Why the Speed of Light is Actually Horribly Slow

this video is made possible by brilliant start achieving your learning goals for 20% off by being one of the first two hundred to sign up at brilliant org slash real-life floor lights is about the fastest thing that you can possibly imagine think about how fast it seems when you turn on a light switch in your room and you see it instantly fill up with lights or when you shine a flashlight on something and the light immediately appears on whatever you're shining it acts it feels instant because of our scale light moves so quickly that it might as well be but when you move out beyond our scale light get slower and slower to the point where it quickly seems to more resemble a snail rather than you know light speed here's what I mean light on earth seems really really fast because earth is small light travels at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second when in a vacuum which is fast enough to completely orbit the entire earth more than seven times in a single seconds which looks like this while it's happening when you flip on a light inside of your room the light probably moves fast enough to reach across the entire room in just one 500 thousandth of a second which tamir human eyes basically feels instant this is why instant communication on the internet between any two people on the earth's surface is possible because earth is a small enough place to where light speed basically does mean the same thing as instants but that all changes drastically when we zoom out just a little far away from the earth and get out into the rest of the universe far from being instantaneous it takes light 1.25 five seconds to cover the distance between Earth in the moon which has all kinds of weird implications when the Apollo astronauts were there there was a lag in communication between them and Mission Control back on earth because a message from Mission Control would take 1.25 five seconds to arrive and then the astronauts message will take 1.25 five more seconds to come back for a total message relay time of 2.6 seconds round-trip so in the future when you're trying to communicate on Facebook or discord or whatever it is with someone living on the moon you'll have to wait at least two point six seconds after sending a message before you'd actually get a response and it's all because of the limitations and speed of light speed communication but communicating with somebody on the moon is still easy when compared with somewhere else like say on Mars which is a lot further away from us than the moon is in the future when we have colonies with thousands or even millions of people living on Mars the sheer distance away that Mars is is going to create lots of weird and interesting communication problems since Earth and Mars have different orbits around the Sun Mars varies pretty drastically in her distance away from Earth on the close end it takes light just over three minutes to cover the distance which isn't bad but on the far end it'll take 22 minutes in 24 seconds which makes instant communication impossible if you have a friend who lives on Mars and you send them a message when Mars is farthest away from Earth your message will take over 22 minutes just to get there and then whenever they get around to responding to you it'll take over 22 more minutes just to get back to you even if your friend on Mars responds immediately when they get your message it'll take about 45 minutes after you sent it before you get a response and that's the quickest response time possible so nobody should really get upset after not getting reply to for a while by a Martian this is going to become a big problem in the future and I suspect it's going to cause human civilization on Mars to gradually feel more and more isolated and separated from Earth the light just keeps getting slower and slower the further we move away from Earth the time it takes light to reach a Jupiter from Earth is anywhere between 33 to 53 minutes meaning that when NASA has a probe in orbit they have to wait for around two hours sometimes just to process information and send instructions to correct a potential navigation error meaning that Lightspeed instructions are sometimes too slow to arrive in time to fix the problem even light from the Sun takes a while to reach us here on earth generally around 8 minutes on average which looks like this in real time it's slow so slow in fact that if the Sun all of a sudden just disappeared for whatever reason we wouldn't even realize it back here on until eight minutes after it happens and just forget about trying to maintain instant communication at the outer reaches of the solar system on Pluto because it takes light over five hours to get here from Earth and keep in mind everything that we've talked about so far is just within the confines of our own solar system so light gets even slower when we get even further out the nearest other star to our Sun Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light-years away from the earth meaning yeah it would take 4.24 years for light from earth to reach it so just imagine what it would be like if we ever successfully managed to get colonists or a probe out on a planet there a single message between the colony and earth would take almost a decade to achieve because the Lightspeed message would take 4.24 years each way going back and forth to truly appreciate how insane that is if there were a human colony on a planet there right now they would only just now be hearing about news and memes from 2015 do you even remember what was going on back then Boeing had just unveiled the 737 max Obama was still the US president brexit hadn't been voted on yet everybody's favorite educational YouTube channel hadn't even been created yet and people were arguing over what color that stupid dress was it's blue and black it just is so this would be the current state of our planet that would be reaching the residents of Proxima Centauri B in the future it'll take 8 and a half years just to get a response from somebody there after you send them a message if humanity's life expectancy remains around 80 years in the future you'll only be able to share a maximum of 9 messages in your entire lifetime with somebody who lives around Proxima Centauri B and that's what the fastest form of light speed communication looks like with just the closest star to us in the universe let alone the billions and trillions of stars and planets that exist even further away from that the speed of light is slower than you think it is and it's too slow for our grander ambitions and space we just haven't really developed to the point yet where it's become a major problem for us but it will happen eventually and we need to be prepared for it the physics of lights are complicated but even though light moves slowly there's all kinds of things that you can learn by looking at it you can use the principle of parallax to learn how far away a star is or you can look at a star's luminosity to figure out how hot it is and you can learn how to do both of these things and so much more right now in the astronomy course that's offered over at brilliance it's never too early or too late in life to learn something new and what makes brilliant so special is that they help you learn the kinds of things that you were forced to and maybe struggled with when you were a kid physics calculus computer science algebra and more but they actually make it fun and approachable the feeling of achievement when you finally understand something in conceivably complicated is amazing and brilliance teaching style of breaking down big scary concepts into their smaller more intuitive chunks makes that possible to experience for everyone you can even do this on the go with their app and if you're the type of person without a lot of free time but who still wants to learn new things you can set a goal to do each of their daily challenges in those small free moments that you get best of all if you're one of the first 200 people to sign 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 2,947,727

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, speed of light, how fast is light, how fast is light speed, light speed, light speed travel, why light is slow, why light speed is slow

Id: t3XcNxsCgfY

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020