What would happen to the human body moving at near lightspeed?

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In science fiction, spaceships that travel at or faster than the speed of light allow for a wide range of intergalactic exploration. However, in the real world on Earth, the speed of a massive rocket reaching light speed (299,792,458 meters per second or 670,616,629 miles per hour in a vacuum) is a physical impossibility. “It’s the speed at which massless objects travel,” says Gerd […].

The speaker is an associate professor emeritus of physics at Michigan State University. He points out that anything with mass cannot reach that speed. Additionally, even massless particles are limited by the speed of light. "It's often referred to as the cosmic speed limit because nothing can exceed that," the professor says.

Reaching light speed just isn't feasible. "It's neither possible nor survivable to travel near the speed of light compared to our home Earth," the physicist explains.

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At the Large Hadron Collider.

Let's put all that aside for now and picture this: imagine we could come close to the speed of light. If we had a perfect fuel source, a vast supply of it, a spacecraft designed to withstand such speeds, and the determination–what would traveling at nearly the speed of light be like?

As you might expect, things would start to get a little unusual.

What's the significance of light speed?

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In simple terms, special relativity says that the speed of light remains constant while time, which is the fourth dimension, curves in relation to how objects are moving. This means that objects that are in motion experience time differently than objects that are standing still. At normal speeds on Earth, this effect isn't noticeable. However, at almost the speed of light, it would definitely make a difference, a phenomenon known as time dilation, which we'll explore in the next section.

Because of the unique relationship between light speed and time, it remains constant, no matter how fast an observer is moving. Think of it like this: you're in a car on the highway and another car passes you, going twice as fast. To you, that car is moving away at 30 miles per hour, relative to your own speed. But if you try to catch up to a speeding photon, even if you move at half the speed of light, it will still be moving away from you at the speed of light. "It's always the speed of light, regardless of how you're moving, which is very different than anything else," Kortemeyer says.

Reaching light speed will be an incredibly intense experience.

What would travel occur like if it was almost as fast as the speed of light?

Conceived by Kortemeyer and his team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The straightforward game aims to illustrate relativistic effects when moving near the speed of light, in a universe where light travels much slower, and slows down even more as you move around. Even in this world, you wouldn't be able to reach or surpass light speed, but you could get pretty close by walking quickly.

If you were to observe the galaxy from your location, you would experience a visual effect similar to watching an ambulance with its siren blaring as it speeds by - the pitch would change as it moves away. As you got closer to a celestial object, it would appear bluer because its wavelength would appear shorter. On the other hand, if the object was moving away from you, it would shift to a redder appearance due to its wavelength lengthening.

Moving fast towards a bright light source makes it appear even brighter to you, much as it does when you run into a downpour and your shirt gets soaked faster. Kortemeyer compares this effect to running through the rain. As you move rapidly through a rainstorm, more raindrops hit your front, making your shirt wet faster. In a simulation game, this is similar to hitting a beam of light at nearly the speed of light. Many light particles then hit your eyes at the same time.

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If you're able to move at 299,792,450 meters per second (which is just less than the speed of light), two minutes of traveling at that speed through space would be equivalent to about six days on Earth passing by.

"It's all speculation, not based on reality," he says. “Distorting space is a scientifically proven phenomenon,” but there’s no method to exert power or control the distortion of space to alter speed. “There is no concept of a warp drive in physics. I wouldn’t be aware of any physical principle that would make that feasible,” he says.

A speed of 299,782,450 meters per second would be a tremendous challenge in itself. However, when it comes to high speeds, the biggest obstacle isn't maintaining a constant velocity, but rather the acceleration required to achieve it. We're already moving at an incredible speed of about 67,000 miles per hour as the Earth orbits the sun, yet we don't feel it because the speed remains constant. But attempting to reach the speed of light relative to Earth would be a vastly different experience. "You can't just take off and reach the speed of light. You would be flattened," says Kortemeyer.

As our body's internal circulatory system becomes congested with built-up matter.

Accoding to Kortemeyer's calculations, it would take approximately a year for a person to reach the speed of light while accelerating at a force of no more than 3 g. However, the long-term effects of even this relatively moderate acceleration on the human body are still unknown, he notes. Prolonged exposure to forces above what we're adapted to, equivalent to 12 consecutive months, may test not only the boundaries of physics, but also our own physical endurance.

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