The speed of light is fast but just how fast is it really? The speed of light is our fastest way to track speed, but in the emptiness of space, is it really that fast? it takes 8 minutes for light to travel from the sun down to earth. That means that if the sun blew up, we wouldn’t know for 8 minutes. even the closest star (not including the sun) is 4 years away at the speed of light! 4 years is pretty long considering we are using the fastest travel possible. The speed of light is approximately  670,616,629 miles per hour or 1,079,252,848 kilometers per hour. For reference, some of the fastest cars only go 280 miles per hour! That’s like comparing a small bicycle to a private jet, and even still, places in space are still so far away we wouldn’t be able to travel anytime soon. We barely made it to the moon and we weren’t even going that fast, we only went 16,000 miles per hour which is nowhere near close to the speed of light.