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What would happen if traveling at the speed of light?

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If it were possible for an object to travel at the speed of light, when the object returned to the place it started, would it be the same time as when the object left, or would it be hundreds of years later?

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  1. you die


  2. The mass will increase indefinitley and time will stop for the traveller.But time on earth will run in the normal spped.

  3. If you travelled in your car lets say at 60 km/h and you returned in 2 hours then you would be 2 hs older and everone at the starting point too. If you travelled at the speed of light and where underway for 2 hs again you would be 2hs older as would everyone be at the starting point. The only thing thats changed is the distance travelled, ie. at60km/h its 120km and at 'c' 1.296 times 10 to the 12th power km. I dare say that you would probably feel a whole lot more jet-lagged!!!

  4. well, lets say you traveled for 100 years. from your point of view, you traveled for 100 years, and you aged 100 years. from the point of view of someone on earth, you arrived the same time you left and you didnt age at all.

  5. it could be tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of years later. if it went at the full speed of light - which we are certain is not possible for real objects - then even an instant at that speed would shift you forward an infinite amount of time.

    But this is part of General Relativity and depends on the enormous acceleration the object would have to go through to return to a point in space, not just the variation in speeds.

    People are often very glib about who's time gets slower. but if the speed of both objects is constant, then - this gets a bit complicated - you cannot say that one is moving and the other one still. You can consider that either one of the two is moving and he other still, and you would be  'right'. You cannot say that one time stays fixed and the other changes.

    It is only when one of the objects accelerates that you can see the real effects of time dilation.

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