Narrator: Near light speed 101: Effects of near-light-speed travel.

First, a lot of weird things can happen, like time and space getting all bent out of shape. For example, If you’re moving at nearly the speed of light, according to the clock inside your rocket, you’ll only take a bit more than half the time to reach your destination compared to what a clock on your planet would say. The end result is that while your clock might move normally to you, you’d see the clocks back home had moved further when you return, so you might want to reschedule your dental appointments before you leave.

Also, because you’re going so fast, what would otherwise be just a few hydrogen atoms that you’d run into quickly becomes a LOT of dangerous particles, so you should probably have shields that keep them from frying your ship and also likely you.

And finally, you wouldn’t want to accelerate too quickly toward the speed of light, because, well.

Thanks for watching, and please...be careful out there.