[ColanR]

> The drive is not currently merely like an airplane, where it is obviously possible to fly (at least as well as birds), we just didn't know how to bang the rocks together correctly to do it.

> People like to cite a lot of cases of various supposed boundaries being broken over time as evidence that maybe this one will be broken too, but there's a qualitative difference between some "elderly distinguished scientist" opining something is impossible, and the mathematics of physics saying something is impossible.

I appreciate your distinction in the use of the word 'impossible'. I didn't actually see what you meant by it before. From what I remember from learning about the development of airplanes, it was considered physically impossible until proven otherwise. It wasn't an elderly scientist saying planes can't fly, it was the best science of the day declaring that something heavier than air was meant to stay on the ground (IIRC).

I'm simply skeptical of claims of impossibility, across the board. I do appreciate and understand the science of the reasoning behind the claim; but to a layman who knows a bit of the history of science, 21st century scientists declaring things scientifically impossible (because science has progressed so far since 100 years prior) sound eerily similiar to 19th and 18th century scientists saying the same thing, for the same reason.

[antepodius]

I have a very hard time believing that, given birds existed.