Our happy hour fact to amaze your drinking buddies with.

Contrary to what you see in your favorite sci-fi movie franchise, when a space ship approaches light speed, everybody dies.

According to William Edelstein, a visiting professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins University, a spacecraft traveling on the cusp of light speed would be assaulted by a deluge of hydrogen atoms that have roughly the same energy as protons whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider.

Thus: "For the crew," Edelstein explains, "it would be like standing in front of the LHC beam."

That beam would expose a human in its path to nearly 2,000 times the amount of radiation that the body can withstand. If that wasn't enough, most of the craft's electronics would be damaged by the extreme radiation as well.

On the bright side, this means Earth is probably safe from attack by any Imperial Star Destroyer.