The Limit of Everything

In 1815 during the Battle of Waterloo Nathan Rothschild had a network of messengers who could deliver news faster than anyone else.

While Napoleon’s army was losing, Rothschild’s agents were already on their way to London with the news. Rothschild knew that once the public found out about the defeat, the value of British bonds would go up.

Before the news spread, Rothschild bought a lot of bonds at a low price, while everyone else was still worried and selling. When the victory was officially confirmed, the bond prices shot up, and Rothschild made a huge profit.

Rothschild's success came from getting early information showing how important speed in communication.

But his messenger system wasn’t much faster than methods used thousands of years earlier, like couriers on horseback. In fact, it was relatively slow compared to the breakthrough that came just a few decades later with the invention of the telegraph.

The Road to Faster Communication

Before the telegraph, information could only travel as fast as people could deliver it — whether by letter, horseback or even pigeons. It was slow, unreliable, and often too late to make a real impact.

In the 1830s, everything started to shift. In the U.S., Samuel Morse developed the electric telegraph. At the same time in the U.K., Wheatstone and Cooke built their own version. Different inventors, same idea: sending messages through wires, almost instantly.

From the moment the telegraph was invented, information could travel faster than any car, plane, or human could ever hope to move.

Wires changed everything. Messages flew across cities in seconds — not days. Suddenly, the world sped up. Business, politics, life itself started moving at a new pace.

The telegraph helped create the world we know today. It was the first big step in connecting people everywhere, changing communication forever.

Then came the telephone, radio, television, satellites, and eventually the internet. Each step forward wasn’t just about innovation. It was about necessity. The need to move information faster became a key driver of progress.

Speed meant power. Faster communication enabled quicker decisions, more efficient trade, coordinated military operations, and real-time crisis management. Governments and corporations poured resources into accelerating the flow of information.

During the Cold War, the need for rapid communication reached a critical peak. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 demonstrated how delays in communication between Washington and Moscow could escalate tensions to the brink of nuclear war. In response, the U.S. and USSR established the Moscow–Washington hotline (a direct telegraph, and later, satellite-linked system) to ensure near-instantaneous communication between leaders. Faster information exchange wasn’t just convenient, it was crucial for avoiding war and keeping peace.

The faster we could share information, the faster society evolved. So we kept pushing.

And eventually, we pushed right up against a hard limit. Not a technical one. A fundamental one.

The speed of light.

The Speed of Light is the Limit

The speed of light is the ultimate barrier when it comes to how fast we can send or receive information. Whether it’s messages, data, or even light itself, everything is bound by this speed limit. In simple terms, nothing can travel faster than light, which has a speed of about 299,792 kilometers per second.

Even though light is incredibly fast, it still takes time to travel long distances. For example, light takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun. So, when we look at sunlight, we’re actually seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago!

This speed limit isn’t just about sending emails or making phone calls. It applies to anything that involves the transfer of energy or information, whether it’s a signal traveling through fiber-optic cables or even light traveling through space. Even with all our advanced technology, we can’t break this rule.

But the speed of light is more than just a limit on communication. It affects everything: how quickly we can explore space, how we understand the universe, and even how we experience events. No matter how fast we go, this speed limit is always there, holding us back.

The speed of light isn’t just a limit for technology. It’s a limit for everything. It defines how fast we can interact with the world and the universe around us. And no matter how advanced we become, we’ll never be able to go faster than light.

How the Speed of Light Affects Real-Time Communication

One of the most noticeable effects of the speed of light limit is how it directly impacts the ping or delay we experience in online communication. Ping is the time it takes for a signal to travel from your device to another device (like a server or website) and back. This delay is usually measured in milliseconds (ms).

Here’s the key: the farther away something is, the longer it takes for the signal to travel. Since signals can’t go faster than the speed of light, the distance between you and the server determines how long the ping will be.

For example, if you’re playing an online game like Counter-Strike and the server is in another country, the data has to travel a long way, so you’ll experience a longer delay.

If someone is closer to the server than you, they may have an advantage. They will experience a shorter delay, meaning they can react to events faster and see you earlier than you can see them, giving them a potential edge in gameplay.

Messages from Earth to Mars take about 3 to 20 minutes to arrive, depending on the planets' positions in orbit.

Advances in technology won't significantly affect the delay, as the main factors are the distance and the speed of light, both beyond our control.

In fact, the speed of light is the main factor behind this. Even if the technology we use is incredibly fast, the physical distance between locations means the speed of light still imposes a delay. This is why when you’re connecting to a server halfway across the world, it takes longer for information to travel back and forth than if the server is right next door.

So, in practical terms, the speed of light sets the minimum time it takes for any data to travel, and the farther the distance, the longer the delay.

This is a fundamental limit we can’t escape.

The greater the distance, the bigger the ping and the more noticeable the lag.

Why the Speed of Light is Unbeatable

The speed of light isn't just fast. It's the fastest anything can go in the universe.

And if we tried to go faster, we would run into a huge problem: we would need infinite energy.

As you get closer to the speed of light, your mass becomes heavier, and it takes more and more energy to keep speeding up. To reach the speed of light itself, you would need an endless amount of energy, which is impossible.

Also, if we could go faster than light, it would disrupt the basic rule of causality, where causes always precede effects. This would lead to paradoxes, like events happening in reverse, and we would find ourselves in a world where physics itself ceases to make sense.

This idea of breaking causality is explored in pop-culture, like in the TV series The Flash. By traveling too fast and changing events, he creates major paradoxes.

To prevent such chaos, the universe has this speed limit.

Time, space, and cause-and-effect are all connected to this speed. Without it, our understanding of the universe would fall apart. So, while the speed of light might seem like just a number, it's actually the key rule that keeps everything in order.

That's why the speed of light isn't just unbeatable.

It's unbreakable.