4 ms·
It takes <67 ms for light to travel half the circumferance of earth. From my location in Europe to Chicago it takes 26 ms. Cables aren't laid out straight, but
by tapland 7y ago
It takes <67 ms for light to travel half the circumferance of earth. From my location in Europe to Chicago it takes 26 ms.
Cables aren't laid out straight, but network infrastructure adds a majority of the cross continental latency.
But gaming from the moon would not at all be feasible using light. I wonder how we could solve this for future space communications.
- imInGoodCompany 7y agoShort answer is: we can't :/ the speed of causality is not something we can "solve".
- Retric 7y agoWhen a server sends some state to a player, they player can’t get a response back without a round trip. The same is true in reverse. Further, the path through fiber optical cables is not the strait nor are fiber optic cables a vacuum. Using lasers through a vacuum tube strait from the user to a server on the other side of the planet might hit 134ms of light lag which is already a significant issue for many games. PS: LEO satellite constellations like Starlink have a lower theoretical latency around the world than fiber as the signals are traveling in space, but a longer path. Significantly beating that is going to require magic aka a useful fundamental change in the laws of physics as we know them.