dumbass is a nice name for a speed unit.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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And as we know, dumbasses are quick.
Nothing travels faster than stupidity.
MFW I get a ticket for going 5.374x10^-8^ dumbasses in a 4.633x10^-8^ dumbasses zone
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Both meters and seconds are units of Earth specific measures of space and time. Pretty sure at a cosmic scale god would give fuckall about how we measure and name our shit
If a god existed and gave a so much of a shit about our masturbatory habits he’d be at least tangentially aware of what the fuck a meter was.
For a second i thought you were calling the metric system masturbatory and then i remembered that christians really do think god watches them jork it. Kinky
There's a Family Guy episode referencing that.
It's neat to think about what units an alien civilization would come up with independently. Like the Plank Distance is fundamental to physics, so they'd probably have something for that.
Degrees Celsius is based on freezing and boiling point of water, so if they came up with a base 10 numbering system and water is key to their biology, then they'd probably come up with that.
A calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1L of water by 1C. A liter is a volume of a cube 0.1m on each side. The meter was originally ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and north pole (and subsequent redefinitions are based on that original measurement). They wouldn't come up with the meter, and they wouldn't come up with liters or calories, either.
Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.
Hopefully they'd come up with a better numbering system than base 10. Base 10 is the worst part of metric tbh.
Every base is base 10 dumdum
0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21...
e: starting at 0 to not shame programmers.
That's true. It should really be referenced by the number before 10 (e.g. Base 9 for 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10).
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Also "in a vacuum" would be assumed, since almost the entire universe is a vacuum.
i've just figured out how the religious universe ends. some physicist explains to their god that a lot of their assumptions were based on something being in a vacuum, and then their god says "what vacuum? you mean all that sparse hydrogen?" so the physicist says "let's find out what happens when you have a real vacuum" and then the universe ends at the speed of dumbassery.
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1 Dumbass = 299 792 458 m/s
Thanks, God. We'll spend the next 3000 years obsessing over that.
that is the linear rate at which dumbassery expands, yes. also light, but that's because as yet tachyons remain hypothetical/fictional and i figure dumbassyons would travel faster than light were it possible.
like how sometimes you can look at someone or something and think "some dumbass is going to do some dumbass shit here soon" even though the dumbassery has not yet begun.
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There are various systems of units where select physical constants are set to 1. A handy comparison chart is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units?wprov=sfla1
It turns out you can't harmonize all the physical constants. Some will necessarily end up as some non-round number.
Most of them have speed of light = 1, but some have it as 1/α where α is the fine-structure constant (α = e² / 4πε₀ħc ≈ 0.007297)
I understand nothing I've just read but I'm glad you science folk have fun and funding.
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Anyone come up with a good measure of distance that makes the speed of light a nice round number? I like the metric system, but the meter feels pretty arbitrary. We could do better!
Not arbitrary.
Since 2019, the meter has been defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyper-fine transition frequency of caesium.
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.
we already had meters before we knew the speed of light.
It's true.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the metric system.
Genesis 1:3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
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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.
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299792458? That's amazing; I've got the same combination on my luggage!
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You are correctly trying to say it's well defined, but you are complaining about the wrong comment. You should check the meaning of "arbitrary" again.
Anyway, it's not entirely arbitrary because it was created to represent a "round" fraction of the Earth's circumference that is similar to the length of a person's arms. But it deviated from that too, so it's subjective how much that counts.
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c is pretty round (universal symbol for the speed of light)
aside from that, nothing. as science and maths are mere attempts at describing the universe all our units are arbitrary, decided to be the way they are purely because you just need to pick something to be your reference point.
at no point has a true non-artificial unit emerged, there is no constant size of anything that could aid in that (one contestant for that title could be the planck lenght but that'ss just incredibly inconvenient to use. "honey could you pelase move the couch 6,25 × 1034 planck lengths to the left? [1m])
Proton masses, the distance light travels in a vacuum in a certain time, and cesium oscillation times are quite constant.
proton masses are rather small - inconvenient
the distance light travels at a certain time - then it'll just be based on our artificial units of time
cesium oscillation i don't know much about but from what i quickly read it's also about keeping time, 1s to be precise, which is still an arbitrary unit
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In many advanced physics fields, they use an arbitrary unit system in which c=1, making equations easier to write down. E=m
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The meter isn't really arbitrary, even when you ignore the redefinition posted by @jumperalex. It was originally defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from Earth's pole to the equator, which is a pretty reasonable basis to use by 1791 standards.
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The actual answer is
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because the universe had to pick a finite number and it probably doesnt use meters as an internal measurement ruler for scaling so it's an arbitrary large random number to us.
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Why did it have to pick a finite number? Because it has finite lifespan and resources for actualization. This forces hard speed limit.
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The speed of light has nothing to do with light it's a shitty name that makes understanding its true nature needlessly complex.
In actuality all massless waves/particles including photons, gravitational waves, and neutrinos will move at the speed of light, because thats as fast as anything massless can go. Its a universal speed limit for any real mass-particle, which is ultimately governed by Planck's constant and the symmetry preservation of Penrose spacetime diagrams. Its the speed of causality a universal framerate limit that tells us the universe flows/computes through discrete microstates with ultimate precision limit bounds.
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It doesn’t make sense to me to read it as a single unit of dumbass. I think it’s supposed to say “1, dumbass”. God admonishing the person.
Speed of light in a true vacuum.
Speed of light through any non-vacuum decreases.
The speed of causality remains the same.
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Because the CPU runs at 300GHz.
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