c is the functional limit at which any signal can be transmitted, but I can't remember the experiments that demonstrate that. Crap. I'll ask roast beef later.
Well, if they managed to find a magic 300 gigameter stick magic enough to be handled by a human operator, it might kinda work.
The problem is that non-magical sticks need to be made of atoms, which have electric requirements for how they sit next to each other.
But let's even suppose we could
ignore (sorry, I almost forgot)
magic most of those and use a stick of solid-state hydrogen, whose each individual atom makes a perfectly direct conga-line to Mars. All atoms have a functional mass and volume that they occupy at constant temperature and pressure. Both of which are abstractions that no longer apply to our magic stick, and worse, get wonky for hydrogen at really low values.
So let's use some more magic and make this magic stick formed of hydrogen magic bonds so that I can be lazy and use the radii found on the wiki for
hydrogen's Van der Wall's radius.
That's an even 5*10^22 atoms. Continuing to dick around ineptly with our magic stick, this comes to a modest 87 milligrams of weight! So what point am I trying to make?
Well, this is a conga-line, remember? And they don't start off being directed in motion towards the Martian troll. What the Terran troll is doing is effectively tackling the back of the conga-line and making it stumble onto the Martian troll, creating a domino chain of falling, drunk wedding-goers (more fun than a conga-line, really). Each one of these ideal, magically held-in-place
and completely smashed dominoes falls and continues the reaction at a regular and not-at-all instantaneous pace.
The pace for every non-magical object we've done this to has been c or less.
Well, that was useless and long-winded and worse, way outside of my normal realm of science wankery. I'm going to go cry into my drink now.
