DarthXenu said:
Note: At the speed of light. To travel any distance takes NO time at all. This is a consequence of special relativity. The universe in the direction of travel is lorentz contracted to a length of zero. Therefore you can traverse this distance in no time. Another way to look at it is that to people observing the craft from outside, time is lorentz slowed to the point at which it stops on board the ship. To those people the ship will appear to be travelling a vast distance at the speed of light. But if they could look at the pilots watch they would see that it had stopped.
So to travel 1000 light years at the speed of light. The journey for the occupants of the ship will be instantaneous (plus some time for acceleration and deceleration). For those watching from mission control it will take exactly 1000 years (plus the time to accelerate and decelerate).
So if (big if) we ever manage to develop light speed travel, mankind can explore the universe not just our local galaxy. However when they get back the earth will probably have been destroyed by the sun going nova. Time will pass at the normal rate for those left on earth.
Yes, sorry, that's what I get for trying to explain FTL travel after a long day of work. The time would be theoretically instantaneous for those inside the ship (ignoring the fact that they would've reached infinite mass), but for everyone else, like those waving goodbye to you or waiting for you on the other side of the galaxy, it would take so long as to be pointless.
You're right that Star Wars cannot be explained with realworld physics, that it proposes a stable space outside spacetime called Hyperspace, and that this space has dimension and objects within it have mass. Hyperspace is about as real as Middle Earth, but I just thought it might help some people here if they visualized just how much distance is being traversed by characters in space sagas like this. I mean, Star Wars starts with "... in a galaxy far, far away." I think Lucas recognized that even highly-advanced civilizations weren't likely to leave their own galaxy.