[roycyang]

With our current understanding of physics, it doesn't seem possible but the key word is current. Scientists recently measured particles going faster than the speed of light. Granted it was not much faster and is still not verified, but if that's possible, it'd stand to reason that there could be other advancements that could do it. If you asked anyone a hundred years ago if they thought they could have real-time communication with someone half way around they world, they would think you were crazy.

[pif]

> If you asked anyone a hundred years ago if they thought they could have real-time communication with someone half way around they world, they would think you were crazy.

It's a different situation: before the radio was invented, people had no idea ho to communicate that far, but they no reason to believe it was not possible at all: it was just a matter of technology. Regarding talking in real time to Mars, already a century ago they had good reasons to consider it impossible: the scientific knowledge of the world is (and already was a century ago) incompatible with faster-than-light cause-effect relation.

One thing is not to know how to do something, another is knowing it to be impossible, short of stunning scientific discoveries.

[RVijay007]

Wasn't this formally disproven, that particles (neutrinos) can go faster than light? A technical issue I think was at play, or some miscalculations that did not take the effects of relativity into account properly.

[pif]

Indeed, all the experiments located under Gran Sasso are reporting measured speeds compatible with light speed (in the vacuum). Here's the CERN press release: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/releases2011/pr... There are also named two possible causes of the original, unexpected result.