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Posted by dmitrybrant 10 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!
400 points | 160 commentspage 5
joelthelion 5 hours ago|
Why are the lamp posts blinking in a weird way?
mark_something 4 hours ago|
I think that light coming from different parts of the lamp arrives at different times. So if the lamp turns off, you see the part closest to you go black first.
thesparks 8 hours ago||
What if the speed of light was 2c instead of c? Would that change anything for us?
BSTRhino 8 hours ago||
Less latency in multiplayer games or Zoom calls. Because light can travel around the Earth 7 times in one second, that means one roundtrip to a server on the other side of the world must take ~140 ms (1/7th of a second) which is a timescale you are able to feel. That's lag in multiplayer games. I'm constantly amazed that the reason why multiplayer client-side prediction strategies like rollback netcode exist is because light is slow enough on a human scale that we actually have to architect around it. Light is surprisingly slow in some ways.
ShinyLeftPad 7 hours ago||
The universe would look very different probably.
throwaway893257 3 hours ago||
This looks oddly similar to a psychedelic trip.
nephihaha 2 hours ago||
The most obvious thing would be that we and other creatures would have sight as a secondary sense. If light went that slowly we would have to develop other ways of navigating the world, such as echolocation, smell or touch.
emmelaich 7 hours ago||
So weird, after visiting, my mouse icon disappears!
dares2573 9 hours ago||
Then we will never be able to see aliens again.
ligarota 2 hours ago||
"What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

Website loads in few ms

Nahh it's not

skulk 10 hours ago||
in the real world if the speed of light was 5 km, we'd probably be a lot smaller!
teiferer 6 hours ago||
Um, speed of light and gravity are so fundamentally linked that nothing you see would look like that. Just changing speed of light but not adjusting anything else makes little sense.
sim04ful 4 hours ago|
Now I'm curious what the evolutionary ramifications of this would be.
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