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Comment by HDBaseT | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Ultimate counterevidence of an benevolent "intelligent designer"

How do you arrive at 300ms?

light is 186k miles per second, the other side of the globe is 12.5k miles away - so 67 ms / 130ms+ round trip in optimum conditions. Add more for network hops and consider that fiber is not quite as fast as vacuum.

300ms feels extremely optimistic coming from my perspective of someone living on an island in SE Asia

Simply send your cable through the center of the earth and boom, latency reduced by ~1/2. Remember me when you make billions of $ from my idea.

It'd actually be about 36% shorter :)

Can't wait for the neutrino-internet to launch once they fix the packet loss issue :)

For a city that is far away from anywhere:

https://wondernetwork.com/pings/Auckland

Your real world latency is going to be worse.

This is a great example of information taking time:

https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

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