speed of light
Some days ago I stumbled upon this on X
light really is too slow. when you contemplate the vastness of the universe you realize that the speed of light is essentially a prison.
and it is not wrong at all, light travels through space approximately at , that seems fast as fuck for our scale, and it is.
The distance from where I am currently sitting writing this to it’s antipode is , so
for comparison, the blink of an eye lasts between 0.1 and 0.4 seconds, the light literally circumnavigate the globe in the blink of an eye.
What’s cool about the universe is how things are mind-blowing and thought provoking wherever you look. Start by zooming out from Earth, quickly you’ll realize how ant-like we are to the vastness of space
The average distance between the Earth and the Moon is , light takes ~1.28 seconds to do this small trip, but let’s go a little bit further
Now we are talking, a whopping 12.5 minutes for light to cover the distance.
I remember February 18, 2021 watching Perseverance’s landing and listening the telecommunications team being worried about the delay they had with the rover, it took me a few seconds to understand why that was the case.
The landing procedure involved atmospheric reentry, parachute deployment, heat shield and back shell separation, then landing, and it took 7 minutes to complete. Communication in these cases is limited by the speed of light so we are tied to the average 12.5 minutes delay. The rover was alone and we could only sit and wait for it to do all the procedures right, funny.
Speed of light is not only a prison in the sense of traversing the vastness of space but for communications too, let me illustrate that point with an example.
Recently, on April 16, 2025 there was a lot of buzzing about a exoplanet named K2-18b, it was discovered in 2015 and in 2019 the presence of water vapor in it’s atmosphere was reported, then in 2023 carbon dioxide and methane followed. The buzzing in 2025 was caused because of the finding of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) in K2-18b atmosphere, this chemical is considered as a biosignature as on Earth is produced by marine phytoplankton and bacteria. DMS was found in concentrations 20 times higher than in our planet, and adding the short-lived behavior of the molecule this amount of concentration suggest that there is a mechanism on the planet that is replenishing DMS, hopefully life.
K2-18b is 124 light-years away from us, even travelling at the speed of light it would take a spaceship or probe 124 years to reach it, and 248 year to say Hi and receive Hi! from the other end, it’s crazy. Let me, without any authority, doubt in Einstein’s special relativity. I do think that the speed of light limit can and will be broken, because the universe is too magnificent to not be experienced, or maybe the universe just does not care about us and does not care if we can dwell the stars or not, maybe we are supposed to rot in our solar system, but I want to believe, I want to believe that future generations will be able to do the unthinkable to solve this problem.
But for them to do the unthinkable we have to keep doing our part, expand our knowledge, be curious, build and test, and I am sure that in the process we’ll break some barriers, opening the field for the next physicists, engineers and mathematicians.
Ad Astra per Aspera!