4 ms·

Click the button in the bottom right and it moves at light speed. Which, it turns out is really, really slow. Big revelation to me!

• mrpdaemon 7y ago
  Actually it is really really fast relative to speeds we are familiar with in our lives. Space is just so big that it makes the speed of light (c) feel slow.
  • kijin 7y ago
    Even on Earth, c is slow and it's pretty inconvenient. We wouldn't have to worry too much about which edge location a resource is served from if intercontinental latencies were on the order of 100 microseconds instead of 100 milliseconds.
  • bdeshi 7y ago
    this video[1] by Dr James O'Donoghue really made me stop and consider how slow the fastest possible speed is, relative to the awesome vastness of space. I mean how many people have actually paused for 8:20 mins and thought, "wow that's a really long time for light to arrive from that star that seems like a stone's throw away!" [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9D5tSbxudQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9D5tSbxudQ
    • snowwrestler 7y ago
      Here's my favorite version of the same idea; it's a bit more immersive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BmXK1eRo0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BmXK1eRo0Q It usually only takes about 15 secs for people to go "wow, that doesn't seem very fast at all."