Fascinating YouTube video reveals that the speed of light is actually ‘extremely slow’
It takes 8 minutes for light to travel to the Sun from Earth.
Nothing moves faster than light.
But, what if I told you, this is only light as we know it on planet Earth.
A recent YouTube video shows that the speed of light is in fact not all that fast when we look at it in terms of the whole universe.
'Sound is nearly one million times slower than light' the video, posted by BlenderTimer, states before it delves into the mind-bending question.
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'Well, because we've just been looking at what happens on our own tiny planet, there's still a whole universe out there! And when the speed of light is compared to the whole universe, it becomes a snail's pace.'
With the animation of a 'newly invented spacecraft', the video showcases light travelling to different places across the universe.
The narrator refers to it as the EMR-c, which is short for ElectroMagnetic Radiation, and c which is commonly used to represent the speed of light.
Starting off leaving Earth and going to the Sun, light takes a little under 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel there.
Then, the rocket travels from the Sun to planet Neptune, and it shows to take even longer, over four hours in total. And when it heads over to Neptune's closest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri, the narrator expected it to only take just a couple of months, and it actually ends up taking four years and three months.
To really drive home how slow light seems, the video shows the speed of light in comparison to a snail. Turns out, a small snail can travel around Neptune over 3000 times 'before light could travel around the observable universe once.'
'So either the speed of light is extremely slow, or the universe is extremely large,' the video concluded. 'In fact, it could even be both.'
Views are shocked at the video's depiction of such a vast concept.
One viewer commented: 'This doesn't show how slow the light is, it shows how absolutely huge the universe is.'
'Never seen a represantation of light with snails this is mindbending,' another comment read.
'That is utterly mind blowing that even at 1 billion times the speed of light it's still slow,' wrote another.
Other viewers used the video to think about space travel sooner than we thought: 'This video actually made me think that it would be possible to travel to another solar system in a life time.'