Hypothetically: (ping question)

iLostMyXbox21 · February 2, 2019

So hypothetically, if I were playing an online game on pluto, and internet from earth could reach that far, how high would my ping be? I’m asking just so I’ll know, but IF the connection could reach, what would my ping be?

Fasauceome · February 2, 2019

The fastest connection to that distance takes several ~~minutes~~ hours, and ping is in milliseconds, so take regular ping and throw a heaping helping of zeroes at the end

jj9987 · February 2, 2019

Okay, so, let's assume best case scenario that the data moves at the speed of light, for convenience let's round it to 300 000 km per second.

Pluto is 7.5 billion kilometers away (that's 7 500 000 000).

Light would travel that in 25000 seconds, which is about 416 minutes. That's 25 million milliseconds.

BobVonBob · February 2, 2019

About 5 hours 30 minutes, give or take 8 minutes depending on where Earth is in its rotation. The connection would also probably drop in the winter since that would be when Pluto is behind the Sun, at least with where Pluto currently is in its orbit. Overall, a ping of about 20 million.

Edit: BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Ping is a round trip, so it would actually be about 11 hours, or about 40 million ms ping.

Edit 2: AND I'M JUST GETTING STARTED

Pluto has an elliptical orbit, or at least more elliptical than the other planets, so it would be between 8 hours 20 minutes and 13 hours 40 minutes for a round trip, also give or take those 8 minutes.

February 2, 2019

Depends on what kind of connection you'd use.

A hypothetical copper cable? Fibre? Radio waves?

Let's go with fibre optic for example. The speed of light in fibre optic cable is 31% slower than 299,792,46 km/s. Let's take 200,000 km/s to make calculations easier. The distance between Earth and Pluto amounts to 7,5 billion kilometres at the farthest. Which means that your hypothetical ping from Pluto to a server on Earth and back to Pluto would have to travel 15 billion kilometres at the speed of 200k km/s - that's 75 000 seconds. 1250 minutes. 20 hours and 50 minutes. And that's with a hypothetical fibre optic connection.

In the best case scenario, you're still limited to c - the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299,792,458 metres per second. If you'd hypothetically go above that, physics would start breaking in funny and often unpredictable ways.