Travel at the speed of light

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**Grey Templar**

http://gizmodo.com/this-video-lets-you-travel-at-the-speed-of-light-sort-1683107013

Riding Light is a 45-minute short film/animation that attempts to recreate what it would be like to hitch a ride on the back of a photon and travel from the core of the sun to beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Be prepared to feel completely insignificant.

All of humanity has a close up in the video for, oh, about 2 seconds, until the photon blasts past the moon's orbit and onto Mars. The upper left corner keeps track of distance traveled and time elapsed since you've been vomited from the sun's core and the upper right has a handy countdown to your next planetary encounter. So you can skip to the brief flybys if you don't have 45 minutes to dedicate to a quick trot through out solar system. None of this is visually based in science, such as how we would even perceive light and time if we were traveling at the same speed, but the film does use accurate distances and speeds to convey how utterly massive our solar system really is.

This romp through space was pieced together by animator Alphonse Swinehart, who came up with the idea after poring over astronomy books. I can't decide if I'm more in awe at the fact that the speed of light can actually feel slow or just depressed after realizing that honestly everything we do on this mud ball planet is completely pointless and space is an endless vacuum of swirling galaxies ready to swallow us whole.

Go to link for video. Very cool.

**hotsauceman1**

More emotional then the twilight films.....

**Iron_Captain**

It is like playing Elite

angerous, except without shooting stuff.

**Smacks**

That's really cool, It's amazing how slow the speed of light seems at those scales. Of course, with time dilation it would actually feel instantaneous. At 90% of the speed of light (slower than in the video) it would take about three and a half minutes to reach Earth, which would be twice as fast as we see here.

You might also like this scale map of the solar system: If the moon were one pixel

The distances are pretty insane. It takes about half an hour to scroll to Neptune.

**Co'tor Shas**

Yep. In takes like 8 minutes for light to reach earth.

**Smacks**

Co'tor Shas wrote:
Yep. In takes like 8 minutes for light to reach earth.

It depends on your frame of reference, the speed of light is constant, time is not. If you are standing on the Earth with a stopwatch, then yes it will take about 8 mins for light you are observing to reach Earth, but if you were following behind the same beam of light in a spaceship at 167,654 miles per second (0.9*c) with a stopwatch, then your clock would run slower, so it would only take you three and a half minutes. At 99% of the speed of light your clock would hardly move at all.

**TheDraconicLord**

Well... I feel insignificant now

**Matt.Kingsley**

Here I was expecting to see all the universe* at the same time...
(for those who don't understand, when you travel at the speed of light time stops in your frame of inertial reference, so to you you'd be everywhere along your path at the same time, though to others you wouldn't be)

*well, not EXACTLY all of it... but more than what we see in the video

**Co'tor Shas**

Smacks wrote:
Co'tor Shas wrote:
Yep. In takes like 8 minutes for light to reach earth.
It depends on your frame of reference, the speed of light is constant, time is not. If you are standing on the Earth with a stopwatch, then yes it will take about 8 mins for light you are observing to reach Earth, but if you were following behind the same beam of light in a spaceship at 167,654 miles per second (0.9*c) with a stopwatch, then your clock would run slower, so it would only take you three and a half minutes. At 99% of the speed of light your clock would hardly move at all.

Well, using our time, it takes about 8 minutes for the photons to reach us. That was my point. It's not so much about the physics (although they are quite interesting), but to give an idea of the distance.

**Orlanth**

TheDraconicLord wrote:
Well... I feel insignificant now

I have the opposite view. With so much emptiness the scale of the universe makes us a special highlight and therefore precious.

**Compel**

I tend to disagree with Orlanth on a lot of issues but that mirrors pretty close to how I feel.

"Sure, we're insignificant, but look at all the badass stuff we've done."

**Skinnereal**

Co'tor Shas wrote:
Smacks wrote:
Co'tor Shas wrote:
Yep. In takes like 8 minutes for light to reach earth.
It depends on your frame of reference, the speed of light is constant, time is not. If you are standing on the Earth with a stopwatch, then yes it will take about 8 mins for light you are observing to reach Earth, but if you were following behind the same beam of light in a spaceship at 167,654 miles per second (0.9*c) with a stopwatch, then your clock would run slower, so it would only take you three and a half minutes. At 99% of the speed of light your clock would hardly move at all.

Well, using our time, it takes about 8 minutes for the photons to reach us. That was my point. It's not so much about the physics (although they are quite interesting), but to give an idea of the distance.

Which is why an Astronomical Unit is around 8 light-minutes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit

**Co'tor Shas**

Yep.