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thesparkstoday at 3:52 AM2 repliesview on HN

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


Replies

BSTRhinotoday at 4:04 AM

Less latency in multiplayer games or Zoom calls. Because light can travel around the Earth 7 times in one second, that means one roundtrip to a server on the other side of the world must take ~140 ms (1/7th of a second) which is a timescale you are able to feel. That's lag in multiplayer games. I'm constantly amazed that the reason why multiplayer client-side prediction strategies like rollback netcode exist is because light is slow enough on a human scale that we actually have to architect around it. Light is surprisingly slow in some ways.

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ShinyLeftPadtoday at 5:19 AM

The universe would look very different probably.