I mean it's not that mindboggling. Tape delays in live broadcasts are common. I live near enough our NFL stadium and watching football games I know when a scoring drive happens because I can hear the fireworks before it happens on screen.
Also the moon is on a ~2 second delay compared to our observations of it on Earth.
The speed limit of information has much bigger consequences though. The sun could literally vanish and our orbit not be affected for the eight minutes it takes for the information to reach us.
In essence it hasn't happened yet to us for those eight minutes in every measureable sense.
To me the difference here is that there are (currently) no humans on Mars to actually observe anything happening. The first time any human in the solar system learns of what is happening on Mars is (at the moment) 11 minutes after the event takes place. So in that case...does the delay really matter? All of humanity learns about what happened at the same time 11 minutes later regardless, so it's sort of like it's happening live. Anyways, it's fun to think about.
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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '21
I mean it's not that mindboggling. Tape delays in live broadcasts are common. I live near enough our NFL stadium and watching football games I know when a scoring drive happens because I can hear the fireworks before it happens on screen.
Also the moon is on a ~2 second delay compared to our observations of it on Earth.