Journeys and Space and time

Ever since people could communicate with each other, the stars have been a big point of conversations. May it be through old tales about constellations or methods to keep yourself in the right direction, the stars have always been a point of fixation all throughout time. Constellations have had a huge impact on our ancient ancestors, be it through astrology or astronomy, constellations have still played pivotal roles in every day life. However, the stars that we see today aren't exactly the same stars that our ancestors have seen. For example, the constellation Leo the lion looks almost nothing like it did thousands of years ago. This is for a multitude of reasons, primarily due to the motion of the stars. 

The ability to travel even close to the speed of light is still far and away from our reach, and until we can get closer to reaching that goal, intergalactic space travel like in the movies will only be works of fictions they are now. Even the fastest machines that we've ever produced, the Voyager space crafts ( Mentioned in previous posts) only travel at 1/ 40,000 times the speed of light. That is a minuscule amount, and to reach the nearest star (Alpha Centari) 165,000 years. That's more then ten times the amount of times that humans have been alive. 

Just because traveling at the speed of light seems like work of fiction, hasn't stopped the brave few from contemplating it. Probably one of the most noteworthy is famous theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Einstein's equations and theories have gone on to do amazing things and revolutionize our understandings of many things in many fields of science. Just a few of Einsteins many discoveries are: The photo electric affect, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy. Einstein has had many theories about the speed of light as well. One of his more famous ones was what would happen if we were to travel at the speed of light? This turns out to have an interesting answer. If I were to travel at the speed of light, time would slow down and even stop for me. So in essence, if I were traveling the speed of light and could stop whenever i wanted to, i could be anywhere instantaneously, without my knowledge of any time passing. This does help us in the minute chance that we do end up achieving speeds that approach the speed of light, traveling through vast space would be easier for us. Without us having to spend the years and years that it takes light to travel almost any distance in the cosmos, time would slow down to ridiculously slow speeds.