I will never get a ping time to American servers from my home here in Melbourne of less than the distance times two divided by c.

Funny you should mention that. I spent years working in IT, and this knowledge was actually useful once. I tried to ping a DNS router in Europe (I forget where) from California, and it came back in 1ms and I thought "Ummmmmm... no. You lie." It turned out one of the smart switches on the local network was fucked up and was somehow returning all pings itself.

Behold! Even a pop-sci understanding of physics controlled my anticipations in a way that was useful for accomplishing goals in the world.