THE UNIVERSAL SPEED LIMIT

Nothing can travel faster than light. This is not a question of technology, but of fundamental physics. The universal speed limit, which we commonly call the speed of light, is fundamental to way the universe works. Scientists have found that the faster you go, the more your spatial dimension in the forward dimension shrinks and the slower your clock runs when viewed by an outside observer. Space and time are not a fixed background on which everything takes place in the same way it always does. Instead, space and time can warp and bend. As you approach the speed of light your spatial dimension in the forward shrinks down to nothing and your clock slows to a stop. A reference frame with zero width and no progression in time is really a reference frame that does not exist. Therefore, this tells us that nothing can ever go faster than the speed of light, for the simple reason that space and time do not actually exist beyond this point. Because the concept of speed requires measuring a certain amount of distance traveled in space during a certain period of time, the idea of speed does not even physically exist beyond the speed of light. In fact, the phrase faster than light is physically meaningless. The restriction that nothing can travel faster than light is not as limiting as it seems. A more accurate statement of the principle would be, nothing can locally travel faster than light. This means that we can indeed acquire effective speeds faster than light if we use non-local scales. For instance, if wormholes exist you could use one to take a shortcut from Earth to the North Star. This is allowed because you never locally exceeded the speed of light. As another example, there are some distant stars in the universe that are moving away from each other at a speed faster than light. This is allowed because it is not a local speed. No alien species, no matter how advanced, can travel faster than light. Universal physics forbids it. As objects approach the speed of light they get harder and harder to accelerate further. It would take an infinite amount of energy to exactly reach the speed of light, let alone surpass it.