Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the speed of light — or more accurately, the maximum velocity that information can travel in a vacuum — were much faster. Let’s say it was a thousand times faster. In that case light would be able to travel the diameter of our Earth’s orbit around the Sun not in 1000 seconds, but in a single second.<\/p>\n
Suppose further that somehow this difference did not alter gravity, chemistry, biology, or the various other physical properties that govern our lives at terrestrial scale. I realize that this may be inconsistent with the laws of physics as we know them, but go with me here.<\/p>\n
What effect would that change in the speed of light have on our daily lives? For example, if terrestrial telecommunications systems could effectively be instantaneous, would things be radically different?<\/p>\n
In particular, what effect would that possibility of instantaneous communication have on our world’s economy, on its culture? What effect would it have on our lives in general?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the speed of light — or more accurately, the maximum velocity that information can travel in a vacuum — were much faster. Let’s say it was a thousand times faster. In that case light would be able to travel the diameter of our Earth’s orbit around the … Continue reading “If light were faster”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19436"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19437,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19436\/revisions\/19437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}