How far apart do two miners with hashes that meet the requirements of the cryptographic algorithm for mining *coins in order for the has to be considered valid?
Is it 1 second? 2seconds? 3 seconds? More?
It's not a fixed amount of time. If two miners each find a block based on the same parent block, only one of them is going to be accepted by the network, and the other will be abandoned. So practically speaking, there needs to be enough time for new blocks to propagate through the network so that miners know about them and base their calculations on the new block instead of the old one.
The time needed is going to be less on a small, well-connected network, and greater on a large, poorly-connected network. If you had a network where all the miners are directly connected to each other, the time between new blocks could be on the order of milliseconds without creating orphans.
