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> It seems as if you're confident that any day now we'll discover that relativity was just as wrong as alchemy and phlogiston all along I'm not saying that rel

> It seems as if you're confident that any day now we'll discover that relativity was just as wrong as alchemy and phlogiston all along I'm not saying that relativity is wrong. It's correct because it clearly aligns with our observations and predicts many things. But here's the problem: we don't know what space and time are, in the physical sense. We don't know what they're made of. We don't know how malleable they are. It might well be the case that relativity is just one of the parts of a bigger "theory of everything" that does in fact allow FTL travel and/or communication. There were links to papers here on HN how a warp drive is possible without breaking relativity, by making space "flow around" a bubble containing your spaceship instead of propelling the ship itself. Relativity also doesn't forbid almost-Stargate-style traversable wormholes — we just don't know how to make one and most probably don't have enough energy even if we did.

krapp 5y ago
>. It might well be the case that relativity is just one of the parts of a bigger "theory of everything" that does in fact allow FTL travel and/or communication. There's no evidence of that, though. Even gravity was recently proven to be limited to the speed of light. In prior cases, observable anomalies suggested fundamental flaws in existing models, and that eventually led to better theories and more accurate models. While it's obvious relativity is incomplete in its incompatibility with quantum mechanics, there is no evidence that the speed of light is variant, or that FTL communication is possible. So chances are that even if an Alcubierre drive were possible, at best it would allow travel at or near the speed of light, but not more. Same with wormholes. Same with everything. And then you have the Fermi Paradox. If we're not alone in the universe, then all it takes is for one civilization to discover FTL and colonize or mine a significant enough amount of the galaxy to be noticeable. We're still burning dinosaur carcasses for heat and we've got theoretical models and math, surely someone a million years ahead of us should have expanded into a galactic empire by now. So (setting aside the countless other solutions to the Fermi Paradox) two possibilites remain - FTL cannot exist, or it's so expensive no civilization has ever bothered. And we're back to square one, the question of debate. The only reason to believe FTL is possible is a desire to live in a science fiction universe. It's a religious question, a matter of faith, you either believe it or you don't. These discussions always go in circles (fun, but unproductive recursion nonetheless) because one can't really debate faith versus science.

krapp 5y ago

>. It might well be the case that relativity is just one of the parts of a bigger "theory of everything" that does in fact allow FTL travel and/or communication. There's no evidence of that, though. Even gravity was recently proven to be limited to the speed of light. In prior cases, observable anomalies suggested fundamental flaws in existing models, and that eventually led to better theories and more accurate models. While it's obvious relativity is incomplete in its incompatibility with quantum mechanics, there is no evidence that the speed of light is variant, or that FTL communication is possible. So chances are that even if an Alcubierre drive were possible, at best it would allow travel at or near the speed of light, but not more. Same with wormholes. Same with everything. And then you have the Fermi Paradox. If we're not alone in the universe, then all it takes is for one civilization to discover FTL and colonize or mine a significant enough amount of the galaxy to be noticeable. We're still burning dinosaur carcasses for heat and we've got theoretical models and math, surely someone a million years ahead of us should have expanded into a galactic empire by now. So (setting aside the countless other solutions to the Fermi Paradox) two possibilites remain - FTL cannot exist, or it's so expensive no civilization has ever bothered. And we're back to square one, the question of debate. The only reason to believe FTL is possible is a desire to live in a science fiction universe. It's a religious question, a matter of faith, you either believe it or you don't. These discussions always go in circles (fun, but unproductive recursion nonetheless) because one can't really debate faith versus science.