What would we see at the speed of the light

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Today what would we see if we approach the speed of light. let's Embark together on a space ship which accelerates away from Earth moving faster and faster what would we see when constantly accelerating what Optical effects would occur and if we try to exceed light speed by bending space-time like in Sci-Fi movies what would we see answering these questions will lead us to explore many fascinating phenomena of our universe and immerse ourselves at the heart of special and general relativity our spacecraft is initially at rest

once launched we begin to accelerate we imagine that its propulsion system allows us to accelerate constantly as long as we wish as we gain speed we move away from Earth by accelerating more and more one would think that the speed would eventually become unbearable.

However this is not the case speed has no effect on our body when two trains cross it is impossible to feel whether it is our train or the other which is at rest similarly inside the spaceship we cannot feel its speed but only its acceleration the thrust of the reactors which presses us against our seats if this thrust is reasonable it will be perfectly bearable all along our journey even When approaching the speed of light.

There is nonetheless a risk associated with very high speeds a collision at High Velocity a mere Speck of dust would cause colossal damage if it hit us fortunately our ship is equipped with a force field that repels dangerous objects and allows us to roam freely through space as we accelerate a first Optical effect appears the stars in front of us which we get closer to seem to gradually move away the sky contracts before us

To understand think of this common situation you are in a car driving at high speed and it starts to rain the rain falls vertically from top to bottom but as the car moves forwards you receive raindrops on the windshield from face on the rain does not appear to fall from

above but from the front as if its trajectory were tilted and the more you accelerate the more the rain seems to come from face on our spaceship the optical effect is perfectly analogous the stars is light comes from a certain direction but as we accelerate the light rays appeared to come more and more from the front their Direction seems different when we are in motion this is the aberration of light as light focuses in front of us its intensity increases while behind us the sky seems to widen and becomes darker the aberration of light results in another strange phenomenon let's imagine we are moving through an immense grid representing the fabric of space ordinarily we would see a straight grid made up of straight lines converging in front of us due to perspective however by speeding up the aberration phenomenon distorts the image of the sky around us as the days go by the grid seems to contract forward and the straight lines Bend if we were to go past an object it would appear to be slightly angled in our Direction this is called terrible Penrose rotation as we move very quickly images of objects seem contracted in front of us and perspective is strongly distorted we often hear that the further we look into space the further we look into the past indeed the light we receive from a distant star must travel billions of kilometers this journey is not instantaneous and it takes some time for light to reach us as a result we see the star as it was in the past when it emitted this light perhaps several thousand years ago who knows how it might have changed since then looking out from our spaceship the same phenomenon is at work as we move away from Earth the planet's light takes longer and longer to reach us if we could zoom in with a telescope we would see people on Earth evolving in slow motion this is the Doppler effect each tick of the clocks on Earth takes longer and longer to reach us we receive light rays in slow motion and their intensity seems to weaken as the image of the planet shifts towards red color in front of us it's the opposite effect the ship catches up with the light and the Stars seem to get brighter they shift towards blue color and their clocks seem to take faster with precise enough equipment we could measure the aberration and Doppler effects since the start of our acceleration in space however if we decided to end our journey and return to Earth these effects would have had no impact they are only optical illusions due to the way we receive light while moving after several hundred days however as the reactors push us ever faster the ship begins to approach light speed at such speeds some phenomena will no longer be mere optical illusions real physical effects will kick in with irreversible consequences