Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
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.
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I disagree. I think if you were to describe modern air travel to people back then, most would consider it to be complelty impossible. "What you are going to do is climb inside this big metal bird that doesn't flap it's wings, weighs 735,000 pounds before you and 400 people AND your luggage get inside, cruises at 40,000 + feet at a speed of 800 miles per hour", most would scoff at the idea and follow it up with a few "Cool story, bro"s.
And to really blow some hair back, you could point at the moon and say "Oh ya, btw, we have had humans walk on that thing" Pretty sure you would be getting dragged off to the loney bin or at least labeled as the town drunk.
It wasn't all that long ago that we thought breaking the speed of sound was physically impossible. Not only is it done daily today, the US just launched an aircraft that can do mach 5.