For centuries, physicists thought there was no limit to how fast an object could travel. Nothing can travel faster than 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second). The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It's about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km).
The fastest spacecraft in history, the Parker solar probe, which is now in space, will reach a maximum speed of 450,000 miles per hour. It would take just 20 seconds to get from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take about 6,633 years for the solar probe to reach the closest neighboring solar system to Earth. It's about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers). This really depends on what you mean by “in space”.
If you just want to orbit the Earth, you must reach speeds of at least 4.9 miles per second, or approximately 17,600 miles per hour. However, if you want to completely escape Earth's gravity and travel to another moon or planet, you must go even faster, at a speed of at least 7 miles per second or about 25,000 miles per hour. Undoubtedly, micrometeoroids are not the only obstacle to future space missions, where higher human travel speeds are likely to come into play. Speculative dangers could also arise if humans manage to travel faster than light, either by taking advantage of gaps in known physics or through paradigm-shattering discoveries.
However, shortening travel times would mitigate these problems, so taking a faster approach is highly desirable. In the Isaac Asimov Foundation series, humanity can travel from one planet to another, from one star to another, or across the universe using jumping motors. General Relativity states that space and time are merged and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. The Orion spacecraft is destined to take astronauts to a low Earth orbit, and it's a good bet for the vehicle that will break the 46-year record for being the fastest we've ever traveled.
If you are at point A and can travel one meter per second, it will take 10 seconds to reach point B. Marc Millis, a propulsion physicist and former director of NASA's Innovative Propulsion Physics Program, warns that this possible speed limit for traveling by humans remains a distant concern. Some characters, such as the astronauts in the movies “Interstellar” and “Thor”, use wormholes to travel between solar systems in seconds. Scientists are investigating many other ways to go fast, including high-speed travel, the faster-than-light trips popularized by Star Trek.
However, assuming that we can overcome the considerable technological obstacles involved in building faster spaceships, our fragile masses, mostly of water, will have to face new and significant dangers posed by traveling at that high speed.
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