[taylodl]

I'm sorry. We know physics very well. There's no "unimaginable technologies" that are going to be developed that gets us around the fact that we're not going to travel much faster than 20% of the speed of light - and that doesn't change the fact that the average star you see with your own eyes is 60-100 lightyears away and will by dying at roughly the same time as our sun.

The most important point to realize about science fiction is that it is fiction.

[AlessandroF6587]

> We know physics very well.

We should tell it to physicists ;-)

That was the same in 1700s. Laws of mechanics were well known and they were convinced that it was just about getting better in using math with it.

Then electricity and magnetism emerged.

Then nuclear physics and quantum theories and relativity.

And we know very well that they don't match up.

And we have anomalies all over in our measurements and no good theory to explain them.

But just using "known" physics theories we have warp drives and warmholes and quantum teleportation.

Going to the moon was something impossible and we accomplished it.

Before the same was for flying or going deep underwater.

Do you need more examples to get some fate?

[taylodl]

I think it's very important to understand the Relativity Of Wrong.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dbalmer/eportfolio/Nature%20of%20...

Our knowledge is incomplete, but we can put boundary boxes around what is possible. Just because our theories are incomplete doesn't mean that what we know is wrong. Our knowledge has been extensively tested over the past 100 years.

[davidivadavid]

> we can put boundary boxes around what is possible

Based on our incomplete knowledge. So we really can't. What would a proof that something is physically impossible look like?

[taylodl]

Did you even read the article I linked?

Newton was wrong, Einstein has provided us a better, more accurate, theory of gravity. Guess what? We still teach Newton in high school and college physics! Why? Because though it's wrong it's only wrong in the most extreme circumstances. Generally speaking it works quite well. The only observation we made contradicting Newton was Mercury's perihelion precession. But Einstein didn't change how fast apples fall to the ground.

Likewise, we know, or at least strongly suspect, Einstein is wrong. That doesn't mean everything we've observed the past 100 years corroborating General Relativity goes out the window with a new theory. No, instead that's what makes creating a new theory hard: you have to account for a century's worth of observations validating GR and reconcile with QFT (otherwise why bother).

But it wouldn't change anything about what we already know and what we've observed. That's why it's a boundary box. This is science, not magic.

[davidivadavid]

I've read the article. It exposes a well-known point of view in philosophy of science that has been debated at least a hundred years. It doesn't begin to cover that question at all.

Notably, the idea that a new theory simply takes existing "observations" and adds to them is historically unfounded. Indeed, many theories start as thought experiments that contradict observation and later turn out to be better models, not the other way around.

You also may or may not be familiar with the concepts of theory-ladenness and the commensurability of theories. If not, I suggest doing some reading about that so you can appreciate why those questions aren't as straightforward as you seem to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commensurability_(philosophy_o...

[taylodl]

A new theory isn't going to contradict your observations. It may provide an alternate explanation and allow you to understand the phenomenon a different way, but the phenomenon leading to the observation is unchanged.

This is important in this discussion because we've never observed anything traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. That would appear to rule-out faster-than-light travel, which for practical reasons would make traveling to other solar systems impossible.