> In all this excitement hopefully we don’t forget the horde of luddites that’s the modern physics community that couldn’t imagine the possibility of faster tha

> In all this excitement hopefully we don’t forget the horde of luddites that’s the modern physics community that couldn’t imagine the possibility of faster than light travel. https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10701-011-9539-2 https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10701-011-9539-2 - cited 57 times https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/aafcea https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/aafcea - cited 47 times https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.56.2100 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.56.2100 - cited 123 times Each of these papers propose a separate method of faster-than-light travel. Where's the lack of imagination? > Like I get it, it’s absurd to consider FTL in regular space time, but when a normal person asks this question all they care about is whether they can realistically imagine going from one star to another in meaningful timespans. Pretty much every physicist I talked to online and offline would scoff and call the concept “absurd” (which is technically true in regular space time). I even believed them for a while. They’d shut down any discussion or imagination before it was even possible. Even now you see the same backwards thinking instead of being excited at least by the theoretical possibility. Even last year when I brought up the Alcubierre drive to a physics PhD he wasn’t aware of it, and couldn’t imagine this being anything other than a joke (even after showing him the Wikipedia page). What's the difference between "regular" and "non-regular" spacetime? Also, maybe the physicists you talked to worked in other subfields of physics and didn't have expertise in this topic? Imagine going up to a professor in computer networking and asking what they think about the P=NP problem. > Like a bunch of science fiction writers could think of something called “warp drive” and it took decades for some dude in Mexico to imagine a theoretical potential method to do this? A bunch of science fiction writers also thought up of something called "transporters" and we have no way of making it real. Another group came up with PADDs and we have them now. You're cherrypicking one data point and generalizing it. > The last great physicist in my opinion is Carl Sagan, the entire field just like most sciences have rotten to the core into completely unimaginative folks who cannot fathom a world that’s only marginally different from what’s currently around them. Roger Penrose is still alive, and has a Nobel Prize in physics. We also took a picture of a black hole two years ago. Isn't that a great scientific achievement as well? It seems as though you're mistaking Sagan's scientific outreach efforts for actual scholarship on the subject. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I see the opposite of what you do in academia. For me, it seems to be still working well. Sure, there's still weird politics and worrying about being scooped, but ideas that are credible won't be shot down, but anything that doesn't make sense would be ripped to shreds.