Sure.

Accelerate at 1g and you'll get pretty close in about 5 years.

One day it will be possible, but only after a very long time :)

Sure.

You just need a sufficient amount of shielding to protect the ship from radiation, but fortunately as I understand it, its almost all coming from the front so you can concentrate your shielding there. Water is actually a good shield.

If you are constantly accelerating at a slow pace, then you wouldn't really notice it. Star Trek had to create inertia dampened due to the rapid acceleration and deceleration ships undergo which would be an issue.

If you're traveling at the speed of light. What happens when you turn your headlights on? -mitch

We're already moving at 1.3 million miles per hour as the Milky Way drags our solar system with it to it's destination of the Great Attractor at the center of the Laniakea Supercluster. But because everything else around us is also moving at that speed, it doesn't feel like we're moving at all let alone being squished to the ground like a pancake or flying off the Earth's surface.

Slow acceleration would lead to extremely high speed eventually, but at the same time, if you travel anywhere close to lightspeed, wouldn't the increased energy basically make everything more radioactive for you. Space is filled with cosmic radiation, so higher speeds on a relativistic scale should make that radiation even more dangerous. Also, any matter would have an incredible amount of added kinetic energy so a speck of dust might hit like a torpedo at even low percentage of lightspeed.

So high speeds are pretty likely to destroy the ship. Nevertheless, if there is a race out there that figured it out, that's still tens of thousands of light-years to cross and due to the danger, it is doubtful they would be traveling at near light-speed. So, for all we know, an alien ship flew by the planet a million years ago and didn't see anything interesting and the next ship will pass by a thousand years from now.

Even using human reference, there were places in the remote regions of the Roman Empire that never encountered the Romans simply because they were so far removed from any normal trade routes. There might be an incredible amount of civilized interstellar trade in the galaxy, but we simply don't have the ability to detect it or know what to look for.

Personally, I imagine that all the factors required to even reach a level of technological complexity like ours is both rare and so far there is no evidence that technological progress is sustainable even when possible. Therefore, the odds of there being an extremely advanced interstellar civilization are likely very, very low. Possibly so low that even most galaxies are devoid of it.

Not so much the acceleration as the energy requirements and the threat of coming across most anything. There's another reason we can't: the tiniest thing in space would destroy us spectacularly. Light is a particle/wave, not even big enough for atoms to distress. A human or structure? No, it would create an unpleasantly spectacular burst of energy probably immediately.

We already are, relative to distant galaxies speeding away from us.

What acceleration? If you are at light speed you are not accelerating.

You couldn't prove that it worked to us, because you would have left us all in the past. I hope it works out for you though .

We could casually arrive near light speed aside hitting that speed instantly, this would avoid the effects of inertia turning you into liquid however it would take a very long time to reach such speeds. If by chance we can control time dilation (creating a bubble around our ship) then we could avoid inertia all together because the ship is not actually travelling, the space around it is.

The issue with creating an envelope around a ship is the amount of energy required to distort spacetime, far more then we are currently capable of.

The light speed limit stems from a misunderstanding of the special theory of relativity. It doesn't say that you can't travel faster than light. What it says is IF you DO travel faster than light then you also begin to outrun time. So that to an outside observer you arrived before you left. Even though from your perspective you continued to travel forwards in time at your usual rate.

The speed, or near the speed, of light is actually very slow when talking about the distances involved. See how they talk about the light from other stars or galaxies. We are seeing light from 200,000 years ago, for example. So if, you were traveling at or near the speed of light, it could take 200,000to travel. travel. If your talking about traveling interstellar distances, you have to find another way. Science fiction has a number of ways to solve that, but do any of them work? Apparently not, since the OP made a accurate observation: we appear to be alone. No one has said hello. So faster than light, or FTL, is unlikely. Or, maybe we are the first. Unique. Which, I think is also unlikely considering the age of the universe. What is most likely, interstellar travel is near impossible at least in normal human life spans.

I don't think so. Space is not a perfect vacuum. So traveling anywhere close to the speed of light will make your ship smash at those atoms at that speed, so it would be like the ship was inside a particle accelerator. That would likely fry up all the people inside with deadly radiation. Or even vaporize the ship itself.

Not in a literal sense.

I think probably yes. Right now it's still a Sci-Fi subject, but in the next 500 to 1000 years it's possible we'll make incredible unbelievable advances.

If you exellerate gradually you might never know you are going faster then light right? Besides ..

Einstein answered that question 100 years ago. Increase speed = increase mass.

Off topic a little but Hyperion books 3/4 deal with this in a …messy way…lol

I do it every the time I turn on a light!

Tbh I think we’ll figure out more about teleportation before speed of light travel

People used to think trains, cars, etc. would flatten people like that, 30 miles per hour was a nearly insane speed to even imagine before cars were around!

Maybe, but you’d also have to maintain that speed for quite a while to get anywhere

Unlikely - even if you had enough reaction mass to accelerate to say, 0.9c, the collisions with hydrogen and helium atoms in the interstellar space will destroy any "ship" travelling that fast.

What happens if you are travelling at the speed of light and you turn your lights on?

I think that is a safe assumption

Not quite what you asked, but any entity can be modeled as traveling near the speed of light by selecting an appropriate frame of reference.  For example, from the frame of reference of an arbitrary photon all entities will be traveling at or near the speed of light.

Regarding the search for extraterrestrial life, there are countless possibilities for why we haven't encountered any such form.  Maybe Earth really is specially crafted to support life.  Maybe extraterrestrial life has visited and deemed humanity as unworthy or too primitive for contact.  Maybe the universe is a Dark Forest.  Maybe there exists some Great Filter that prevents life from progressing past a certain biological or technological point.

The problem is not what you think. The problem is moving near the speed of light causes you to be bombarded with intense radiation ( subatomic particles hitting you near the speed of light). So, no.

There is no such thing as a universal frame of rest, so we are probably already traveling close to the speed of light relative to something out there.

I think it is impossible. Also, even at the speed of light, intergalactic/interplanetary-system travel still would take years or centuries (depending on the distance)

I dont think you grasp how big the milky way is. And why would they come here? How would they know we are here? By detecting our radio waves? Then we're only talking about being detected within 100 light years or so. Which means depending on where and when they detected our radio waves, even at light speed they couldn't have reached us yet. If they're 50 light years away and just detected us 10 years ago and immediately set out to find us, they wouldn't even be 1/4 of the way here yet if they were traveling at the speed of light.

We haven’t been contacted by aliens because we’re in a localized ancestor simulation of the solar system.

its not necessary. this is a hologram. we just need to Crack the source code. thats why you see objects flying around breaking the laws of physics... right angle turns at super high speeds, cross medium travel with zero impact....hologram. There is another layer to reality beyond spacetime. How will we Crack the code you ask? By playing God in our own simulations we will eventually uncover the truth.