If you are a fan of Star Wars, Star Trek or any Sci-fi franchise involving inter-galactic missions and travels, one thing they will always say before they blast off to their destination is along the line of "Get ready crew, we're about to enter warp speed/travel at the speed of light."
Sure, traveling at the speed of light is pretty convenient especially when trying to get to one planet to another because you know, space. Even going at the speed of light will take you 8 minutes to reach the sun from Earth, let alone other galaxies or solar systems.
However, the problem of getting a spacecraft to travel at the speed of light mainly revolves around the passenger inside them. In one scene from Star Wars, Hans Solo and Chewbacca got themselves geared up to jump to light speed.
Now, suddenly jumping to 186 000 miles per second is going to have a problem to the likes of Chewbacca and Hans Solo, specifically, with Inertia. Inertia is defined as a property in which matter continue to be in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.
Since he is jumping from near stationary to 300 million meters per second, the inertia he will experience will have him thrown back into his seat with such force that he would be splattered all over the control panel.
According to Jeanne Cavelos, an astrophysicist from NASA and the author of The science of Star Wars, "The gravitational force of an object is equivalent to the inertial force of an object undergoing a comparable acceleration. Just as gravity pushes you down the Earth, Inertia pushes you back against your seat"
So how do we safely get them to travel at the speed of light and arrive in one piece?
According to the professor, not only that it couldn't be done in an instant, it would also take a lot of time before our body can adapt with the gravitational force exerted on our body. You've probably heard of the concept of gravitational force expressed in "gs" or "g force" especially if you are an F1 fan since driving at super high speed subjects drivers' body to immense gravitational force beyond 3gs. What 3gs essentially mean is that you feel 3 times heavier as the gravitational force exerted on your body tripled.
The level of g force a human being can safely withstand is around 9gs and even that is limited to just a few seconds. Anything beyond that, the person will pass out and die because internally, you will feel it 9 times heavier as well and that your heart can't pump hard enough to overcome such force.
Cavelos suggest going at a more survivable acceleration which is around 3gs to get up to light speed, something we can normally suffer around an hour but even going at that speed, it would take 2 and half months to reach light speed. (Not that fast to escape from an exploding star)
Star wars isn't the only culprit, even movies as recent as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 portrayed Yondu and Rocket jumping through space at warp speed while remaining in one piece. I mean sure, they're not humans and you could argue that they have different physiology but is it really that different?
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Reference:
- Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos
- The Jump to Light Speed Is a Real Killer