Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?

skulk

in the real world if the speed of light was 5 km, we'd probably be a lot smaller!

dragonfax

Well I'm not a physicist, but we all travel through time at the speed of light. With a much smaller speed of light, I think relativistic speeds would be much easier to achieve. I.e. you could age noticeably differently than your family on a solo car drive to get groceries.

bananaflag

Btw there is also this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Slower_Speed_of_Light

wging

See also https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ , a 2012 game that did the same thing

gryfft

It would be nice to add controls for mobile.

scotty79

Next step, taking into account effects of acceleration according to general relativity.

tomjakubowski

MIT Game Lab made a take on this back in 2012. https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

tristanj

Velocity raptor is a free game that accurately simulates the effects of special relativity. It slows down the speed of light to 3m/s and you solve puzzles as a cute dinosaur. https://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html There is also a helpful FAQ which explains all the strange things happening, such as length contraction, time dilation, and color shifting: https://testtubegames.com/srel101.html My favorite levels are #18 (which demonstrates time dilation), #26 (which demonstrates space warping), and #42 (which demonstrates retarded time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retarded_time ). All the levels are unlocked and you can skip to any level.

fuzzfactor

Can't see your website but I would think everything you see would have so much latency it would be worse than today's internet with dialup using 2GB of RAM on an Atom CPU ;)

zrail

The first few Discworld books explore this a little bit too. I think pterry dropped the concept after that, I don't really remember it later in the series.

the-mitr

In the Three Body Problem Trilogy by Liu Cixin some of the more advanced civilisations have the ability to change the speed of light locally with very interesting consequences for the that local space

dares2573

Then we will never be able to see aliens again.

aghilmort

this is really great

thesparks

What if the speed of light was 2c instead of c? Would that change anything for us?

nekusar

Would mean the biomolecular computers would be faster than electronics. Electronics wouldnt work at all.

rootusrootus

Whenever I think about light speed being fast, I imagine myself standing at the edge of the solar system and watching a hypothetical photon travel from the Sun to the Earth and taking 8 minutes. Suddenly it doesn't feel like light is really all that fast except at human scales. 5 km/h would be fascinating though.

koolala

Which parts of this were ideas you came up with yourself?

TZubiri

cool idea, but being vibe coded doesn't inspire much confidence on whether the math or author subject understanding is correct. As such I wouldn't base my understanding on the subject on this as-is. Which is a shame as, if it was actually hand coded I might actually use this to learn relativity, something which would otherwise be out of my reach. A note on source code, I think committing the actual javascript code and such is a mistake at the level of committing compiled binaries to a repo. It's more useful, correct and genuine to upload the prompts used, which are the source code that generates the target code, and upon which the author and others can study and modify the program. That said, as an idea, it reminds me of Kay's dynabook example ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800193.1971922 ) : "Here look." Her fingers started to fly on the DynaBook's keyboard, altering the program she had·written several weeks before .. You justact as though the ship is pointed towards the sun and add speed!· As she spoke her ship started to fall, but not towards the sun. Oh no!..·" If we want to move closer to that ideal, of interactive education, I don't think we can just apply the old forms and use the LLM to aid one in being the allmighty program-creator, the LLM needs to be placed at the service of the user. I can't help but seeing the usage of LLMs to generate code as misplacing this power. It's as if a new powerful metal were discovered and smiths can only think about making hammers and foundries and casts with that metal, considering it too valuable to actually use it for the products being smithed.

buttercraft

This only works on a desktop? Is there any way to interact with it on a phone?

aadyachinubhai

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!