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Posted by dmitrybrant 9 hours ago

Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?(rivendell.dmitrybrant.com)
I've always wanted to make a visualization where the speed of light was scaled down to human speeds, so that we could intuit relativistic effects with everyday objects. Here is the first version of it!
356 points | 152 commentspage 3
janandonly 4 hours ago||
I think the old SciFi classic "Zone of Thought" and the other book which name escapes me now explorer this idea, although not 5Km/h.

To stop a 'blight' in the universe, some natural laws have to be changed wherever it starts to spread, is the story premise if memory serves me.

chantepierre 4 hours ago||
The third volume of « Three body problem » and its fan-written and author-approved sequel deal with those local physical constants changes !
messe 4 hours ago||
"A Fire Upon the Deep" and "a Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge
seanmcdirmid 4 hours ago||
Deepness in the Sky "programmer-archaeologist" will never come to pass because of LLMs :(

The Forever War series changes the speed of light at the end to mess with the mortals, not to prevent any calamity however.

linzhangrun 3 hours ago||
The speed of light, wave-particle duality, and so on, always make me feel that the universe also has a "computing power"
mjdv 3 hours ago||
Feature request: I'd like to ride the ferris wheel.
koolala 7 hours ago||
Which parts of this were ideas you came up with yourself?
Crowberry 6 hours ago|
It’s Astra ui and graphics. I recognise it after only having seen 3 examples…
rx_tx 4 hours ago||
Very related Scott Manley video that discusses and simulates the same effects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_g9EeT233Q
aadyachinubhai 6 hours ago||
Awesome, at 5 km/h it feels like I'm in a black hole. Time stops at the speed up light if I'm not wrong!
aquafox 6 hours ago||
FWIW, the best traveling speed is 147000km/h, because the Doppler effect makes a red light appear green. ;)
zkmon 3 hours ago||
Light doesn't have a "speed" as in the usual meaning of the word "speed". Talking about speed requires defining spatial distances and time durations, which are in turn defined or created by the phenomenon of light.

Light doesn't "travel". It's just an exchange of entangled photons creating the concept of time duration and distance.

adamtulinius 3 hours ago|
So how do you explain that light can be slowed down?
zkmon 2 hours ago||
The same way as we talk about it's speed and travel etc - using higher level human perceptions.
Vishal_Max 6 hours ago|
This 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 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.

lolakutty 5 hours ago||
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..

Vishal_Max 5 hours ago||
That is also very much possible, we can never know. Or maybe we can in the future. Only time can tell
barrenko 5 hours ago|||
Cogito ergo sum is still the only "barrier" for self-awareness, aka real knowledge.
gigisfndr 2 hours ago||
Woah your reply feels very much like Deja Vu to me - my OP on X from months ago

Gitanjali GulveSehgal @gigi_sehgal Jun 22 Replying to @fermatslibrary Contrarian Takes: 1. We live in a “box” governed by the compute we are capable of. Perhaps the rockets are out there in a form we cannot observe. ( borrowing from Quantum Ruliad ). E.g What do bacteria think of us? Do we “exist” for them? Are we infrastructure or entities to them? Do they think we do not exist? We cannot see Neutrinos streaming thru our bodies but atleast we managed to figure out that they existed. Who knows what else exists that our senses and technology cannot perceive or reverse engineer existence of? 2. Perhaps they have remote observation capability, 3. Perhaps its a simulation we are in a space alien overlord’s lab 4. Perhaps the Men in Black wiped our memory each time we see them 5. What were those drones flying over DC? 6. Perhaps they are already here

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