How close did humanity get to achieve the speed of light?

Answer 1

The question itself is a bit vague, if one is careful not to assume 'travel' means to travel through space only. If one assumes travelling through space only, then you can come nowhere close to travelling at the speed of light through space at the current time. Current day rocket ships don't even travel close to the speed of light through space, a mere thousandth of 1% the speed of light in fact.

That being said, however, we all travel at the speed of light through space and time. When we move faster through space, we move slower through time, and when we move faster through time, we move slower through space. But the combined speed of both moving through space and time is the speed of light, or equivalent to c.

Answer 2

Right now, at this moment, I am completely motionless with respect to my surroundings.

From time to time, in a short burst of maximum exertion, I can briefly achieve a speed of roughly

22 feet per second with respect to my surroundings, equivalent to 0.0000000224 of light speed. (rounded)

Answer 3

-- The Apollo missions traveled from the Earth to the moon in 3 days.

That corresponds to an average of about 0.0005 of the speed of light.

If people don't need to go along, and we're only making objects go as fast

as possible, then we have achieved much greater speeds.

-- Regarding sizable objects that you can see or hold in your hand, we have

launched spacecraft, and then guided them past the big planets, in such a

way as to gain enough speed to escape from the solar system ... about 525 km

per second, or 1.174 million miles per hour. That's about 0.0018 of light speed.

-- Regarding objects that are too small to see, the accelerators built for research

in Particle Physics routinely push electrons and protons to 99.999% of light speed.

Answer 4

Individual particles have been accelerated to over 99.9% of the speed of light. Spaceship have not even reached a tenth of one percent of the speed of light.