Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, that's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned a sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light years thick but out by us it's just three thousand light years wide. We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point, we go around every two hundred million years and our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed thereis. So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space because there's bugger all down here on earth.
And to add the cherry on top, should you ever reach his arbitrary speed limit, it distorts time itself. Even if you flew through space at c for a little weekend getaway, you'd return to a now foreign world only to find time had skipped forward +2,000 years, your entire family and social circles long dead from old age with societal and technical advancements beyond what you could have ever thought possible, completely isolating you. You're now doomed to live in an unfamiliar world where not a single human speaks your language nor can they relate to you in any meaning way.
Light speed is a "you must be this clever to participate" barrier to becoming an interstellar species, that's all. Even if it's not breakable, it just means you gotta be able to plan hundreds or thousands of years into the future.
And sending a space ship at a good fraction of light speed to a nearby star uses more energy than our total civilization uses at the moment. We've got some work to do climbing up the Kardashev scale before we're anywhere close to that kind of travel.
Hear me out. It doesn't even matter that it's 96 billion light-years away if you're traveling at light speed. Because if you can travel at light speed, time would be frozen for you relative to earth time.
So if you're in a spaceship traveling at light speed to your destination, it would feel like you gotten there in an instant.
That the speed of light was infinity at the birth of the universe but sentient species reduced the speed of light several times as a offence/defense mechanism to protect themselves from others.
Let's say we reset everything today, wipe out everyone's memory. God will be forgotten, science will still exist. People will figure out science sooner or later.
There's a bit of skipped step here. Just how do you get to the speed of light when it requires an infinite amount of fuel, with diminishing returns on the quantity of fuel you have?