uniformly distant from each other with no central point of expansion and no obvious sign of pulling in any specific direction such as would be the case for a gravitational effect.

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

#218

Post by sinuhe69 »

Terr_ wrote: post #140
santiagobasulto wrote: post #90

Some 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,…

In terms of comparisons to human lifespan, I think this one is interesting: If you can somehow accelerate/decelerate at a constant human-acceptable 1G, time dilation means almost anywhere is reachable in a human-lifetime. That coincidence(?) could easily become false if we are accustomed to lower accelerations or lesser lifespans.

Then I guess you will need millions tones of perfect mass to light converter like Astrophage just to get to the neighbor. The universe is simply too big to comprehend.

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

#219

Post by dinfinity »

apothegm wrote: post #215
dinfinity wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not as unbelievably slow as signals in our body. If you hook up a fiber connection from a button to an LED, then stub your toe on the button, the fiber can be thousands of kilometers long and you'll still (via the LED) see that you've stubbed your toe before you feel it. This is of course assuming instant activation, a direct connection and no additional latency from network hardware.

The LED will display it first, but will the signal reach your visual centers first? And how about the time for your brain to process that signal and make you consciously aware of the visual vs. the way the pain signal is forwarded to conscious processes?

Fair issues, but none of them impact the fundamental point. I'm not trying to make a point on touch vs. visual sensing or with regard to consciousness (time shifting of visual input is a thing, which could be impactful here, see "chronostasis").

The point is to quickly and accessibly convey an intuitive understanding of the propagation speed of information in biological circuits vs. the max speed of information in our universe (to our current knowledge at least) and in our technology.

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

#220

Post by nayuki »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #90

Some 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,…

Pedantic note: The symbol for the speed of light constant is c (italic lowercase c). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

Roman lowercase c is the metric prefix centi-. Roman uppercase C is the metric unit coulomb.

Italic uppercase C has various uses such as: a variable denoting capacitance in electrical engineering; an undetermined constant of integration in calculus.

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