How can you accelerate to the speed of light?

Answer 1

A person cannot travel the speed of light because a propellant to move a space ship in the vacuum of space would have to travel faster than light speed. Since everything is relative, nothing travels faster than light speed (speed C).

If light, for example, was to power a space ship by pushing on giant panels it would still not be able to push the space ship fast enough to travel at light speed.

If the energy was in light, enough to push a spaceship to almost light speed, it would still not have enough energy to push the space ship to light speed. It would still be slower.

Think of light speed like this: If you wer an ant walking as fast as you could and we make this the speed of a jet liner, light speed would still be the speed of the Earth going around the sun. The speed of light is vastly faster than any machine ever made.

Answer 2

Keep pushing on it, hard, for a long, long time.

5 kilograms is a mass that weighs roughly 11 pounds on earth; so our object is

something roughly like a Bowling ball ... you can pick it up, hold it, toss it, etc.

If you push on it, then it accelerates. It keeps accelerating as long as you keep

pushing.

Let's say we push on it with a ton of force ... 2,000 pounds ... and keep pushing.

It accelerates at the rate of 181 G's, and reaches 10% the speed of light in about

4.7 hours.

Notice that 181 G's is pretty ridiculous, because it would shatter anything constructed

from known materials.

Let's accelerate it a more reasonable rate .. say 10 G's. Still more than a human being

could tolerate and survive for very long, but it ought to be OK for a bowling ball.

In order to accelerate 5 kilograms at 10 G's, we only have to push on it with a force of

about 490 newtons ... about 110 pounds.

From a standing start, it goes from zero to 60 mph in the first quarter of a second, and

it hits 10% of the speed of light in 3.54 days, or about 85 hours.

The whole problem is: How much rocket fuel you need to keep up that much force for

that long a time.

When the 5 kilograms reaches 10% of the speed of light, its kinetic energy is 2.25 x 1015 joules.

That's 625 million kilowatt hours.

According to some numbers I found online from the "California Statewide Residential Appliance

Saturation Study of 2004", this is the amount of electrical energy used by 104,000 average

3-person families in California in one year!

And we needed that much energy to push a bowling ball to 10% of light speed.

The problem should be starting to come clear by now . . . .

Answer 3

The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second. Anything faster than that would be faster than the speed of light; however, according to current understanding, this is impossible to achieve.

Answer 4

As an object with mass, it's impossible to accelerate to the speed of light due to the principles of special relativity. As you approach the speed of light, your mass would increase infinitely, requiring an infinite amount of energy to continue accelerating. Additionally, the laws of physics dictate that only massless particles, like photons, can travel at the speed of light.

Answer 5

nope, forward. or rather you will age slower then the rest of us and will feel as if you went forward in time.

Answer 6

No mass can be accelerated to the speed of light. Einstein showed this in his earliest papers, and we have not thought our way around restrictions that he showed were in place in nature.

Answer 7

According to our current understanding of science and physics, you can't.

Answer 8

You cant.......its too fast :l

Answer 9

yo ma