Question: Do you think that using the particle accelerator will be able to increase human speed?

Scott Lawrie answered on 11 Mar 2016:

Good question Isaac! High speeds are really hard to get your head around. You might feel like you’re going quite fast in your car on the motorway at 70 miles per hour. You certainly wouldn’t want to crash at those speeds! What would you say if I told you that some clever engineers and scientists are building a car that can move at 1,000 mph? That’s much faster than the speed of sound!

Now let’s think about space. To get into space – and stay up there! – you need to be moving at 14,000 mph! That’s how fast Tim Peake is moving up in the space station right now. Pretty fast, right? But what if I told you that the fastest anything (particles or people) can ever go is 670,000,000 mph!! That’s the speed of light. Makes it seem like Tim Peake’s barely moving at all!

Now going back to our car on the motorway, you just cannot wrap your mind around how fast the speed of light is. To get anywhere near that fast would need us to not just burn all the oil, coal and nuclear fuel we have, but probably most of the rest of the planet, too! That being the case, rockets are looking a bit pathetic and wasteful needing so much fuel…

We are developing particle accelerators that work in space that have the potential to accelerate us to much higher speeds than normal rockets (in fact there are some on satellites and the space station now!), but they do take a LONG time to get up to speed. But considering just how slow (relatively) we are going right now, have a long acceleration to higher speeds using particles might be the way to go 🙂