![]() The reason? A property of the Universe known as inertia, whereby any object with mass resists change to its state of motion. Rapid acceleration and deceleration can be lethal to the human organism: witness the bodily trauma in car crashes as we go from a mere tens-of-kilometres-per-hour clip to zero in the span of seconds. However we attain speeds in excess of 40,000kph, we will have to ramp up to (and down from) them patiently. Speculative dangers could arise, too, if humans achieve faster-than-light travel, either by exploiting loopholes in known physics or through paradigm-shattering discoveries. Therefore, humans should – in theory – be able to travel at rates just short of the “Universe’s speed limit”: the speed of light.īut assuming we can overcome the considerable technological obstacles in building faster spacecraft, our fragile, mostly-water bodies will have to contend with significant new hazards that come with such high-speed travel. Surprisingly, speed – defined as a rate of motion – in of itself is not at all a problem for us physically, so long as it’s relatively constant and in one direction. Can we hope to safely bridge the gap from 40,000kph to those speeds? Light zips along at about a billion kilometres per hour. “There is no real practical limit to how fast we can travel, other than the speed of light,” says Bray. “I think a hundred years ago, we probably wouldn’t have imagined a human could travel in space at almost 40,000 kilometres per hour,” says Jim Bray of the aerospace firm Lockheed Martin.Įven Orion won’t represent the peak of our speed potential, though. On their way back from a lap around the Moon in 1969, the astronauts’ capsule hit a peak of 24,790mph (39,897km/h) relative to planet Earth. The current human speed record is shared equally by the trio of astronauts who flew Nasa’s Apollo 10 mission. Is there some limit, however, beyond which hurtling bodies can no longer bear the strain of speed? In fact, humans have already travelled many times faster than Mach 5. Those jets would carry no crew – but not because humans can’t travel at such high speeds. Recent months, for instance, brought news that students in Germany have broken the record for the fastest accelerating electric car, and that the US Air Force plans to develop hypersonic jets that would travel at more than five times the speed of sound – that’s speeds in excess of 3,790mph (6,100km/h).
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