What If You Sped Up and Couldn’t Stop?

Something goes wrong and you start speeding up, and it doesn't stop. You outrun traffic on your own street, then a bullet train, an airliner and your own sound. The ground drops away under you. You pass the Moon in fifteen seconds, the Sun in half a minute, and then your speed sticks just under the speed of light and something else gives way instead: time. The readout in the corner is your speed the whole way. The numbers are real: sound travels at 1,235 km/h, staying in orbit takes about 28,000 km/h, and leaving Earth takes about 40,000. The Moon is 384,400 kilometres away and the Sun is 150 million, eight minutes away for light. The nearest star is 4.25 light-years out, the Orion nebula about 1,300, Andromeda 2.5 million and the Virgo cluster 54 million. Nothing with mass can reach the speed of light, but the closer you get, the slower your own clock runs, so the second readout is real too: it shows how far the clocks at home have run ahead of yours. Some of it is not real. The dust and the stars streaking past between galaxies are there so you can see yourself move, everything is lined up along one straight path, and at these speeds the whole sky would really be squeezed into one blinding point ahead of you. Galaxies more than about 16 billion light-years away can never be reached, even at the speed of light, because the space in between is stretching too fast. The very last thing that happens is made up. You ran for nine minutes. At home, more than sixteen billion years went by. 0:00 You can't slow down 0:06 Your street 0:46 The highway 0:58 Faster than sound 1:26 The mountains 1:38 Off the ground 2:18 The Moon 2:48 The Sun 3:34 The stars 4:22 The Orion nebula 4:53 The Milky Way 5:52 Andromeda 6:21 The Virgo cluster 7:07 The Great Wall 7:50 Out of reach #whatif #science #speedoflight #space #universe