Quote:
Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay
A mere 150 yrs ago, it would have taken us almost a month to get to Australia. Today we can get there in 13 hours.
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Well yes but getting to Australia in 13 hours wasn't thought to violate the laws of physics, just to violate our abilities.
Our understanding of physics will always improve, but that doesn't mean that our current understanding will become completely invalid either, all of our current understanding will have to be rolled into whatever new understanding comes forward.
If faster than light travel were possible, and intelligent life was something that had even a remote chance of developing, I would expect to be able to see artifacts of intelligence out there among the stars, even if they were relics.
Either the artifacts are out there and we just haven't found them yet, intelligent life is so remote that civilizations are too far and few between spatially/temporally to see each other, or getting out of one's own solar system is so challenging (it'd take a year's worth of the world's energy to send a probe to a star in human lifetime timeframes, ignoring how you store that energy and assuming 100% efficiency, double if you want to slow down) that few if any ever accomplish it to any significant degree.