Being aboard a spaceship that's accelerated to such speeds would feel pretty normal internally, but the outside universe would pass by very quickly and processes in that universe would appear to be impossibly fast. Accelerated to a very significant fraction of c would allow you to visit practically everywhere in the galaxy within a few years of ship time. But on the outside, millennia will have passed.
You can see why that's not practical, because everything you left behind would be gone. Still, there are scenarios where this might be a valid solution.
However, you could never reach a destination that's speeding away from you faster than the speed of light. Because you can't accelerate your spacecraft beyond that speed, parts of the universe will always be unreachable - which is the point of the article.
You might wonder why galaxies moving away from each other faster than the speed of light works at all given the cosmic speed limit. The answer is that their "movement" is not normal, inertial movement as we know it. Instead you might imagine that new space is being created in between them, driving them away from each other by simply scaling up the distances involved.
Given the practical and theoretical limits on spacecraft acceleration, people have been thinking about a different way to travel, a way that doesn't involve momentum but instead manipulates spacetime to simply shift an object to another position without acceleration. The article hints at this as well. It makes sense because technically the acceleration and deceleration part of a journey is wasteful and limiting. At this time, it's the only way we know how to get from A to B, but we're all hopeful that one or more alternatives can be researched which allow us to simply go somewhere else without using traditional movement.
You can see why that's not practical, because everything you left behind would be gone. Still, there are scenarios where this might be a valid solution.
However, you could never reach a destination that's speeding away from you faster than the speed of light. Because you can't accelerate your spacecraft beyond that speed, parts of the universe will always be unreachable - which is the point of the article.
You might wonder why galaxies moving away from each other faster than the speed of light works at all given the cosmic speed limit. The answer is that their "movement" is not normal, inertial movement as we know it. Instead you might imagine that new space is being created in between them, driving them away from each other by simply scaling up the distances involved.
Given the practical and theoretical limits on spacecraft acceleration, people have been thinking about a different way to travel, a way that doesn't involve momentum but instead manipulates spacetime to simply shift an object to another position without acceleration. The article hints at this as well. It makes sense because technically the acceleration and deceleration part of a journey is wasteful and limiting. At this time, it's the only way we know how to get from A to B, but we're all hopeful that one or more alternatives can be researched which allow us to simply go somewhere else without using traditional movement.