dragnet2’s use of “Approximately” is a valid point.
The fellow I was initally responding to was off by 1000X - 3 orders of magnitude.
Just getting that corrected was all I was shooting for. To give him a better - more accurate - feel for what we were dealing with. Since he was so far off, I figured more precision than that would have been showing off a bit.
And telling him the value of c is 186,282.397051221 miles per second would have been downright smart-alecky, IMHO.
AND of course, the EXACT measurement is NOT in mph.
The speed of light is defined as precisely 299,792,458 meter per second.
Why thank you.