Impossible Acceleration?

I breathe in the delicious hydrogen of space to feed the blue star at my heart. The blue star energizes me and keeps the plants, animals, and sentient symbionts warm and thriving. Every few centuries I like a drink of complex hydrocarbons from a large gaseous planet. Neptune and Jupiter are particularly satisfying. My young Charagni must drink often to build up his body and undergo the changes necessary to fly freely among the stars.

Yes, Jack. I have been watching human science develop for a thousand years. According to your physics my high acceleration is impossible, but I and my tribe have been flying around the universe for billions of years. Our flying speeds and accelerations are not theory, they are our usual way. As I fly by the 10th planet of Rigil Kantaurus, my speed is approaching the speed of light.

No Jack, my mass is not approaching infinity. I have not gained weight at all, but I'll grant you that it looks like that from Earth now. Your relatives on Earth, watching me with powerful telescopes, perceive the exertions of my wings having less and less effect, the faster I fly. But that is only an illusion. There is nothing to slow me down. Space is not a medium that becomes more and more viscous the faster I fly. It only looks that way from the outside, from the limited point of view of Earthlings. The faster we fly, the longer it takes each of my beautiful photons to reach Earth. You watch your clocks tick-tock, tick-tock, and for each tick-tock I seem to be slowing down, but I'm not slowing down. It's the illusion of Earth science.

Humans have proved I can't fly faster than light? How did they do that?

You say they built big linear accelerators and no matter how big an electro-magnetic push they gave electrons or protons, they could not push them past the speed of light? Have you thought this through, Jack? You cannot push a moon-buggy faster than you can run. Electromagnetic waves -- light -- cannot push any faster than light, so your protons cannot be accelerated any faster than light. If the proton could push itself, if it had wings, it could fly as fast as I do.

But out here among the stars I push -- I accelerate every day -- and we will arrive at the center of the Milky Way in about 300 years. I'm glad, Jack, that you came along for the ride.