After learning the speed of light from middle school, most of us have fantasized about traveling at the speed of light. Today, let’s talk about what the speed of light travel looks like at the cosmic scale.
First look at the definition of the speed of light: the propagation speed of light or electromagnetic waves in a vacuum or medium. The speed of light in the vacuum is equal to 299, 792, 458 meters/s
The speed of light is out of reach for current humans. Because the fastest aircraft of humans was the Sun God jointly developed by West Germany and NASA, breaking the record to 252,792km/h. This means flying 70.22 kilometers per second. Of course, this is insignificant in the face of the speed of light. But is the speed of light really powerful in the universe? We can take a look at the nearest star system on Earth.
is about 4.3 light years from our closest star system, Alpha Centaurus. Assuming that we travel at the speed of light, it will take nearly 10 years for us to travel back and forth. Suppose a person's life span is 100 years and the golden period of his career is 30 years. This time scale is relatively long for a person. This is just the nearby stars. If you put them in the scale of the galaxy: for example, , the Laniakai Supergalaxy Cluster , the calculated diameter has reached 520 million light years. This means that traveling at the speed of light will take 520 million years. Imagine what the earth was like 520 million years ago. This time scale has exceeded the extinction of dinosaurs until the birth of humans. Even if our Milky Way has a diameter of 100,000 light-years (currently, some people estimate it to be 200,000 light-years), 100,000 years ago, there were still six types of humans on the earth at that time, and Neanderthal is still alive. In other words, even if you want to travel at the speed of light and want to travel across the Milky Way, you have to start from the time of the Neanderthals.
The universe currently has an observable diameter of 93 billion light years. This scale has far exceeded the age of the earth. Beyond the observable scale, there are places we have not discovered. It can be said that if you travel at the speed of light, it will make little sense outside the cosmic scale.
So, how will humans in the future travel? Or at what speed should we explore the universe? Perhaps, in the future world, the two concepts of distance and time may disappear, and may be instantly displaced across galaxies or unknown. However, even so, in such a vast universe, there may be 2 trillion galaxies in observable universe. A person may not be able to travel through the observable universe after spending his entire life, let alone the unobserved part of the universe. This may completely satisfy human enthusiasm for exploration. After all, humans on Earth are not as numerous as galaxies in the universe.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-