Does It Fast Enough To Explore The Universe?

The speed of light can be thought of the speed limit of the universe. However 299,792,458 m/s or 670,616,629 mph, as staggering as it may sound, is truly not fast enough to explore the universe. Our solar system from the Sun to Pluto is 328.5 light minutes. This means that going at the speed of light, it would take about five and half hours. That may not sound like too long of a time, especially if it took the New Horizons probe nine years to reach Pluto. However, keep in mind that this is just our solar system – a grain of sand on a gigantic beach. The nearest star-system, the Alpha Centauri System, is 4.37 light years away. Our universe is so incomprehensibly gigantic and constantly expanding, that just the observable “sphere” of the universe around us by our most advanced telescopes is 92 billion light years across. That is why, if by some supernatural or transcendent force I could realize the true answer to any scientific question, I would want to know how exactly to achieve Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel. …show more content…
Without it, it would take trillions of years to explore the universe, even at the speed of light. We are sentient beings with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and achievement of FTL travel would be a paradigm shift in the path of humanity. It would allow humans to travel to the far reaches of the universe and back to Earth in a significantly shorter time. Humanity could keep records of every single star, solar-system, galaxy, and cluster it visits. How those unfathomably large stores of information will be kept is another problem entirely, but more than likely the “manifest destiny” spirit of humanity will solve every intermediate problem in between now and FTL travel’s