We all know the speed of light is fast, but a jaw-dropping simulation has made it crystal clear just how unbelievably quick it really is.
Once you watch it, the concept can be rough to get your head around.
Light moves through a vacuum at an astonishing 186,282 miles per second, or 299,792,458 metres per second.
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Numbers like that are so huge they barely seem real, which is why a YouTube video by Airplane Mode has taken on the challenge of visualising it. The result is nothing short of extraordinary — and a little terrifying.
The video sets the scene with something we can all imagine: a round-the-world flight. It shows the route as if you were sitting in an aircraft circling the globe.
But when the same journey is played out at the speed of light, the idea of lightspeed travel gets truly wild. The entire lap around Earth is over in just 0.13 seconds, which only takes up eight frames of footage. That’s so quick that, in theory, light could complete 7.5 orbits of our planet every single second. Trying to picture that in real-time is nearly impossible.
The simulation itself has been online for a couple of years now, but even today, it’s no less mind-blowing to see. Watching something we can’t normally comprehend brought to life on screen gives you a whole new appreciation of how absurdly fast light actually travels.
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So, the next question that pops into the minds of many is whether anything mankind could build would ever reach that speed. The short answer is ‘no’, but it’s a ‘never say never’ sort of ‘no’.
In their original coverage of the video, supercarblondie reminded us that “no manned craft can fly that fast”, with the closest we’ve managed being hypersonic flight. Whilst hypersonic speeds might sound impressive at Mach 5 and around 3,800mph, that’s nowhere near light speed. In fact, it’s not even close.
Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, in particular, puts a hard limit on things, since nothing with mass can travel at, or faster than, the speed of light. The reason for that is that the amount of energy needed would be infinite.
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Essentially, unless we pull off a scientific miracle, humanity’s dream of travelling at light speed will remain firmly in the realm of sci-fi.
That said, the simulation gives us a tantalising glimpse of what it would be like if we could somehow do it. If we think of where we are now as our start and lightspeed travel as the end goal, humanity just needs to work out everything in between.