this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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I mean, that is pretty arbitrary. The reason the divisor is that specific constant is because we already had meters before we knew the speed of light.
Then it's lucky the numbers line up as well as they do, no?
One light year is 9.4607379e+15 meters, so there’s a power of 10 that could give us a unit of length close to 94 cm. That would not be as arbitrary.
But fuck me if we discover the speed of light in a vacuum has not been constant along the history of the universe, the c would be an awful base for cosmic distance, or very long term science.
But don’t worry, humanity doesn’t look like it will exist long enough to do very long term science.
Yes and no. Humanity is doing a great job at fucking itself in to extinction (along with most other megafauna species on this planet), but astrophysicists/astronomers already have to deal with the entire history of the universe to explain things.