My friend Arie is a deep-space photographer. Here’s his recent shot of the North America Nebula, so named for obvious reasons. It’s 2590 light years away – meaning that traveling at the speed of light it would take 2590 years to get there. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. Right now the fastest our rockets go is about 25,000 miles per hour (unless they’re being pulled by a big gravitational force, as when falling into the sun). So you see the problem! And it’s worse than that because as an object approaches the speed of light its mass increases (to infinity at the speed of light) which slows it back down. I assume this is why photons have no mass.