system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Explain this, If we made a stick 600 light years long, put it in between two space stations floating around a planet. If we pushed one end of the stick up about 1 inch, would the other space station get that signal instantly, or would it take time to get to him?

If said space station managed to stay perfectly aligned is a point to discuss, but say the space station ARE managing to stay perfectly aligned and nothing hit the stick, such as another planet or meteor(Or whatever the correct term is).
gpt
Unfortunately, unless Einstein messed up, you can't send information faster than the speed of light.

When you're pushing on that stick, it actually does take time  for the "push" to reach the other side depends on the material properties of the stick. If, for example, the stick was really floppy like a string, if you wiggle the string, you can see that the "wiggle" will take some time to get to the other side. The more rigid the material is, the faster the "wiggle" will go across.

If you have a perfectly rigid object, then yeah the signal will go across at the speed of light. But it won't be instantaneous.

Why? Because objects on a small scale are not continuous - they're a bunch of molecules that have some interaction with each other. For example an iron rod has a bunch of iron atoms a particular distance from each other - close enough so that they can bond together (the reason for this distance is so that they can delocalize their electrons, but this is above a ELI5 level), and far enough so that the charges in the atoms don't repel each other.

So if you push on one end of this iron rod, the 1st bunch of atoms you push on will get too close to the a bunch of atoms in the next slice of the rod, too close for comfort, so the 2nd slice of atoms will move away from the 1st, causing it to get close to the 3rd, etc. until it goes all the way down. On a small scale, this is pretty fast. But on a larger scale (e.g. 600 light years), the "push" will be propagated down the rod like a wave that travels, at maximum, the speed of light.