Narrator: Near light speed 101: Near-light-speed travel times.

While you will be traveling very fast, the universe is also a very big place, so you might be in for some surprises.

For example, even though you’re traveling at almost the speed of light—and time and space weirdness will make the distance seem shorter to you—your rocket’s clock will still say it takes a bit more than nine months just to get from the Earth to the edge of the solar system. According to a clock on Earth, it’s even longer—over a year and a half. That's not too bad, but to get to the next star system, your clock would say it took you just over 2 years.

If you want to get to farther-out vacation spots, however, you’ll probably need more than a few extra snacks. A trip to the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large neighbor galaxy,

could take over a million years, and a trip to the farthest known galaxy where it currently ismight take over 15 billion years, which…is more vacation time than I think I’ll ever have.

Thanks for watching, and please...be careful out there.