Thanks for the answers guys, but I still don’t really understand how sound can go at the speed of light, and IMO I think it took a lot longer than we think.
Don’t believe me? Imagine we have no advanced tech that we have today, and across world voice calls don’t exist. Imagine how fucking difficult it would be to make the sound of your voice go at light speed across Earth.
For example imagine you’re at a park with your friend and across world vc’s don’t exist. You’re speaking to each other through the pipe with the two cups at each end, and you want to invent a way to communicate across the world
The fact they did it is awesome. It sounds impossible. And at the time I have no doubt the majority of the world thought it was impossible. But we always think it’s impossible, until it’s invented.
OP below
I always thought that the sound travels at the speed of light but then it hit me that it’s not light, it’s sound, so I had to post this.
OP above
Edit: It’s technically still sound though right? Just converted into something else.
Just because it’s converted into a different form doesn’t mean it’s not sound. It’s just sound in a different form, or it wouldn’t be sound at the other end.
Who was the first person to convert sound to the speed of light?
Edit2: I still think there’s something you’re not telling me guys 🤔😂
Edit3: to the few haters who downvoted my reply to the comment when I said ‘no shit’ when someone compared this to paper travelling at the speed of light, get a brain. Sound doesn’t weigh anything.
Edit4: u/mitchrsmert fr? If sound has mass how can it travel at the speed of light?
In: 627
First, as others point out you are converting your voice into a digital signal comprised of ones and zeroes. In the case of a cell phone, you do have some delay from non-optical cables, such as copper wires, radio signal, etc.
Once you get to the “main” part of the journey, those digital packets that simulate your voice traverse optical cable and travel at nearly the speed of light. The speed of light is insanely fast, nearly 300 million meters per second.
The circumference of the Earth is about 40 million meters, but typically you don’t traverse more than half of that. So you might have your digital voice travel upwards of 20 million meters. Over optical cables, that journey takes less than 1/10 of a second (less than 100 ms).
So even if you add the latency from non-optical transmission, you’re looking at probably 200-300 ms lag *at most*. Humans typically can’t perceive latencies of 100 ms and even 200-300 is barely perceptible, and in the case of a phone call is probably not noticable.
If you read about can latency when we used satellites for transatlantic communication, you’ll see that they definitely had noticeable latency. Isn’t the internet wonderful?
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