This never made any sense to me whatsoever.
I’ve see all the physicists (Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc.) explain this principle but it doesn’t make sense. They say that if you were to go to the moon and back at a certain speed near the speed of light, you might return to Earth a thousand years into the future like what happened in Planet of the Apes. But if you were going at the speed of light, you would arrive at the time light takes to arrive there. Why the dip? What is being missed?
It doesn’t? If you travel at the speed of light (which isn’t possible since you have mass) you don’t experience any time or distance. To the perspective of a photon, it is released and absorbed at the exact same moment in time, and it has traveled no distance at all.