It's important to note first of all that we haven't meaningfully escaped Earth's gravity well. Our models seem to make it possible, I'm sure it can be done, I'm

It's important to note first of all that we haven't meaningfully escaped Earth's gravity well. Our models seem to make it possible, I'm sure it can be done, I'm sure we can even get to other stars without changing our understanding of physics. At the same time the notion of "absolute minimum level of intellect" is somewhat poorly defined. It's somewhat hard to imagine, but there could be a set of physics theories that don't include relativity or gravity or any of our familiar concepts, but still enable interstellar travel. Maybe another civilization skipped our fragmentary and incorrect understanding and hit directly on a unified field theory. Or maybe we both have fragmentary and incorrect understandings, both are essentially wrong in every way, and yet they are close enough for practical purposes. Is the civilization which developed the more practical model of physics "smarter" or just lucky? Does "smarter" mean that you develop a model of physics which is closer to ground truth, or one that enables you to build better spacecraft, or one that enables you to build better computers?