Can you travel faster than the speed of light?

The speed of light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. The fastest thing in the universe. But can we go faster than the speed of light? The short answer is no. Unfortunately, scientists haven’t discovered a way to travel faster than the speed of light, and here’s why.

As an object reaches the speed of light its mass becomes closer to infinite, until it has completely reached the speed of light. This means that you would also need an infinite amount of energy in order to reach the speed of light, which is impossible. But, let’s take that factor away, how could we theoretically travel faster than the speed of light? 

The fastest spacecraft we’ve created so far was the New Horizons spacecraft. Its max speed was 21 KM/s when it was passing Jupiter. However the fastest manned rocket was the Voyager 1 going at an astonishing speed of 77 KM/s. But, this isn’t the fastest spacecraft that has been made, there’s something in development called the Solar Sail. Solar sails

The fastest spacecraft we’ve created so far was the New Horizons spacecraft. Its max speed was 21 KM/s when it was passing Jupiter. However the fastest manned rocket was the Voyager 1 going at an astonishing speed of 77 KM/s. But, this isn’t the fastest spacecraft that has been made, there’s something in development called the Solar Sail. Solar sailsare able to travel at 29933 KM/s, which is still nowhere near the speed of light, in fact it’s only 10% the speed of light. The way a solar sail works is it has a sail that captures the sun's light and then propels it forward using that method. In fact, this is the same method used by sailboats, but instead they capture the wind. NASA is currently the only ones developing solar sails along with some of their partners that are also researching.

“As we venture farther out into the cosmos than ever before, we’ll need innovative, cutting-edge technologies to drive our missions," Bill Nelson the NASA Administrator stated in an article about the solar sail. 

Meaning there is further research undergoing and this could also mean that maybe the solar sail could achieve a faster speed than what has currently been theorized.

As of this moment in time there is only one possible theory that can travel at the speed of light, and it's the warp drive from Star Trek. The warp drive works by breaking down the matter and antimatter using fusion reactions. Once this is completed, it produces so much energy that it completely warps space time meaning it can travel faster than the speed of light. To put that into perspective it would mean you could travel to the sun and back in 16 minutes, to the moon and back in a little over 2 seconds and around the Earth 7 times in one second. Light is so incredibly fast, but at the same time incredibly slow. It would still take an astonishing 200,000 years to travel across the milky way while traveling at the speed of light.