The speed of light is encrypted at 300,000 kilometers per hour, a gigantic figure that seems impossible if we think about what we are used to. However, getting to travel at more than that speed has become an obsession for many scientists in recent decades, since making it possible would be the first step for human beings to be able to travel through space.
The human being has always been “restless” by nature. There were many centuries in which trips and explorations of all kinds took place until every place on planet Earth was discovered. Now, the human being has been putting a lot of effort in recent years to travel to space, a place as big as it is unexplored. Companies like SpaceX are actually beginning to offer the first civilian spaceflights , though these are somewhat limited. If we want to go to more distant planets, even beyond the solar system, we need to go faster than the speed of light, but is this possible?
The theory of relativity, the key to understanding it
To understand the concept of traveling faster than the speed of light, we have to go back to the beginning of the 20th century, right at the moment when Albert Einstein published his well-known theory of relativity. This theory lays the foundation for many principles that are still fundamental to any physicist on the planet today, and also sheds a key concept on the topic that concerns us today: no object with mass can travel faster than light . This is because the acceleration that an object would suffer to travel at the speed of light would cause an increase in its mass and a deformation that is unaffordable today.
Albert Einstein.
Also, the speed of light is a constant, it never varies . This collides directly with the rest of the speeds that we can see in the universe, which are always relative and depend on a series of factors. This constant has a consequence known as “time dilation,” which means that time passes more slowly for people traveling in very fast vehicles relative to those who are standing still.
How does this affect the concept of traveling faster than the speed of light? If we take into account that to reach these speeds, the mass of the object or ship in question would tend to increase almost infinitely, so the energy that would be needed would also tend to infinity , something that, as we know, is not within the reach of human being with the technology that is created today. In addition, time would not pass in the same way for the people inside the ship and for the rest of humanity, which is also known as the twin paradox.
So is it not possible to exceed the speed of light?
As we say, today we do not have any technology that allows us to travel faster than the speed of light. However, some scientists have developed theories that show us that it is possible , although of course in practice they are still far from becoming a reality.
Travel through a wormhole
Wormholes, also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, could be considered a kind of “spatial shortcut”. These are based on the theory that space is capable of curving, so a kind of “tunnel” would be created that would make traveling a distance through it much faster than doing it normally.
Wormhole.
If we put this theory over practice, the truth is that we would be cheating, since we would not be traveling faster than light, but we would be doing it by a shorter path. The problem, also in practice, with wormholes is that they are rather theoretical, and today there is no type of technology or theory that allows us to produce them at will.
Spacetime Warp Propulsion
This theory, promoted by Miguel Alcubierre, has always been considered one of the most plausible, since it fully respects Einstein’s theory of relativity. Since, in theory, no object with mass can travel faster than light, Alcubierre comes up with a rather original solution: warping space-time .
Explained in a simple way. This theory argues that thanks to distortion propulsion it would be possible to expand the space behind us and compress, at the same time, the space in front of us . Interestingly, we have already seen this type of technology in great science fiction movies such as Star Trek, where ships manage to make this type of trip thanks to curvature engines.
Explanation propulsion to distortion.
This theory also has something of a trap, since in reality we would not be traveling faster than the speed of light. What we would be doing, in reality, is taking advantage of the qualities of space , although in this way we would be able to reach places that until now human beings can only dream of.