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by CamperBob2 3781 days ago
Think of it this way: c isn't a speed limit, it's the only speed that anything can travel at. Specifically, time is only one component of four-dimensional spacetime. If you move in x, y, and/or z, the vector length of that spatial movement has to come out of your velocity in t.

So it's not that you can't travel at c meters per second; it's that if you do, you'll zero out your velocity in the "seconds" component.

To cite an example from one of Neal DeGrasse Tyson's lectures, that's one of the funky things about photons from the most distant stars: they don't experience the passage of time at all from their own point of view. They arrive at our eyes/telescopes/radios as soon as they're emitted. Meanwhile, their velocity is limited to c from our point of view. The same thing would presumably happen to you if you could travel at c... but there would be other inconvenient effects in that case, such as an infinite increase in mass.