Stunned with technology that can help us get from New York to Los Angeles in just... 1 second

What if we could travel at the speed of light? There is still a long way to go, but surely this technology could one day allow us to get from New York to Los Angeles in under a second.

Light is the fastest thing in the world with a speed of 299,792,450 m/s. That is, it can go from Earth to the Moon in just over a second.

Creating vehicles that reach the speed of light is not easy. There are too many variables to deal with. However, the technology that we use in spacecraft today could allow us to exploit a small percentage of that speed.

The "solar sail" method is used on spacecraft. (Photo: bgr)

Harnessing the speed of light in travel

Traveling at a percentage of the speed of light doesn't sound like much. However, even at 1% of the speed of light, we can still travel more than 11 million kilometers in an hour. That means it takes just over a second to get from New York to Los Angeles. This is about 10,000 times faster than traveling in a jet plane.

Of course, harnessing that power is not easy. Currently, scientists are working on warp engines, technology that we use in spacecraft that can help vehicles achieve faster speeds.

In 2010, humans started using the Solar Sail method on some spacecraft. The idea of ​​the project is to use large mirrors to draw power from sunlight, similar to how ordinary sails use wind power. There is a lot of complicated math behind this technology, but if successfully applied on smaller scales, we can completely make a breakthrough.

Solar sails are actually just thin mirrors attached to spacecraft. The ships will use the collected sunlight to propel the ship forward. Scientists believe they will one day be able to travel at 10% the speed of light.

Light is the fastest thing in the world. (Photo: YiuCheung/Adobe)

Why don't we widely adopt this technology?

We already have the technology, so why don't we use it? This is not quite as simple as that. Energy is an important factor in mobility. Any moving object requires energy. This is called kinetic energy, and to go faster you will need a lot of kinetic energy. The problem, however, is that it takes a tremendous amount of kinetic energy to increase the speed of an object.

Making something go twice as fast requires four times as much energy. Increasing the speed of something three times requires nine times the energy, and so on. According to The Conversation, it would take about 200 trillion Joules to help a 50kg teenager move at 1% the speed of light, equivalent to the amount of energy used by 2 million Americans every day. If we want to move at such high speeds, we will need to find new ways to generate kinetic energy.

So far, we haven't even reached 1% of the speed of light. In fact, the closest ship to that velocity is NASA's Parker Solar Probe. In 2018, NASA launched a probe from Earth. After launch, it skimmed the surface of the Sun and used gravity to reach a speed of 531 thousand km/h, about 0.5% the speed of light.