There's no set-in-stone scale of "warp-factor" speeds in the "Star Trek" universe. Over the more than 50 years of productions, different series and episodes and movies throw out conflicting numbers.
However, Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda – two technical advisers to The Next Generation series – published a technical manual in 1991 that includes some solid figures, and it's those numbers (vis-a-vis a Wikipedia page) that O'Donoghue said he leaned on for his animation.
That scale suggests a warp factor of 1 is light speed (shown below between Earth and the moon) and the typical upper limit warp of 9.99 is more than 2,140 times light speed.
O'Donoghue chose to depict the Enterprise flying away from the sun and across the solar system toward a finish line at Pluto.
The spaceship starts out at warp 1 and eventually accelerates to warp 9.9, or about 2,083 times light speed.
Warp 1, or light speed, makes the Enterprise look like it's at a standstill over the sun. At this light-speed rate, the ship would take 5 hours and 28 minutes just to reach Pluto, which is about 3.67 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) away from the sun.
Meanwhile, Proxima Centauri – the nearest star to our own – is a dismal four years and three months away.
Warp 5 is about 213 times faster, making a sun-Pluto journey just 1 minute and 30 seconds long. Proxima Centauri is still a weeklong voyage.
Warp 9.9 makes Pluto less that a 10-second trip away, and Proxima Centauri an 18-hour cruise.
This last rate of travel is thousands of times faster than the physics of our Universe may ever permit.
However, travelling at a warp factor of 9.9 from one end of the Milky Way galaxy – a body of hundreds of billions of stars that may stretch 150,000 to 200,000 light-years wide, according to a recent study – to the other could take 96 years. That's almost a decade longer than an average human life span today.
Even considering the fastest "transwarp" (or "beyond warp") speed achieved by the Enterprise, which is about 8,323 times light speed, according to Star Trek: The Next Generation – Technical Manual, a transgalactic voyage would take 24 years. A transwarp voyage to Andromeda, which is the nearest galaxy to ours at about 2.5 million light-years away, would last about 300 years.
The fastest any human-built object has ever gone relative to the sun is about 119 miles per second (192 kilometers per second), or 430,000 mph (692,000 kilometers per hour).
NASA's Parker Solar Probe briefly achieves this speed when it careens around the sun, and flying to Pluto from the sun at that rate would take nearly a year.
Engineers with the Breakthrough Starshot project are working toward achieving partial light-speed travel with tiny "nanocraft".
The idea is to rapidly accelerate them by shooting reflective light sails with powerful laser beams, ultimately flying them past nearby stars like Proxima Centauri (a red dwarf that just might host habitable planets).
Yet even at a planned cruise velocity of 20% of light speed, it could take more than 21 years for the probes to fly past and photograph the nearby star system.
On top of that, it'd take another 4.24 years for their radio signals (travelling at light-speed) carrying image data to reach antennas on Earth.
https://www.sciencealert.com/former-nas ... y-slow/amp
That's gored-awful.
