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Sci-fi writers guide to interstellar travel. Part 5

The trouble with light speed


Traveling faster than light is one of the biggest “what-ifs” when it comes to interstellar travel. In theory, it would solve so many problems: we could zip to distant star systems in a matter of years, days, or even seconds instead of spending decades or centuries in transit. The problem is, according to our current understanding of physics, it’s impossible—or at least very close to it.

The main roadblock comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. It tells us that as you get closer to the speed of light (about 299,792 kilometers per second), something weird happens—your mass starts increasing. The faster you go, the more energy you need to keep speeding up. By the time you approach light speed, your mass becomes so huge that you’d need an infinite amount of energy to move any faster. And, well, “infinite energy” is not something we have lying around. This means light speed acts like a cosmic speed limit that no object with mass can break.

But it gets even trickier. Let’s say, somehow, we did find a way to push through that barrier. Things would get pretty strange. Time, for instance, doesn’t behave normally when you’re moving close to the speed of light. To an outside observer, time for you would slow down—a phenomenon called time dilation. In theory, if you hit light speed, time might stop entirely. If you somehow went faster than light, time could reverse, which leads to all sorts of paradoxes, like arriving somewhere before you even left. Basically, physics as we know it starts to unravel at faster-than-light speeds.

There’s also the issue of energy and destruction. Space isn’t completely empty; it’s filled with tiny particles and radiation. If you were moving faster than light, slamming into even a single atom of hydrogen would release an insane amount of energy—enough to destroy your ship. You’d essentially be creating a high-energy shockwave with every step forward.

That said, scientists and science fiction writers are great at dreaming up workarounds. Concepts like wormholes (shortcuts through space-time) or warp drives (like bending space around you so you technically don’t break the speed limit) sound promising. But these ideas are mostly theoretical and would require technologies or materials we haven’t even come close to developing—like negative energy or exotic matter.

For now, we’re stuck with slower-than-light travel, which is why interstellar journeys seem so daunting. It’s not just the distance that’s the issue, but how long it takes to cross those distances with our current technology. Until we discover a way to bypass these cosmic rules—or a deeper understanding of physics that changes the game entirely—faster-than-light travel will stay in the realm of imagination. It’s not impossible that future discoveries will surprise us, but for now, light speed isn’t just fast—it’s untouchable.

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