Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. ~Douglass Adams, Mostly Harmless This is part 1 of a many-part series on faster-than-light travel. Before we can discuss how to travel faster than light, we need to understand why this is a problem in the first place. Why is the speed of light the universal speed limit? The answer starts with the invariance of the speed of light. By this point, everyone knows that the speed of light is constant, but it is not at all obvious