Did you know that just like the roads in your own neighborhood the universe also has a speed limit?
It is called the speed of light. The faster you travel the more space and time bends and warps.
Space and time are not constant or fixed like how we know it to be in our everyday life.
So could you really travel at the speed of light? Or more importantly should you? Welcome
the Factnomenal today we're going to find out if it's a good idea to travel at the speed of light.
Hold on to your hat marty mcfly, things are about to get weird. Actually people call me marty
Pleased to meet you Calvin. Traveling light Can we travel faster than the speed of light? Not yet.
What about at the speed of light?While traveling you start to require more and more energy to the
point where you would need infinite energy to make yourself move. Kind of reminds me of being
in a food coma. Just remember one thing the more you increase the movement of an object
the more energy it needs. Conversely the less energy there is the less movement there is
by this theory massive objects simply cannot move faster than the speed of light so you might wonder
how is light even able to move doesn't it require infinite energy then the answer is no you must
remember that light is made of photons which do not have mass they do not require energy to
move okay you must be wondering so why can light not travel faster than the universal speed limit
why does it slow down with air water and glass the simple answer is time dilation according to
Einstein's theory of relativity. Time dilation is the slowing down of a clock as seen by an outside
observer who is in relative motion in respect to that clock basically the faster you travel towards
the universal speed limit the slower your clock starts turning it keeps shrinking and shrinking
until eventually there's nothing it's a little hard to visualize but a photon does not follow
a clock everything for a photon happens within an instant in other words as you approach the
speed of light time starts to slow down and it entirely stops when you reach the speed of light
so let's say you spent six months on the international space station you would age
slower by a very subtle number basically you would age 0.005 seconds slower than someone on earth
anti-aging creams who needs them on the other hand the ISS takes 90 minutes to travel one time around
the earth it only moves at 0.003 percent the speed of light imagine if you traveled at more
than 90 percent the speed of light decades would pass on earth by the time you finished one round
mind blowing so if you want to travel at the speed of light you must ask yourself
are you ready to lose decades of time to watch everyone age when you complete one round trip
people will have aged by decades or even centuries you would miss all
their birthdays or everyone would be dead good afternoon or i guess just afternoon i mean it
can't possibly be that good traveling at the speed of light is like traveling to the future
time travel to the future has always been probable just not possible right now
time dilation aka space time Einstein was the first to find out that time does not remain
constant the faster you travel through space the more it slows down he came up with a term at
space time space time is when three dimensions of space and one dimension of time are fused together
instead of thinking that space is flat and holds all our planets and galaxies together
he envisions space as a curve that is flexible according to Einstein space works like a
basketball on a trampoline where the trampoline is space and the basketball is a the trampoline
dips and any baseballs or other masses placed around the basketball would dip towards it the
closer the smaller object gets to the basketball the more speed it would require to move just as
time slows down when you reach the speed of light time slows down when you reach the core of earth
the reason being that the gravitational force around earth dips at its center or core
here the gravitational speed is faster as time moves slower the faster you go through space the
closer an object is to earth's core the slower it moves all this just to say the time travel to the
future is conceptualized but a reality why because of speed and technology we simply do not have
a technology that moves that fast with what we have today people have traveled to the future but
just by a few milliseconds still that's impressive but just imagine you are a scientist and you
were able to travel decades into the future who would you come back and report your findings to
would it even be possible to return to what you know as the present
wormholes Einstein once theorized that it was possible to travel back in time with
the Einstein Rosen Bridge which is a wormhole. Wormholes as you might know are those areas of
space-time that are warped to allow two distant points in space to meet if the wormhole were
stable the two points that are connected could connect in time for now we can listen to what Dr.
Jamie Matthews a professor of astrophysics has to say about interstellar light travel into space
interstellar travel reaching close to the speed of light may be possible but this voyage is one way
into the future not back to the past at the moment even an Einstein Rosen Bridge cannot be used to go
back in the past because it doesn't live long enough it is not stable Matthews explains. Even
if it was stable it requires other physics which we don't have hypothetical particles in states
of matter that have exotic physical properties that would violate known laws of physics such
as a particle having a negative mass that is why wormholes are only science fiction
what could happen whether you want to travel back to the past to kill hitler
or travel to the future to a more beautiful planet everything in space is light years away from earth
a light year is the distance that light can travel in a year without any interruptions
as we discussed earlier right now traveling at the speed of light is not possible as we simply
are too big for that our technology is also not advanced enough yet everything is also very far
away Proxima Centauri the closest star to earth is still 40 trillion 208 billion kilometers away
that is 4.246 light years away do you have the time to travel even so close ask your superior
and let us know if you do have vacation time though there are also other problems to consider
space is kind of overcrowded with numerous satellites and debris like dust ice metals and
other particles surrounding earth traveling super fast uninterrupted is not possible and nor is it
safe think of it as driving on the road with your car at super speed even a tiny insect hitting your
hand will have an impact just like that traveling at light speed in space will tear your ship apart
if a tiny particle of dust collides with you this is called explosive decompression it means that
the dust particle the tiny teeny little almost unseen particle of dust will tear your ship to
pieces if you collide with it everything on the ship will be ripped out into space with a small
hole created by the dust particle so you might need a giant shield to cover your ship all around
it in the way that the star trek show has we sadly do not have that kind of technology right now
but we might in the future if admiral Jean-luc Picard shares his secrets the next problem is
that we simply do not have enough fuel to take us from earth even to its nearest star but let's
look for something more habitable like Kepler the planet nearest to us that can support life
Kepler is a whole 600 light years away from earth travel there would take nearly 23.4 million years
do we have this much time money and fuel so what do you think is traveling the speed of light
merely a fictional idea or will we someday be able to join the likes of our favorite
sci-fi movies and defy the laws of physics. Tell us in the comments and if you enjoyed
this video be sure to smash that like button. And as always thanks for watching Factnomenal