Through Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity, the speed of light has become known as the cosmic speed limit. Nothing can travel faster, period. This has been the standard of thought as long as I've been able to remember. But as usual, I could never wrap my head around it being an absolute. To me, saying nothing can go faster than the speed of light was the same as saying that a black hole was this mysterious whirlpool in space that sucked you in and transported you to another universe. It made zero sense to me.

I remembering hearing that because of the universe and the limits set forth at the beginning of creation, that constants were set in place and nothing could change them. Of course the universe has its rules, but we humans have broken those rules many times and will continue to do so. The universe said that we as human beings cannot live or survive under water. We proved that wrong by building submarines. The universe said that we cannot fly. We proved that wrong by building airplanes. The universe said that we could not leave our planet and be able to survive in outer space. We've built rockets with capsules and space stations that allowed mankind to venture far beyond the safety of our planet and even to the moon. It would only make sense that at some point we can achieve faster than light speeds.

These are my thoughts and opinions about this matter and will hopefully show what I believe to be the possibility of exceeding the speed of light. First we need to prove that travelling faster than the speed of light is possible. Is there a sign that that has already happened? If there is a sign, then it would only mean that it would be a matter of time before we would be able to accomplish that. There are two examples that I know of, although there may be more I don't.

The first involves the Cern Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. There have been results achieved at Cern that have given a glimpse into the fact that the speed of light isn't the universal speed limit. Certain experiments have had particles collide and the subsequent remnants have been documented to be travelling just beyond the speed of light. Even greater speeds would be easily achieved when and if the Cern Collider was expanded to an even larger accelerator. Not only would we find faster speeds upon which the particles could collide, but we would be able to discover even more significant particles than the Higgs Boson. With the possibility of results and achievements as historic as those, it warrants the expansion of the Cern Collider. Let's hope it happens in our lifetime.

The second area of evidence is in the universe itself. We now have technology that makes it easier to determine, with pretty exact measurements, what the size and age of the known universe is. Using these numbers gives us a way to show that the universe itself has broken the speed limit of light. In fact, it shows that there could be no limit to how fast anyone could travel. The first thing we need to do is to figure out the size of the universe. The second would be the age. We can then divide the size by the age, using the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second or 671 million miles per hour to show the how fast the universe is expanding. Let's start by defining the numbers we need for this equation.

The first number we need is the size of the universe. The size of the observable universe, only what we knowof is approximately 90 billion light years across. We can use 45 billion as the distance from the middle point to the current outer edge of what we can observe. Our universe may stretch infinitely, but we don't know for sure. This is highly unlikely due to rapid expansion and the fact that the universe is speeding up its expansion. If the universe were slowing down, then our universe would be making contact with an outside force, or possibly another universe and the effects of an infinite vacuum being null and void.

Next, we need the age of the universe. The age of the universe varies depending on the source, but most have it at about 13.6 to 14 billion years old. Not long ago, it was thought that the universe was about 12 billion years old. We may eventually determine the age to be well beyond 14 billion and may be higher than 15 billion once we can advance technologies to truly run the proper tests. Most sources put the universe at about 13.83 billion years old. So that is the number we will use.

Just using the numbers we have and not adjusting for the universe speeding up due to expansion, we divide the distance of expansion from the center of the known universe which is half of 90 billion, or 45 billion, by the current age of 13.83 billion. We would determine that the outer edge of the known universe is moving at an average of 3.26 times the speed of light. And knowing that the universe is even larger than what we do know, the universe could be moving at even more incredible speeds, maybe 4 or 5 times the speed of light.

From several sources on the internet, it is mentioned that general relativity provides allowance, saying that the universe can expand faster than the speed of light. But if the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit as we have been told, then this would not be true, and our universe cannot expand any faster than the speed of light at any point in our universes history. An exception to the rule cannot be made just to keep the speed of light as the absolute rule of speed. The speed limit has been broken. In fact, we don't know how fast things are expanding on the outer edge of the real universe, or to what limit they can expand. There may be no limit and things could be expanding at billions of miles per hour, and having expanded out more than several trillion light years.

Here's something to think about that will blow your mind. Since the outer edge of our universe is moving faster than the speed of light, nothing can see it approaching as it expands. I'll clarify how this is possible. We see light. Our eyes do not see objects, but interprets the light that brightens them. Light from an object is emitted from a singular position in space where it is emitted and not compounded with the speed of the object from which it came as the object is moving, no matter the objects speed. If our universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, with the light being a constant and only moving at one speed, the universe will outpace the light it is sending. If you were positioned outside the universe, you would get hit by the universe before ever seeing it.

We have overcome the limits of nature and the universe as we move forward as a species. It is our intelligence, the gathering of knowledge and how it is applied to technology, inventions and ideas that will further our progression to overcome other limits set forth upon us by our universe. Although it may take a few thousand years, as long as the collective brilliance of humans is applied, our technology will continue to evolve, and it will only be a matter of time until we advance far enough to eventually achieve velocities faster than the speed of light. The speed limit is limitless.