We don’t know about you, but we have a need for speed. The adrenaline of driving a racecar or riding a roller coaster is very attractive to many people. But that’s nothing compared to how fast light travels, which is a whopping 186,000 miles per second! We are probably centuries away from inventing any transportation method that could move like that, despite science fiction’s fondness for portraying ships that go at warp speed. Still, we know that humanity has a habit of going beyond expectations. What would realistic light-speed travel look like? Here are the key facts you need to know.
A realistic perspective
Why is flying at the speed of light such an attractive prospect? First, it would make interstellar travel possible and allow humans to visit faraway regions of the universe. Maybe we could even find another inhabitable planet?
However, it seems that the laws of physics might be against us in this. General relativity doesn’t contemplate anything with mass traveling at the same speed light does, never mind going even faster. Even subatomic particles have a tough time of it.
