If you could travel at the speed of light, objects would not pass by. They couldn’t. You’re already everywhere in the universe at once as the entire universe has collapsed down to a plane of infinite thinness. Additionally, by the time you were able to process a single thought, the universe would have met it’s eventual end, as time is passing by infinitely fast.
So you get going at lightspeed hoping to get to the next star system in a reasonable amount of time, and the entire universe goes *poof*
Time and space hate it when massive entities go at lightspeed, so much that they literally warp to prevent it.
Now, if you didn’t actually go to lightspeed, but just a hair under, say .999c then you’d see the stars, compressed nearly flat whizzing past. In your space ship, your eyes still see visible light, but for you, that’s microwave and infrared emissions as you approach and x-rays as pass by. So brown dwarf stars will be reasonably bright as you come up to them, then disappear as you pass.
Edit: Just to put some numbers: at .999c, the Lorentz factor is ~22.4. So, your trip past Sol to Proxima Centauri, 4.22ly distant, takes 4.2242 years as measured on earth, but only 0.18797 or about 69 days on the ship. As you pass supposedly “spherical” bodies, you measure them to be 22.4 times as wide as they are thick: or only 4.4% as thick as the apparent diameter facing you. When you approach a star or planet, it looks like this:
But as you pass it and look out the side:
Edit2: Looks like this is homing in on 200 upvotes, so in honor of that, I’ll add some more numbers. Let’s say you were going .99999c (five nines). The Lorenzt factor is 223.6. No pictures of what would be a disc, but the time element get’s interesting. Observing from Earth, you’ll get to Proxima Cetauri in just 22 minutes longer then the 4.22 years it would take light to get there. But on board the ship, the whole trip past Sol to Proxima only takes a little less than a week.
At six nines, the factor is 707. Earth sees your ship arrive 133 seconds after the light pulse, and on board the ship it takes a bit more than 52 hours.
At seven nines, the factor is 2236. From the earth, only 2.2 minutes separate the laser announcing the ship is heading that way and the ship arriving, but on board the ship, the trip takes 16.5 hours.
At 8, the factor is 7071 and the ship’s experience of the trip takes a mere 5 hours.
At 10, the factor is 70,710 and the trip takes 31 minutes on the ship.
At 12, the factor is 707,115 (I suspect the calculator has some rounding error: I’m using RELATIVITY CALCULATOR) and the trip takes 188 seconds as seen from the ship.
To get it down to about 18 seconds, we probably have to go to 14 nines. This is how fast you’d have to be going to get the sort of view where stars as passing by every few seconds like what you see out the view screen on the old Star Trek show.
.999999999999999 c. That’s very fast.
Thinking Bits 