What You Would See and Feel While Traveling Near the Speed of Light

We all learn in school, or at least from our more rig­or­ous choic­es of sci­ence fic­tion, that we’ll nev­er be able to trav­el faster than the speed of light. At first, this may sound dis­ap­point­ing, but upon reflec­tion, 186,000 miles per sec­ond is noth­ing to sneeze at. Ques­tions about how to achieve that speed soon give way to ques­tions about what an attempt to do so would be like, many of them answered by the ani­mat­ed video from Sci­enceClic above. The first sur­prise is that mov­ing so fast, in and of itself, would have no neg­a­tive effect on us. When we trav­el by bicy­cle, car, air­plane, space­craft, or what have you, we feel only the accel­er­a­tion. If that remains at a safe rate, no absolute speed will be a prob­lem, in the­o­ry, assum­ing you can get up to it. Still, it could­n’t hurt to buck­le up, not that it would help much in the event of a col­li­sion, even with a speck of dust.

Putting that out of our minds by assum­ing that “our ship is equipped with a force field that repels dan­ger­ous objects and allows us to roam freely through space,” we can con­cen­trate on what we’d see through the win­dow. First, “the stars in front of us, which we get clos­er to, seem to grad­u­al­ly move away. The sky con­tracts before us,” much as rain appears to fall from the front when you’re dri­ving through it.

“Behind us, the sky seems to widen, and becomes dark­er,” and any object we pass “would appear to be slight­ly angled in our direc­tion.” Just as the light in the sky we see while stargaz­ing takes some time to reach us, thus con­sti­tut­ing a view of the stars as they were in the past, events on the Earth from which we’re mov­ing away — pre­sum­ing we had a way to see them — would appear to be tak­ing place in “slow motion.” Earth­’s image would shift toward the col­or red, and that of every­thing in front of us would shift toward blue. After a few hun­dred days, our ship begins to approach light speed, and that’s when things get even stranger.

This, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly speak­ing, is when spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty comes into play, caus­ing our ship to swerve onto its own “time axis” apart from the one fol­lowed by Earth. From our per­spec­tive, the entire uni­verse would con­tract along our length of motion, mak­ing our jour­ney short­er than we’d expect­ed. As we move faster and faster, the view in front of us inten­si­fies, while the view behind us turns com­plete­ly black. And what would hap­pen when we final­ly reach light speed? Noth­ing, because we can’t reach it: “You may try to catch a light ray, but from your point of view, it will always escape at the same speed.” Accel­er­ate all you like; “from your point of view, you are still motion­less, and light escapes inex­orably.” At best, “our ship will con­tin­ue to accel­er­ate for­ev­er, and our field of vision will shrink ever more, until form­ing an infi­nite­ly bright spot in front of us, sur­round­ed by an infi­nite­ly black sky.” But there may be a loop­hole, in that, even if an object can’t do it, “noth­ing pro­hibits space itself from mov­ing faster than light” — a premise for some tru­ly mind-blow­ing sci-fi if ever there was one.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

M.I.T. Cam­era Cap­tures Speed of Light: A Tril­lion-Frames-Per-Sec­ond

60 Sec­ond Adven­tures in Astron­o­my Explains the Big Bang, Rel­a­tiv­i­ty & More with Fun Ani­ma­tion

Does Einstein’s The­o­ry of Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Sug­gest That There Is an After­life?: A The­o­ret­i­cal Physi­cist Explains

Pro­fes­sor Ronald Mal­lett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Cen­tu­ry … and He’s Not Kid­ding

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

What It Feels Like to Fly Over Plan­et Earth

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.