Traveling the Universe at Light Speed

The speed of light.

As far as we're aware, nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light. This means that no matter how advanced our technology becomes, we'll always face a hard limit on how fast we can go — and that's 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year.

That may sound like a long distance, but the universe is big. Really big. So traveling the cosmos at this speed is going to be a rather time intensive process. In fact, you wouldn't even be able to make it to the closest black hole (Gaia-BH1) before you died.

Kind of a bummer, huh?

Unless we develop technologies that allow us to (somehow, inexplicably) travel faster than light speed, there's no way that any human could ever see more than our own teeny tiny portion of the Milky Way — not in one lifetime, anyway.

Wondering what you could see in your lifetime? Here's a breakdown of just how long it would take to get around the cosmos if you could travel at the speed of light.

• Moon (closest neighbor): 238,900 miles away = 1.28 seconds
• Mars (closest Earth-like planet): 140 million miles away = 12.52 min
• Proxima Centauri (Sun's closest star): 4.24 light-years away = 4.24 years
• Gaia BH1 (closest black hole): 1,600 light-years away = 1,600 years
• Center of the Milky Way: 26,000 light-years away = 26,000 years
• Andromeda galaxy (closest galaxy): 2.53 million light-years away = 2.53 million years
• Edge of the observable universe (we can never travel or see beyond this point): 46.6 billion light-years away = 46.6 billion years