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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 2401439" data-attributes="member: 7533">IAAParticle Accelerator Technician...More or less right.  If a ship traveled at an average of about 90% the speed of light, it would take about 4.5-5 years to reach Alpha Centauri, and a little over 2 years of apparent time would have passed for the passengers on the ship.Problem #1: Anything that travels at the speed of light cannot have mass.Problem #2: Anything that travels at the speed of light only travels at the speed of light; there's no slowing down or speeding up.Setting those aside, we delve into Sci-fi speculation.  As you approach the speed of light, time slows down to the passengers.  The limit of that equation, as Michael Morris said, approaches, but never quite reaches, zero.  The assuption would be, therefore, that time stands still for whatever object is travelling at the SoL (an appropriate acronym, as we will find out shortly).So, the SoL drive gets activated, the ship travels to its destination, and slows back down to 'normal' speeds.  From the viewpoint of the SoL passengers, as soon as the ship reaches the SoL, time stops and resumes, once it begins slowing down.  The entire journey at SoL does not exist for the passengers; to them, it is as if the ship itself instantly jumped from one point in space to another.Sounds a lot like sci-fi 'hyperdrive/jumpgate/warp drive' type stuff, doesn't it?  The main difference, is that during that instant transport moment, time is still passing for the rest of the universe...  The passengers not only instantly arrive 4 light years distant, but 4 irreversable years into the future.Now, here's the tricky part...  When you travel anywhere, you have to know when to turn off the engines and stop.  But, if you are travelling at the SoL, time is frozen.  Not only can you not percieve the appropriate time to stop the SoL engine, but you simply couldn't act to turn off, even if you wanted to.  What would be need would be some sort of relativistic 'net' at the end of your journey to 'catch' the SoL ship, turn its SoL engine off, and slow it down to 'normal' speeds.  Of course, given the astronomical distances traveled at the SoL, you'd need a 'net' that was AUs across to even have a slight chance of hitting it from parsecs away.  Remember, once you are SoL, you also can't adjust your course.This is why, intentional or not, Science Fiction appropriately uses Jump Gates, Wormholes, Hyperspace, Warp Drives and other means of making extradimensional shortcuts through which you travel at normal speeds, rather than actually travelling as fast or faster than light.Conceptually, it's 'easier'...  and universally legal...  to bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.The closest thing to the SoL travel you suggest would actually be Star trek transporters, with the exception that you'd need a recieving transporter to arrive at your estination.In regards to the non-SoL point of view, he would be frozen in mid-step, and would finish the step as soon as the ship slows down.From the SoL point of view, he lifts his foot as the ship leaves Sirius and in less than an instant, the ship is approaching Betelgeuse as he puts his foot down.Yup...  From the point of view of the photon itself, that sounds about right.Undoubtedly there is.  Figure it out, and they'll give you a Nobel Prize.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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