Faster than the speed of light

The concept of exceeding the speed of light has been dead since 1905, when a fellow named Einstein published a paper called 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies'. And yet, the idea persists.

Pretty much every Hollywood sci-fi story since the genesis of the genre includes it. Even so-called 'hard' sci-fi which attempts to retain a veneer of scientific plausibility makes an exception for the fabled FTL drive.

Turns out, you may never reach or exceed 299,792,458 metres per second in this universe. This commandment is often qualified with 'unless you have infinite energy'. But since there is no such thing as infinite energy in this universe, that is a pointless qualification. Just like you may not adjust the gravitational constant, just like you may not adjust the mass of the electron, you may never reach or exceed the speed of light. Full stop. Deal with it.

There is no reason to presume that reality will yield to us simply because we wish it.

Einstein gave us an out in the form of time dilation - relativistic speeds allow you to travel great distances in comparatively short subjective times. Say you travel a distance of ten light years at 99.5% of the speed of light. To an outside observer, the journey will take a little over a decade, but to you, it will seem to take only a year. At 99.5% of the speed of light, nine tenths of the objective journey time is not experienced by the subjective observer.

At greater fractions of the speed of light the effect becomes even more pronounced. At a constant acceleration of ten metres per square second (approximately the same as acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface), you could reach Alpha Centauri in under two and a half years, the centre of the galaxy in eleven years, the Andromeda galaxy in fifteen years, and the edge of the observable universe in twenty-four years.

I'll let that sink in. The edge of the frakking universe in under three decades. Nothing Star Wars or Star Trek dreamt up could do that.

It seems more than a little childish to throw a tantrum about not being able to travel faster than light when reality allows you to cross the universe in mere years of subjective time. Yes, you'd need a beefy energy source to do this, but it's not as though exceeding the speed of light wouldn't need a similarly energy-dense medium, even if it were possible.

Atomic Rockets provides a very good elaboration on these points.