the speed of light
2019-10-09
Everyone assumes the speed of light is, well, fast. But the videos below (from this article, my comments alongside) make you stop and think.
Light circling the Earth. Okay, that's fast, but you can still perceive the speed. If it were truly fast, that white circle would look like a solid line.
Light traveling between the Earth and the Moon looks like a game of ping-pong.
But light traveling from the Earth and the Moon to Mars moves like a turtle.
It follows that even if humankind managed to fly at the speed of light, reaching the nearest planetary system would take 4.37 years. And keep in mind: that's the speed in a vacuum, with no gravitational fields in the way, and getting a large object like a spaceship up to that speed (and keeping it in one piece) is a very, very hard problem.
Conclusion: the speed of light is not fast enough. Exploring the universe any wider will take entirely different technologies or methods (think of the film Interstellar, or the game Mass Effect).
In the video, light reaches Mars in 3 minutes and 2 seconds. Curiosity (the rover, not that big) took 9 months to fly from Earth and land on Mars. A bigger spaceship would travel slower still.