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The science of traveling at light speed

Posted by / August 27, 2016

In science fiction movies, people are always traveling at light speed. But is it that easy? This video looks at all the various technical difficulties of traveling at light speed.

Full story at Vsauce3.

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  • Wow, what a depressing generation you have become.
    We went from “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are difficult,”
    to, “look at how hard this is. Why try at all?”

  • Lacey, did you even watch the video? That wasn’t the point, or even A point. The alt words were, “…but these things won’t stop me from trying.”

  • Traveler

    In science fiction movies, people are always traveling at light speed.

    I thought they were traveling faster than speed of light geez

  • Electromagnetic (photon) particles, wiggle even faster than they travel…

    They can wiggle at different rates. When the fields are wiggling about 500,000,000,000,000 times every second, your eye sees red light. If your eye looks at fields which are wiggling about twice that fast, or about 1,000,000,000,000,000 every second, the light looks blue. All of the colors are due to the fields wiggling at slightly different rates.

  • worm holes…we’ve got to find ’em….OR find how to make em. !!! 27AU16

  • @Robert K. Doyle
    I agree 100%. I doubt that we will ever reach light speed, however I do think through using worm holes or through a process called space folding, we may be able to “travel” much faster than the speed of light while not actually travelling much at all.

  • william hutcheson

    If you are going to a planet 10,000 light years away on a ship traveling at 99.999 the speed of light, why would it only take 14 years to get there.

  • Steven Hightower

    Sounds like a one way trip…. bring your girlfriend(s). For that matter, a larger vessel and a larger gene pool. Start slow and build speed slow. Save your energy for stopping and gathering before moving on again.

    Humanity may live afterall…

  • william hutcheson

    forget prior comment as it was posted in earth time and not speed of light time.

  • max

    who wants to travel at the speed of light? It’s too freakin slow; it would take 4 years to get to Alpha Centauri. FTL stands for FASTER than light.

  • D. Scott Weiner

    Inertia dampeners!!! That’s what it takes to get to light speed instantly. Just ask Mr. Scott how to build them.

  • Neil Wani

    Really think we will use nukes before we ever get close to anything like this.

  • Tach One is the speed of Light
    Extra Terrestrials create the star systems and planets similar to how Humans create housing developments.
    Extra Terrestrials place the humans on Earth and live among them as Humanoid Extra Terrestrials.
    Humanoid Extra Terrestrials have lived here the whole time.
    Millions of the most famous, powerful, wealthy etc.. people living on the planet are Humanoid Extra Terrestrials and most Earthlings aren’t even aware this is a possibility.
    Notice how this is not even given any consideration by all the so called experts of the “ET” search.
    The even funnier part is when all the Earthlings wake up and realize those vehicles transiting our star system aren’t even FLYING and we call them Unidentified Flying Objects.
    The Earthlings are in for a rude awakening one day.

  • Kris Faul

    The Alcubierre drive will make this entire video moot.

  • As he noted, even 100 years ago, the idea of doing the things we take for granted seemed far-fetch, if not impossible. Landing on the moon (ok, not so easy, but still)? Talking to people anywhere in the world in real time? Building a house in days? They’d have called us crazy. Now these things are totally doable. They’re even toying with the idea of 3D-printing houses, with all the innards (ducts, pipes, wires, ect.) included. So who knows what we’ll unlock in the next 100 years.

    The things noted here are valid concerns that must be overcome, but it’s like looking at a wall, and trying to figure out a way past it. 100 years ago, we couldn’t see a way to climb the wall of landing on the moon. Now, though risky and expensive, we can do it. As a sci-fi writer and fan, I get to imagine what discoveries might be made between now and then. And who knows. Maybe I’ll guess right.

    Or I’ll be totally off base. But it’s fun to try. 😀

  • Ben

    First off, I like the video alot, however it does ignore the general relativistic effects due to acceleration which make up for the time/age paradox of the traveler during near C flight. Second I think the real point of the video is to say that we (humanity) always seem to think we have all the answers, until someone figures out more. That means for me that in order for us to advance beyond the limits of our current understanding of physics we must push ever harder to make the required advances. In laymans terms, we need to fund basic science now more than ever if we are going to fix the problems and answer the questions that face us today. Advances get harder and harder the more you know, and right now we know quite a bit. There is alot more for us to learn however, and that will require ALOT of work and funding.

  • Awesome! love it! I really like the thought that your traveling back to earth 28,000 year (or however long it takes to return and providing you survived long enough) the neat thought is you would be returning to your home planet but because of time you would be an alien to those on earth.

  • If we start to time travel, verbs don’t count.

  • Michael Brown

    Perhaps some alien civilization will teach humans how to achieve this kind of technology.

  • Jose Velazquez-Ramos

    Very well done – visually and topics presentation. Yes, very depressing … very depressing that we are most likely condemned, for ever, to a spec of an islet in the vastness. Our only hope, now, apparently, is some long sought breakthrough with the Alcubierre Drive research. The implications of such breakthrough should unquestionably be the greatest for our species. With the Alcubierre Matrix there is no violation of Einstein by having space-time – instead – warping around the traveler, who is relatively immobile (so fretting about being killed by inertia forces) Thus, we are not confronted with the standard paradigm, and it’s problems, of the traveler speeding towards the speed of light. Another enormous benefit of a possible Alcubierre Drive is that the traveler’s clock and that of his/her twin left behind on Earth tick at the same pace.

  • @sundale2 I hate to burst your bubble of optimism but you are acting as if taking trips to the moon are commonplace. The last time a man went to the moon was in 1972, and we haven’t been there since.

    Go back to reading your science fiction novels because traveling at the speed of light is hundreds if not thousands of years away. Not in the next 100 years, that’s for sure. Either way, we will all be gone by then.

  • Tony

    I think that interstellar travel will require some new technology that goes beyond our understanding of current physics. Long distance travel will require travel by spacefolding, hyperspace or something along those lines that allows long distances to be travelled in short times both in the ship and in the rest of the universe so this is really irrelevant.

  • consider the speed of light limit is only for physical processes/events whereby order is maintained.
    Yet an intelligence may find ways organized/ purposeful methods of vastly exceeding the speed of light.

    Bill C.

  • Bill

    The speed of light limit applies to standard physical processes/events to maintain order. An intelligence may conceive and develop a purposeful method of vastly exceeding the speed of light.

    Bill C.

  • Pramod H

    I thought the logic is that if you take 14 years to travel at 99.999% speed of light to a star 10 light years away and then return to earth in 28 years, your twin brother may look 28 years older than you while you may only look a few minutes older than when you left earth.Well.maybe more than a few minutes since you will need some time to accelerate/decellerate to/from speed of light…but am I seeing this right ??

  • Interesting!!!

  • JR

    Heck, I eat a few magic mushrooms and I’m flying at Tachyon speed..

  • Don

    If you accelerate to the speed of light in zero gravity, there are no G forces

  • Don

    If you were to travel faster than the speed of light. You would become invisible to observers. So isn’t it possible that advanced beings are zipping around the Universe and are not detectable. The speed of light is not the barrier Einstein seemed to believe it to be. In fact 10,000 Xs light speed could be attainable.

  • Now anyone with a brain knows that light is bent by gravity. If light is distorted then time equally is distorted as well. So it is possible that you can get there before you left. Sounds preposterous but it is true. We live in an Alice in Wonderland World of global warming and warp speeds, The media makes a living from idiots like us that think we have answers. But in a world where a corrupted woman from a single wide from Little Rock may become president we have fallen from an age of Enlightenment to an age of lunacy and self-stupidity. If there is anyone on the planet that understands the following then email me but my computer will wait hopelessly but perhaps not. That would very well be a revelation that is all is not lost. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton’s world was meat and potatoes and three dimensional. Einstein’s world is warped by space and time due to effects of gravity.

    To travel at the speed of light would require imagination and infinite energy. The media doesn’t have a clue so they write articles that defy reason and logic. Speed of light travel in not possible. Get over it.

  • WW

    …FTL is a cover-all nomenclature for various concepts that attempt to describe moving “faster-than-light” (YES star trek fans this includes warp drive ideas)…but also fanciful ideas ..like Larry Niven’s “continuous teleportation drive”. Under certain conditions…THOSE MIGHT BE THE SAME. Teleportation intervals less than a few tens of milliseconds would
    “fool the conscious mind” ..and would appear smooth ..transparent ..and almost unnoticeable. The visual cortex responds so slowly ..that ‘”fast acting events” (every attempt to count bicycle spokes while that wheel is rapidly spinning?) ..might get missed entirely. IF we don’t notice the teleportation itself ..then noticing the end effect could also
    go unnoticed. People taken to the tops of mountains during angelic visitations (google it sports fans) ..never report angels using any “power generators ..that need to pulse a few times to get started” ..and those who have been taken by ufo aliens. .often sleep though those events ..even the SERPO project people only noticed a slight discomfort ( a few had nausea ..and/or later died they claimed) during their “trip to SERPO”. Star Trek’s “PSI DRIVE” episode* gave some major hints at the real reality here (those writers often check in with the metaphysical before they let “standard physics” get in their way)*( “Where No-One has gone before” where ..Wesley Crusher first meets the traveler). The mystics of old often claimed that personal ascension begins with learning “bi-location techniques”. The human mind and body may be far more capable of “ultra reality” (even demonic possession is a type of spirited communion with the non-physical ..just not one that is desired). Should NASA research “psi drive” along with standard propulsion (the “light sail people” are getting checks to spend on stuff right now)..or other ideas? Email Marc Millis at the NASA “Breakthrough Propulsion Project”…they have some reports and books they might sell you Even “Rocky Jones and the Space Rangers”
    could attempt an “electric rocket” right now…that idea is in one of those Advanced Energy Research convention collection of papers. (email me at Krillmeed.com Star Trek omnibus site .we discuss EVERYTHING ; )

  • gene peveto

    earth is spinning and moving around the sun and also moving through space but not time. there is no such thing as time. light speed what a joke there is no light speed. all so moving at exactly 186,282.397 miles per second, in a vacuum has nothing to do with light. if you collided with a grain of sand at that speed you would become space dust. look at any star, the light from that star is shining out in every direction why do we see just a dot of light? NO I WILL NOT EXCEPT THEORIES AS FACT. Every one of the grate scientist through the ages have been proven wrong by new thinkers living off the tax payers dime.

  • This totally goes beyond my comprehension. Earth time, space time, physics, etc. I just don’t get it.

  • Great Scott!!!!

  • NobodysaysBOO

    Not so FAST . We ain’t been anyplace YET!

    Humans will not find anything sitting here on Earth talking and making sci-fi stories and playing computer games, , we might find a way to travel to the stars out among the STARS or in the astroids. Humans as far as we know have only traveled as far out into space as our moon, (IF you believe in all of the Apollo stuff) never been to INERT-PLANETARY SPACE, NEVER been to INTERSTELLAR SPACE and at this time we will likely never go beyond our own system, Perhaps the answers lie beyond our system in outer space where no human has ever gone.

    Until we find something NEW , short life humans will remain Earth BOUND , fighting and killing each other for MONEY and POWER.

    Fight for a greater Israel you fools.

  • Gailm

    There is another layer. As the ocean without a ship, the air without a plane the moon without a spaceship–the universe is TOO Big to be sequestered by a supposed speed limit. Too Big. Another layer, trust me on this.

  • Sy O'Nara

    It is actually very simple.
    Since we do not have the tech to get to the Speed of Light, all we need to do is get to the Speed of Dark and invert the math and the process.
    They should have asked me earlier…

  • Robert Lightner

    Either you go faster than light i.e. a tachyon field OR you don’t move at all but instead move the universe around YOU! The most important axiom of all is ‘ What can be dreamt can be achieved ‘. The most powerful weapon ever bestowed upon mankind is curiosity.

  • As we know physics, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That doesn’t mean that we can’t create the means of doing so with discoveries yet to be realized. We become limited by our own limitations, but our curiosity will always endure because what’s out there is too exciting not to.

  • PaulApp

    When human find the strongest materials in the universe and able to harness gravity and swap space, then space travel is possible.

  • I think we need wormholes to travel faster than the speed of light, but then I realized, my back yard is full of them!

  • Why travel at the speed of light when you can bend the fabric of space and get there in a instant?

  • Funny how people always overlook things. Even if you could travel at 99.99999 percent the speed of light (or FTL as some have mentioned) the real problem is that the Oort cloud is a spherical barrier that surrounds this solar system in every direction! You can’t go through it! it starts at .8 light years away and continues to 3.2 light years. If you attempted to go through it, you would die… End of travel! God doesn’t want us to leave this system. It’s that simple. Now, wake up from your dream and get back to work!

  • hugo

    Traveling in a straight line seems ancient why not use cosmic gateways or wormholes (bend time and space). Technology to travel at the speed of light at the same time should help us find and map such phenomena.

  • Aurora

    Beam me up, Hugo!