Hm, being an idiot, I'm just wondering, "Why is it that light speed is THE fastest one can get? Why can't we go faster? How did we work out that speed? What is so special about the properties of light, and its speed?"
Once you hit lightspeed, your mass turns into energy. Theoretically. And once you become an energy being, you become like Q from Star Trek and you can control whatever you want. Jk. Despite the fact that Star Trek is purely fictional, I like to use it as a basis for some of my space travel knowledge, since they hit some very good points on almost all the theories of effective space travel. Yes, the Enterprise does travel faster than light. MUCH faster in some cases. I'm not sure how on earth they manage to keep the ship together going warp nine, but to quote Scotty
"Cap'n, she canna hold together much longer!"
It's interesting to note that there in many cases, there is a bottom to everything, but rarely a top. It puts meaning to the term "the sky's the limit". Think in terms a temperature: we have 0 Kelvin (-273 celsius) which is the coldest that you can possibly get. But there is no top to the temperature. It will continually increase. On a much larger scale, look at the earth. It has a bottom, the core, yet there is technically no top. You could send a rocket out in a straight line and it would continue forever unless it hit another object. So light speed is NOT the fastest you can travel. Light is just the fastest traveling particle that we know of, so we use it to define the term "light speed". According to Star Trek (which is purely fictional), warp nine is equivalent to approximately 2,000c^2. For most of the world, that's around 2.33x10^21 kph in scientific notation. In comparison, the American space shuttle on re-entry accelerates to only 28,163.52 kph. Continuing on the Star Trek subject, in some of the episodes set into the future, they have vehicles capable of accelerating beyond warp nine, some of them upwards of warp thirteen.
I'm keeping in mind that Star Trek is purely fictional, but I know for a fact that they aren't lying about how fast warp speed is. Here's a little more random info about warp speed, just to keep your brains awake. Warp 9 requires a little under 100,000,000,000 megajoules of power. In comparison, the United States uses 432,300,000,000 joules of power in a year. So travelling at warp nine would require all the energy of several United States to generate it.
In conclusion, there's MUCH that we have to work on before we can even achieve anything close to light speed and have a human occupant survive. Power consumption is one issue, the whole "who knows what happens when you hit light speed" issue, and the issue of "what if they hit light speed and arrive a lightyear away and they can't get back".