[VladVladikoff]

This feels very defeatist to me. Technology continues to advance, exponentially. And there are hypothetical ultra fast space travel technologies that we haven’t yet been able to fabricate but could theoretically in the future. e.g. Alcubierre warp drive.

[losteric]

> Technology continues to advance, exponentially

Why should we believe it will continue to advance exponentially? And even if it does, we many find none of the hypotheticals pans out - perhaps we advance exponentially and there is nothing feasible to reach even 0.01c

[notTooFarGone]

Yeah it's always quite naïve to say technology will be always exponential. We only had like a few thousand years - if it's logarithmic we wouldn't know it for the next 10000 years.

[krapp]

If the Alcubierre drive were possible, some civilization would have already discovered it, and we would see evidence of its use. This is certain to be the case with any kind of FTL travel, if such a thing is even possible.

But when we observe the universe we see nothing. Therefore either no advanced life exists in the universe besides ourselves, which seems unlikely, or none have spread to space in any significant degree and FTL is either impossible or so difficult no one bothers. There doesn't seem to be a secret third thing that both satisfies our observations and obeys known physics.

[oneshtein]

Geminga?

[krapp]

Everything I read tells me it's a gamma ray pulsar.

[oneshtein]

Something like Alcubierre drive must move fast (0.1% of c at least), be very heavy and dense (to create protected environment inside), and emit lot of high energy gamma rays because a spacetime with negative energy will accelerate light a lot.

[nirav72]

More like technology evolves in spurts. Huge gains within a specific area for 2-3 decades and then only small incremental advancements for the next 2-3 decades.

[nobody9999]

>More like technology evolves in spurts. Huge gains within a specific area for 2-3 decades and then only small incremental advancements for the next 2-3 decades.

I'd expect that the time scales between spurts, while getting shorter over the past 350 years or so, were generally much, much longer.

We first started using stone tools more than 2.5 million years ago. We didn't start effectively using fire for another 500-750k years.

It was another 1.75 million years before we began harvesting seasonal "crops" we identified in our nomadic travels, and another tens of thousands of years before we founded permanent agricultural settlements.

Doing so (and the food surpluses enabled by such) allowed for specialization and R&D into stuff that wasn't directly related to food production.

That really kicked off a technological spurt, which included writing -- a technology that was, perhaps, the biggest step forward, until Liebniz/Newton's Calculus.

Given the immaturity of our current understanding of physics (Standard Model/General Relativity), biology (DNA research) and the like, it seems we're likely to continue without another spurt for quite some time.

I, of course, could be wrong. But since history is often a good guide to the future, I don't think so.

[justinator]

More like technology evolves during global wars.

Fixed that for you. Rev up those stealth fighters!

[freakynit]

The fabric of spacetime itself sets the ultimate speed limit. Nothing can locally move through it faster than light. For example, gravitational waves ripple across the universe at light speed.

Anything that exists within spacetime is bound by this rule. The only odd exception people point to is quantum entanglement, but while the correlations appear instantaneous, they can’t be used to send information faster than light. Sending matter is distant second.

So, if we ever hope to travel faster than light, we wouldn’t do it by "outrunning" gravity. Instead, we’d need to find a way to manipulate spacetime itself, like bending, warping, or reshaping it ... since that, in the first place itself, is what is defining the limits of motion.

[oneshtein]

So c is the speed of light in the fabric, right?

[freakynit]

I believe "c" is the upper limit of allowed speed in this spacetime itself. Light just so happens to be the fastest of all entities in this spacetime. Thus, we see "c" as the speed of light. and not the max. speed limit imposed by the spacetime.

[justinator]

>Technology continues to advance, exponentially.

Currently focusing on imaginary money crypto schemes and ML chatbots whose data centers use as much power as entire US states, sorry.

[Ekaros]

I think our recent forays to microscopic and sub-microscopic things like computers have really distorted our views. Just look at something like EV. Give say 10x efficiency(very high) increase and we are actually still faraway from even interplanetary travel.

Physical world is big and getting from one point to other takes lot of energy and involves lot of mass.

[Rover222]

Especially if we are actually on the cusp of ASI from self-improving AGI systems. That seems like the most likely scenario where technology emerges that we cannot currently fathom.

(Big IF there, I know)