> ... data the avg person sees is 15 minutes delayed ..., that may as well be a light year.
Nit pick: you've got your units mixed up; minute is a unit of time, and light-year is a unit of distance.
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In astronomy, aren't they in some sense equivalent? Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years way, so we are seeing it as it was 2.5 million years in the past.
No. Light year is the distance.
Distance/time * time = distance
Waiting a "light year" would be a year.
Yes, you are correct that astronomers talk about seeing into the past by X number of years when we look at a galaxy X light years away.
I blame George Lucas for this.
Star Wars confused parsecs with a unit of time, not light years.
FYI there's apparently some retcon stuff about that, e.g. maybe the Kessel run is around a particularly dangerous area of space (black holes or w/e), so accomplishing it in LESS parsecs is something to brag about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
an earlier retcon was "that was Lucas's subtle way of showing that han solo talked a lot without necessarily knowing what he was taking about"
1 parsec ~= 3.26 light years
> you've got your units mixed up; minute is a unit of time, and light-year is a unit of distance.
fixed, thank you
In some unit systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrized_unit_system) they are both units of length.
They are not both units of length on that system either.