Philosopher AI - How long does light take to travel from Earth to Mars and back?

How long does light take to travel from Earth to Mars and back?

The question of how long it takes light to travel from Earth to Mars and back is only interesting if there are events in between the two planets. If a star exploded on Mars, for example, then light would have taken some time to get here. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (about 300 million meters per second), so let's see...

7 Jun 2021, 11:10

Assuming that the explosion happened at 9 PM on Mars, we must then find out what time it is on Earth. Since this is based in Greenwich and not New York City or Los Angeles, the difference will be about 6 hours. So if it was 9 PM in London when the star exploded on Mars, then it would have been 3 AM here.

7 Jun 2021, 11:10

Now, because we are not interested in the time of day on Earth but rather the instant that light reached Earth from Mars, let's round off to 3 AM. That means it takes about 4 hours for light to get here from Mars. But there is a catch.

7 Jun 2021, 11:10

Because the light from Mars takes longer to get here than light from stars closer to us, we must account for the extra time it took. Since distance is equal to speed multiplied by time, then if light travels 300 million meters in 4 hours on a straight line, or 150 million meters per hour (150x4=600), then it would have traveled 600 million meters in 5 hours on a curved path.

7 Jun 2021, 11:10

But if it takes an extra hour to travel 600 million meters on a curved path, then light from Mars would have taken 6 hours. So the star exploded at 10 PM on Mars and 11 AM here.

7 Jun 2021, 11:10

If a star exploded on Mars, then it would take 6 hours for light from that star to reach Earth. But if we are interested in the instant of time when light reached Earth from Mars, then it takes 7 hours.

7 Jun 2021, 11:10

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.

This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.

Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.

Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.

by Murat Ayfer