Can we achieve light-speed? yes i think we can...?

Question

ok... many many many many people think light-speed cannot be achieved... but, i think they could be proven wrong by a simple 100 sq. foot black sail. "Solar wind" is what can help us achieve Light-Speed.

Explination: if we attach a black sail to one of our shuttles we use, and find a way to deploy it while we're in space, light will move the black sail... if you can find a way to steer the ship so that it doesn't just "go with the flow", then you have the ability to go where you want to... at the speed of light.

the only thing that is a downside is: The General Law of relativity.
for the traveler, it would be a few days of travel once at the speed of light... but if he's going to a destination that is 3-4 light-years away, it will seem like 3-4 years or decades to the ppl on earth... or possibly longer... which, by then, all our relatives would be dead or old... very sad. please give me ur input on this and i'll reply as best i can.

to those of you sayning we would have to expand the mass of the sail... or how it would never work, blah blah blah... they have never been sailing on the water before have they?... the maximum speed you can go is the speed of the wind... on water you can go a little faster... but with solar wind... you cannot go faster but you CAN reach the speed of light within a few hours/minutes/days/months/years (in real time not light-speed time) and you'd have t decelerate at the end... all you have to do is find a way to deploy and collapse the sail (That is the tricky part... NASA actually tried this in 1982. but the sail cost was extremely high and they had a malfunction with deploying it...so they decided to give up on the idea and go back to the: "Hyper drive" junk...)

Answer 1

Please study the equation

m = (rest mass) / square root ( 1 - v^2 / c^2 )

In order for speed v to get to c (speed of light), the mass "m" will have to get larger and larger ... to infinity. Since it takes energy to accelerate anything with mass, it will take infinite energy to get to light speed.

That is more than all the energy in the universe.

Answer 2

No we cannot reach the speed of light. It would be lovely if we could but its simply not possible. What you are thinking of is a solar sail, it has been thought of for many years by astronomers. It does have some great potential for space travel but no where near the speed of light. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. Also a solar sail on an interplanetary mission would gain only 1 millimeter per second in speed every second it is pushed along by Solar radiation, so it would take a little while to build up any speed. But that does come out to an increase of 195 mph a day, which is nice :o) However, the law of relativitiy does put a damper on things.....To accelerate any matter to the speed of light would require an infinite amout of energy (basically impossible).

Answer 3

The speed of light is over 600 million miles per hour. Light is fast enough to travel around the world 7 times in one second.

OK so we build this big sail in space. There is debris floating in space. What if we hit a rock or some space dust going 100 million mph? How would the sail withstand this? You would have to build it big and strong (and heavy). Then you encounter the problem of the mass of the sail increasing with its speed (mass tending toward infinity). It doesn't look promising.

Answer 4

Can't do it. As your craft gets closer to c (speed of light), the mass of the craft gets larger. This is not saying you need a more massive sail; it's saying the mass of the sail (and the rest of the ship) will get more massive the faster you go. Eventually, you'll reach an equilibrium point at which photon pressure from stars is not enough to impart any additional speed.

To reach c, an object would become infinitely massive, and would need an infinitely large force to move it. That's the simplified explanation of relativity.

Answer 5

Regardless of your propulsion system, you can never go at the speed of light when compared to an observer. A solar sail by the way, will not go instantly at the speed of light. It will experience a slight force due to the momentum of photon sand accelerate according to the laws of physics and that force. It's probably one of the slowest accelerations possible. By the way, on the practical side, how do you move once you get away from a close light source ?

Answer 6

The speed of light is not really a velocity limit it is a time limit.
When the universe came into existence it was initiated by a space-time pulse of minimum duration.
The pulse was some where about 10 to the minus 95 of a second.
If you tried to split this pulse it could not be done because it would go out of existence.
The speed of light is an incident the needs time to occur..
If you tried to increase the speed of light you would be trying to force it to exist for a length of time that cannot exist.

Answer 7

General relativity is entrely irrelevant to this problem.

Special relativity, however, is relevant. As your sail speeds up its mass in the rest frame of the sun will increase, The faster it gets, the closer its mass will approach to infinity. The sun would have to give out infinite energy in photons to get it to the speed of light.

Sorry.

Answer 8

The Theory of Relativity says you are wrong. Mass of an object increases enormously as its velocity nears the speed of light. One could burn the whole universe and not provide enough energy to accelerate an object of infinite mass to the speed of light. You need to study much more to avoid confusion that you display in this question.

Answer 9

I dont think we will achieve light speed; rather, I think we will find a way to get around it so to speak: by warping space, discovering some sort of hyperspace type travel, ect.

Answer 10

No, you can not achieve the speed of light. Think about of it in term of Maxwell equations and Theory of General Relativity.