Most of the comments so far are about the temperature and the closeness to the sun, and, hey, I get it: those are both amazing to think about. But to me even more amazing is... 0.16% of the speed of light?? Yikes.
It is, although I was still a little surprised it's on the order of a minute to go NYC to Tokyo at that speed. My intuition was it would be much less time.
Light is fast, but it isn't imperceptible. The original experiments to measure it in a lab involved spinning rigs and mirrors between hills. When dealing with objects the size of continents, such as phone or other communication systems, the delays are well within our abilities to detect.
The speed of light is the speed of causality, so obviously it can't be too fast or everything will be in instantaneous causal contact. It's not strange that biological creatures find that things over distances that "feel" distant actually take light some perceptible "time" to reach.