Going back to the OP, there *is* an alternative that doesn't get much attention. Not as "sexy" I suppose...
Quote:
Originally Posted by MartinParish
Many sci-fi authors like Heinlein have assumed that faster-than-light travel and/or extrasolar exploration would become possible in the future, and that humanity will colonize worlds beyond the solar system. They've been wrong on that prediction so far, of course, but will they eventually be proven right? I wouldn't bet on it. Based on our current understanding of physics, faster-than-light travel is extremely impractical and it's unlikely it will ever become possible, simply because the energy required to warp space time would be too great.
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Extrasolar exploration is *NOT* just about FTL.
Or even human travel.
First of all, we're already doing extrasolar exploration; remote viewing is a form of exploration and we have probes headed out of the system.
Second, STL probes are a likely possibility this century. STL travel (hybernation/generation ships/clone growers) remains a possibility for future generations to engineer.
My primary objection remains to the word NEVER.
"Unlikely" I have no issue with.
(I'm a skeptic on UFOs, too.)
One thing I'm keeping an eye out for is the ongoing battle in Physics between the reductionists and the geometers and the current battlelines between the standard model (decried as "curve-fitting") and the infinite variations of string- and m-theory (decried as "mathematical pipe dreams") and I wonder what if they're *both* right.
We know a bit about how the universe works.
We don't know everything.
And lately we're running into stuff that is harder and harder to accomodate (and not just quantum weirdness like the shrinking Proton thing, which may or not be real) and odds are that the more we learn the more weirdness we'll find at the fringes. The quantum realms are very very weird. Holographic reality even more so. We need to know more before passing judgment.
Never is a long time.
Just because today we're bottled up doesn't mean we'll always be bottled up.
Never to me means "why bother?".
I prefer to see us keep plugging away, looking for loopholes, new models, new approaches to the tech. Don't care if it takes centuries or millenia; the reward is in trying and learning and learning is a journey unto itself.
Negative answers have value, too.
To me the only acceptable answer to whether star travel is possible is: "we don't know how."