What it Would be Like to Travel Around the Earth Once at the Speed of Light

Traveling at the speed of light means accelerating to 186,000 miles per second, and no imagine achieving that going around the Earth once. That is exactly what ‘Airplane Mode’ shows us in this video. Technically speaking, the only way for light to travel around the Earth is to trap it in optic fibers, which we know isn’t possible, but if it were, it would take around 0.013 seconds.

Now if light could travel in an arc and circumnavigate the earth, it would do so approximately 7.5-times in one second, making it impossible to show in a short video. However, since light essentially travels in a straight line, it cannot circumnavigate the Earth. In this video, we see that it’s so quick that the 8 frames of footage needs to be shown shot-by-shot to see things clearly.