Assuming you could do this… (I am not trying to argue whether or not you could), wouldn’t you exist at all points of the universe at once since it takes 0 time to travel a distance?
For one thing, wouldn’t that hurt?
For another, if it is true, it makes all of those warping space ships in movies that much more advanced because they are able to keep their ship small. Smart bastards.
QuantumGrid,
The speed of light in a vacuum is 2.9979 X 10^8 meters per second. That’s pretty damn fast, but not instantaneous. Even traveling at the speed of light, it would take you a really long time just to get out of our galaxy.
I was and am still under the impression that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, and stops once you reach the speed of light.
You wouldn’t be everywhere at once relative to you, but to everyone else you would be.
According to some one at “rest”, it would take some time to cross the universe. But according to someone going at c, it would take no time (unless the universe is infinitely large, in case you’ll have a zero divided by a zero, which is indeterminite). To such a person, all events along their path would occur at exactly the same time and place. It would be a very confusing experiemce.
Yep, and then you de-evolve into some space slug and make babies with your Captain. Man, I love that episode!!
The feeling of being everywhere at once at the speed of light is not just due to time dilation, which is only one (albeit the most popular and well known) aspect of relativity.
Another that would impact your sensation is that as your speed approaches the speed of light, lengths shorten from your perspective.
There for, at the speed of light, all the space around you would shorten infinitely. It would not seem as though you were traveling at a super-high velocity through an immense universe, it would seem as though you were motionless in a universe that consisted only of a single point, that in which you were.
Note also that this does not apply to things hypothetically travelling at faster than the speed of light, only at the speed of light. Without going into too much detail, weird things do happen at FTL speeds, but they’re not the same weird things that happen at c.
Small note: the speed of light is 299792458 (that’s only 9 characters, instead of the 13 that 2.9979 X 10^8 requires) m/s.
But if you include the commas, needed for clarity, you’re back up to 11 characters: 299,792,458 m/s, so you only get half the efficiency gain RM Mentock claims 
Hey, efficiency and precision. Can’t beat it.
So, what about moving at 299792457 m/s? Could you live with that?
Look at it this way: As you approach the speed of light, time not only dialates but your ship becomes shorter and more massive. Immensely massive because E=mc[sup]2[/sup] works. Basic algebra tells you that E/c[sup]2[/sup]=m, which means that energy divided by the speed of light squared is the measure of the mass you add to your ship. This adds up as you approach c. With a little work I could find the equations that would tell you exactly when your little spacecraft would weigh more than the known universe. How are you going to move a spacecraft whose mass is going up towards infinity? The Lorentz contraction also comes into play here, as has been mentioned previously. And it would shrink you into a point very effectively as you got up to c. Bottom line: Accelerating a massive body to c is impossible. It would entail moving an infinitely massive geometric point.
Well, you CAN get to the speed of light if you combine yourself with an equal amount of antimatter. In fact, you can travel at light speed in every direction at once!
Larry Niven used a hypothetical field which converts matter into a giant photon-like particle in a sci-fi story. I dont’t think this has any theoretical objections - you’re not accelerating a massive body to the speed of light, you’re converting yourself into a form of energy which travels at the speed of light.
Problem is, once you’re in you spaceship and you switch this field on and go zipping off at c, the universe ends before you get to switch it off again. Assuming you don’t hit something!
hijack
I’m sorry but this is a real pet peeve with me. For something traveling at c the time that it experiences is on 0 it is undetermined. Time simply doen’t exit at c, it has no meaning, none. thank you.
I must disagree, etgaw. Assuming you’re a sentient massless particle, time for you would appear to move at normal speed, as it does for all inertial observers. It’s everybody ELSE’s clocks and measuring devices that appear to be wrong – and in this case they’d be very wrong indeed. As for the original question, time would pass as normal, but moving from place to place would seem to take no time because all points would appear to you to be infinitesimally close together. And looking to the side, everything would be rotated a full 90 degrees, so you’d be able to see the wrong sides of everything, like a giant cubist painting. It would also appear to you as though everybody else’s clocks were stopped.