When traveling at the speed of light, how would you avoid running into something?

Question

Like in movies...When traveling in outerspace, If it were possible to reach light's speed in a spaceship, how would they avoid running straight into a blackhole, asteroid, planet, Star, or whatever?

Answer 1

At that speed, just hitting something the size of a grain of salt would be disaster.

Answer 2

Discounting the fact that we cannot reach v = c, light speed, there are other issues way before getting that velocity.\

For example, a tiny bit of space dust with, say, 1 gm mass, would have p = mv = (1/1000)kg (300,000,000 m/sec) = 300,000 kg-m/sec momentum if your spaceship ran into that speck. By comparison a car traveling 120 mph (176 ft/sec) or about 55 m/sec and having a mass of 1,000 kg would have p = mv = 5,500 kg-m/sec. In other words, that speck of cosmic dust of a gram mass would hit your spaceship with almost sixty times = 300,000/5,500 more momentum than a car going 120 mph.

Relativistic effects are not considered here. Even so, I think you can see that colliding with just about anything would be disastrous. Even a v = c/2, half life speed, the dust collision would be about 30 times more than a car at 120 mph. Still a lot of damage.

Light speed travel, or even 5% of c, (3.3 X 10^7 mph) which is still faster than anything on Earth now, would be fool hardy.

Answer 3

I guess you could leave the headlights on so that you could see whatever is in front and avoid it. Like I mean steer clear of it, you know?

OK, seriously now. There would be no need to travel at light speed. (Not a wise idea anyway as you have already suspected.) If you want to get to another part of the galaxy (or universe) in a jiffy, it's much easier and time-saving to go thru a wormhole.

Sigh... why do we get so many of this kind of question here? Why do so many people want to travel at the speed of light? Don't they realize it's still gonna take up lots and lots of time to get to their destination? The nearest star is still a few light years away, meaning it'll still take 4.3 years to reach Alpha Centauri at light speed. To get outside the Milky Way galaxy would take, what, thousands of years? There's really no point in it. By the time you reach your destination, things would have changed so much. Or your destination may no longer be there. So save time (and energy), and use a wormhole instead. You'll travel thousands of light years in minutes (or even seconds) and still be back on time for dinner (provided you don't stay and hang out for long over there).

Answer 4

It is unknown what would happen if you could reach lightspeed. According to Einstein you can never reach lightspeed as an accelerating spaceship - you can only get 99.99...% near it. I'm afraid that avoidance of objects would be extremely difficult as you neared that speed. First, any form of eletromagnetic radiation would be severly shifted - in fact all you would see from the front of the ship would be a small circle of light in the direct line of motion - the rest would be black.

Answer 5

its hollywood.. remember, anything can happen in movies.