Anybody ever get the feeling that some people are starting to grasp for straws?

[Ydoow]

Okay, let\'s be generous; let\'s say that there are a million sentient species in our galaxy.

Further, let\'s be even more daring and say that this million species are all similar enough to us to be recogniseably life forms, maybe even similar enough to develop some kind of a dialogue with.

Further, let\'s go RIGHT OUT THERE and say that all million began their development at such a time that we all exist within +/- 100,000 years of each other.

EVEN THEN, the scale of the Galaxy all but guarantees that no two of them would ever cross paths.

Consider the difficulty involved in getting a human to Alpha Centauri (the closest star to the Sun). You\'re looking at 700,000 years travel by the fastest projected methods of transport[1]. That\'s just to get there, never mind back; and even then, whilst we might be able to guess at whether life exists on a theoretical planet near the star (based on the gas composition - we can detect that, and if we were to detect a 20% Oxygen atmosphere, it tells us that there\'s very likely life there), it\'s still a big gamble to send someone[3] there. How do we know we\'re not just sending them to a jungle with nothing bigger or smarter than an insect living there?

There is no evidence of any other intelligent species; and frankly, even if there were lots, we wouldn\'t expect any evidence. The distances are just too great.

[1] Of course, this is assuming (as we\'re about 90% sure) that travelling faster than light is a logical impossiblity[2]. If someone out there has developed FTL travel, then that\'s a game changer. But it\'s also a physics changer - we\'ll need a whole new framework of physics to understand how that could happen.

[2] As opposed to a physical impossiblity. It is physically impossible for a human to fly; however, given the right technology we can overcome a physical impossibility. Although it is impossible, the concept itself makes sense. However, nobody can make a square circle - it\'s a logical impossibility. The concept does NOT make sense. According to our current understanding of Physics (and remember, we really hope we\'re wrong - a lot of us are Star Wars or Star Trek geeks!!), the concept of travelling faster than light may well be LOGICALLY impossible, or internally inconsistent. Therefore, we\'re not expecting developments in technology to fix the problem.

[3] Given that they\'ll be travelling for longer than the entirety of human history has existed, that\'s a big ask. The only practical way to even consider doing this with current technology would be to send an entire, self-sustaining community on a massive asteroid ship. It may become possible to put crews into some form of cryo-sleep later on, but even that\'s no guarantee of anything longer than a normal human life span.

Thank you, you\'ve summed it up PERFECTLY there!

I\'m just gonna stay out of this thread now, I think that we are alone in the galaxy (I hope we are).

The analogy doesn\'t work; these things don\'t break the laws of physics themselves, people just thought they were impractical; FTL does.

That analogy does work.

The point is that you cannot predict what is possible and impossible in the future based on what we know now.

You all know that all scientific rules are temporary. They describe reality and physics as we observe them to be, and are completely open to change as we test and discover new observations.

Back into the 1800\'s/1900\'s scientists publicly declared space flight was impossible according to all laws of physics and chemistry.

They said that even the most explosive/combustible element (hydrogen) could not provide enough Delta-V to put a craft into orbit.

Clarke\'s three laws

1.) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2.) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3.) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I think that last law is the most impressive.

It\'s saying that a technology that\'s advanced far enough, appears as magic to someone less advanced.

e.g. showing a television to someone from 100 A.D.

The rules of the Universe are absolute, and never changing.

However our understanding, concepts, and ability to work with them are far short of complete.

Faster than light may be impossible to our understanding now, but you can never tell what scientists in the future will discover (look at CERN who had test results that (at first) implied FTL travel), or how they\'ll manage to manipulate technology along these rules (warping space for pseudo FTL travel).

[LukeTim]

The really screwy part, is having to look at everything with an open mind, because reality has this odd habit of taking what we think makes sense vs what is seriously screwed up, and then showing us that the screwed up concept is actually the correct one. Sometimes takes us a while to find that last little piece that makes it all fit and suddenly make sense, but until then.....

There is a great saying, though I am not sure who said it first...

I don\'t know the exact words, so I\'ll just paraphrase.

'One should always keep an open mind, but one shouldn\'t keep it so open that one\'s brain falls out.'

[VincentMcConnell]

Thousands of years ago people thought they couldn\'t sail around the world..

Hundreds of years ago they thought man wouldn\'t fly.. or travel into space..

Experts also said we\'d never fly faster then sound..

If history is any indication of the way we overcome challenges then we\'ll find a way to travel faster then light someday, possibly by bending the fabric of space and time to do it.. (unless we wipe ourselves out first)

The only problem with traveling faster than light is that when you do, you will gain infinite mass. But that\'s only according to what we know now. I believe that the most practical way to do intergalactic travel will be wormholes, but I wish I could live 1,000 years just to see what they come up with.

[Thiel]

Thousands of years ago people thought they couldn\'t sail around the world..

With the resources available at the time you couldn\'t. However that was a function of logistics and not because the laws of physics said so.

Hundreds of years ago they thought man wouldn\'t fly.. or travel into space..

See above

Experts also said we\'d never fly faster then sound..

See above

If history is any indication of the way we overcome challenges then we\'ll find a way to travel faster then light someday, possibly by bending the fabric of space and time to do it.. (unless we wipe ourselves out first)

No, history shows us that we can overcome any number of engineering and logistics problems, not that we can bend the laws of physics.

[Amram]

I think at this stage, quoting someone who knows FAR more on the subject at hand than any of us are likely to is a rather good idea instead of adding my own two cents straight up just yet.

Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Co-founder of string field theory.

http://mkaku.org/

I\'ll be lifting relevant tidbits from one of his books, for a more complete concept. I\'ll be jumping whole paragraphs and pages and only including what seems specifically relevant here. Everything within these quotes are entirely his words. No paraphrasing, each sentence chosen is as printed, i\'ll not be twisting anything.

Chemists of the nineteenth century declared the search for the philosophers stone, a fabled substance that can turn lead into gold, a scientific dead end. Nineteenth century chemistry is based upon the immutability of the elements, like lead. Yet with today\'s atom smashers, we can, in principle, turn lead atoms into gold atoms. Think how fantastic today\'s televisions, computers, and Internet would have seemed at the turn of the twentieth century.

The reason these technologies were deemed 'impossibilities' is that the basic laws of physics and science were not known in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth.

As Sir William Osler once said, 'The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow'

In physics, unless there is a law of physics explicitly preventing a new phenomenon, we eventually find that it exists.

For example, Cosmologist Stephen Hawking tried to prove that time travel was impossible by finding a new law of physics that would forbid it, which he called the 'chronology protection conjecture'. Unfortunately, after many years of hard work he was unable to prove this principle. In fact, to the contrary, many physicists have demonstrated that a law that prevents time travel is beyond present day mathematics. Today, because there is no law of physics preventing the existence of time machines, physicists have had to take their possibility very seriously.'

Already one 'impossible' technology is now proving to be possible: the notion of teleportation (at least at the level of atoms). Even just a few years ago physicists would have said that sending or beaming an object from one point to another violated the laws of quantum physics.

It is always a bit dangerous to make predictions, especially ones set centuries to thousands of years into the future. Today the fundamental laws of physics are basically understood. Physicists today understand the basic laws extending over a staggering forty-three orders of magnitude, from the interior of the proton out to the expanding universe. As a result, physicists can state, with reasonable confidence, what the broad outlines of future technology might look like, and better differentiate between those technologies that are merely improbable, and those that are truly impossible.

In this book, therefore, I divide things that are 'impossible' into three categories.

The first are what i call Class 1 impossibilities. These are technologies that are impossible today but that do not violate the known laws of physics. So they might be possible in this century, or perhaps the next, in modified form.

The next category is what I term Class II impossibilities. These are technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world. If they are possible at all, they might be realised on a scale of millenia to millions of years into the future. The include time machines, the possibility of hyperspace travel, and travel through wormholes.

The final category are what I call 'Class III impossibilities. These are technologies that violate the known laws of physics. Surprisingly there are very few such impossible technologies. If they do turn out to be true, it would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.

This classification significant, I feel, because so many technologies in science fiction are dismissed by scientists as being totally impossible, when what they actually mean is that they are impossible for a primitive civilisation like ours.

Carl Sagan once wrote, 'What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old... and advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or macaque.'

That ends his preface. There is much more to it, but those are the on topic relevant bits.

His list which is covered within the book itself:

Class I Impossibilities:

• [li]Forcefields[/li]
  [li]Force Fields[/li]
  [li]Invisibility[/li]
  [li]Phasers and Death Stars[/li]
  [li]Teleportation[/li]
  [li]Telepathy[/li]
  [li]Psychokinesis[/li]
  [li]Robots[/li]
  [li]Extraterrestrials and UFO\'s[/li]
  [li]Starships[/li]
  [li]Antimatter and Anti-Universes.[/li]

Class II Impossibilities:

• [li]Faster than Light[/li]
  [li]Time Travel[/li]
  [li]Parallel universes[/li]

Class III Impossibilities

• [li]Perpetual Motion machines[/li]
  [li]Precognition[/li]

His point of view on Faster than light travel. Note that i am not including the 18 pages of material in which he outlines both what is currently impossible for us, what loopholes are viewed as possible exceptions to the rule(both useless and otherwise), and how it might actually be possible, given a few conditions....such as what one today might call absurd quantities of energy.

Wormholes and stretched space may give us the most realistic means of breaking the light barrier. But it is not known if these technologies are stable; if they are, it would still take a fabulous amount of energy, positive or negative, to make them work.

Perhaps an advanced Type III civilisation might already have this technology, It might be millennia before we can even think about harnessing power on this scale. Because there is still controversy over the fundamental laws governing the fabric of space-time at the quantum level, I would classify this as a Class II Impossibility.

His basic point, across the entire 18 pages on this one topic, is the same as most of everything else in this book. There is no known law of physics that explicitly rules this out as definitely not going to happen in any way, shape, or form. Will we find such a law, maybe. Will we ever achieve this if we don\'t find one, maybe. Has another civilisation already achieved this, maybe.

His point of view on extra terrestrial visitations, and UFO\'s are that they are a class I impossibility. Should alien life exist within our vicinity, given the rapid advances in SETI, and discoveries both in extrasolar planets and techniques in locating them and determine what they hold, it seems likely that a first contact may occur within the next century. He kills 27 pages on the topic, during which he discussed possible forms a real UFO might take and why, all within the bounds of known laws. He also discusses possible forms of travel which fit the laws of physics, and to an extent sightings.

In short, such a race is rather far beyond us. much as we wouldn\'t bother to offer beads and incense to an Ant colony, they care nothing of us. They aren\'t even likely to invade us for any reason. There are simply too many planets with comparable or grater resources for it to be worth the hassle of coping with an indigenous lifeform that might prove a nuisance. The greatest danger an ant hill faces is that we will simply demolish its existence without thought, or even really knowing it was there, since we just don\'t act or care on that scale. If we do interact with another race that is more advanced than us, this is how its likely to occur. They will have some goal of which we are part, and we\'ll neither have been singled out, nor more likely have even been considered, and still we will likely be powerless in the face of their objective.

The point of all this? The Jury is still out on the topics of both FTL travel, and Alien visitation. They are neither provable nor disprovable with todays technology, possibly also with tomorrows technology with a window of time easily extending beyond several centuries. While neither is possible for us, they aren\'t 100% impossible just yet. There is much we do not know. I\'d wager that despite all we do know of the intricate workings of our reality and what can be done with such details, what we don\'t is by far the larger mass of knowledge, possible as great an imbalance as what human civilisation as a whole knows in comparison to the knowledge contained by the average 4 year old.

We\'ve already covered a good part of why it\'s somewhat closed-minded to outright dismiss such things, and explored a few of the more pertinent aspects. The most important detail of all in my opinion, is that we are a civilisation that is still in its infancy, and our knowledge is comparable. An infant has little ability to define possible from impossible. I believe Arthur C. Clarke said it best.

And in closing. In the 1500\'s we assumed we knew what we were talking about. In the 1600\'s we assumed we knew what we were talking about. In the 1700\'s we assumed we knew what we were talking about. In the 1800\'s we assumed we knew what we were talking about. We look back on that now and find many on the right track, but as a whole, we really didn\'t have a clue at all when speaking of what cannot come to be, or how things we cannot yet experiment with actually do function and the laws governing them. How sure can we be that someone from the 2100\'s or 2200\'s would not include the 1900\'s and 2000\'s on that list as well? Sir William Osler\'s quote seems to imply we belong on that list already....

[Johno]

I should note here that I, for one, haven\'t given up hope of finding some kind of FTL drive; hey, I want the Starship Enterprise as much as anyone else (or even the Phoenix will do!). I\'m not saying it IS impossible, simply that at the present time, most things that we have seen of Physics say that the idea doesn\'t make sense.

There may be loopholes. One I have read that seems to have some promise is an article suggesting that the idea of 'Warp Drive' may work - that is, perhaps wrinkles in the continuum might be able to move faster than light. And of course, Hyperspace is always a possibility - the idea that you could travel faster than light if you actually left this universe and reappeared somewhere else.

But these are faint hopes. The fact is that Physics is building a picture of a world where light (and only light) travels at 300,000,000 m/s, and nothing beyond; and we have to accept the evidence when we see it.

[Ydoow]

With the resources available at the time you couldn\'t. However that was a function of logistics and not because the laws of physics said so.

See above

See above

No, history shows us that we can overcome any number of engineering and logistics problems, not that we can bend the laws of physics.

All of his examples were cases of 'It\'s impossible to do this because it\'s physically impossible' during their era.

Looking back, with our technology, we know it was easily possible.

The laws of physics and science are constantly changing, so please do not say something is impossible because physics say it is.

It\'s not an acceptable answer because they may change in the future, and there are numerous ways to 'work around' the laws of physics.

Also refer to my post on how past scientists used to think Space Travel was physically/chemically impossible.

[Thiel]

All of his examples were cases of 'It\'s impossible to do this because it\'s physically impossible' during their era.

Looking back, with our technology, we know it was easily possible.

The laws of physics and science are constantly changing, so please do not say something is impossible because physics say it is.

It\'s not an acceptable answer because they may change in the future, and there are numerous ways to 'work around' the laws of physics.

Also refer to my post on how past scientists used to think Space Travel was physically/chemically impossible.

Again, no. The difference is the reason why it was impossible. In case of circumnavigating the world they couldn\'t do it because they couldn\'t bring along enough supplies to last them the entire trip. No-one was claiming it was physically impossible, only that it was impractical.

In case of heavier than air flight it was the lack of a suitable engine that made it impractical, not because any physical laws said so.

Same with supersonic flight. No-body was claiming it was physically impossible, but that it was beyond our ability to engineer at that point.

And that\'s why that analogy doesn\'t work. People have realised that we could go around the earth from the moment we found out it was round. We\'ve known heavier than air flight was possible since the moment we invented the kite and we\'ve known supersonic flight was possible since the first time someone fired a rifle.

Not so with FTL flight. We have no idea about a clue of a shadow of a hint of a flimsy piece of evidence that suggests how FTL could be done, or if it\'s even doable.

[Monkthespy]

This is just turning into a pointless argument.

[Johno]

Back when I was a naive first year at Uni, I asked my Physics lecturer about the question of whether it was possible to circumvent the laws of Physics enough to travel faster than light.

His answer was that nobody could really see how . . but no physicist wants to actually slam the door on it, because all of them want to have the chance to travel on a starship!

He then said something that really made me think.

'Actually, before you start asking whether we can TRAVEL faster than light, there\'s something else we need to do - we need to be able to send INFORMATION faster than light. There\'s no point travelling at light speed to a star [1] if once we get there we discover there\'s no planets to visit! So we need a way to scout the territory in front of us, which at the very least means some kind of supraluminal radar (and possibly probes which can travel faster than light AND THEN send a message back faster than light!).'

[1] Remember, even by light beam they\'re still a long way away - Betelgeux, which is comparatively close, would still take 700+ years to reach at the speed of light; and the very nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take 4 years to reach! To shrink the Galaxy down to manageable distances, we\'re going to need to travel a LOT faster than light.

[Crusher8000]

I don\'t think we\'ll be able to travel to a solar system before we get in serious problems on this planet. The glory days of the human race are numbered, civilization might improve in the future but not for long. Perhaps another 50 years and then we will get into problems because society has been too wasteful with its resources.

However, this planet is proof life is possible and if life is possible on one planet, life is possible on other planets.

[Johno]

Don\'t write humans off. We\'re persistent little beggars.

[Crusher8000]

I think humans will survive climate change, no matter if it\'s extreme heat or cold. Civilization won\'t survive though, humans will just be tribal groups again.

[bandit4910]

Back when I was a naive first year at Uni, I asked my Physics lecturer about the question of whether it was possible to circumvent the laws of Physics enough to travel faster than light.

His answer was that nobody could really see how . . but no physicist wants to actually slam the door on it, because all of them want to have the chance to travel on a starship!

He then said something that really made me think.

'Actually, before you start asking whether we can TRAVEL faster than light, there\'s something else we need to do - we need to be able to send INFORMATION faster than light. There\'s no point travelling at light speed to a star [1] if once we get there we discover there\'s no planets to visit! So we need a way to scout the territory in front of us, which at the very least means some kind of supraluminal radar (and possibly probes which can travel faster than light AND THEN send a message back faster than light!).'

[1] Remember, even by light beam they\'re still a long way away - Betelgeux, which is comparatively close, would still take 700+ years to reach at the speed of light; and the very nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take 4 years to reach! To shrink the Galaxy down to manageable distances, we\'re going to need to travel a LOT faster than light.

Alpha Centauri is a binary star system that has two stars.

Betelgeux is spelled Betelgeuse.

OT:

We need to learn to send data and travel faster than speed of light, so we can send an orbiter to the planet to see if it\'s still there.

Say if we were 300 Light Years from a planet, we see it as was 300 years ago, it could of been burnt by it\'s star in that period of time.

[mincespy]

You people seem to forget one important rule:

-Time runs backwards when you travel faster then light.

[bandit4910]

You people seem to forget one important rule:

-Time runs backwards when you travel faster then light.

That\'s if the laws if physics are correct, what if they aren\'t?

If they are then we might, I\'m saying MIGHT be able to time travel back to the dinosaur ages.

Of course we might not.

[Alfastar]

Maybe the persons who presents Ancient aliens are the aliens.

That\'s if the laws if physics are correct, what if they aren\'t?

If they are then we might, I\'m saying MIGHT be able to time travel back to the dinosaur ages.

Of course we might not.

Its so much time investigated that of we can travel back in time or not. And the results are always: We can\'t travel faster then light.

[VincentMcConnell]

Even if we could travel faster than light, that would make us go forward in time... Not backward.

[Amram]

Maybe the persons who presents Ancient aliens are the aliens.

Its so much time investigated that of we can travel back in time or not. And the results are always: We can\'t travel faster then light.

The wonders of a closed mind. This door was opened, it was tested, it was proved, it was proved again and again, no further testing needed, door closed. Your example is also rather flawed. Alchemy and Spontaneous Generation would like to chat with you.

In the absence of forum members sporting P.H.D.s and professorships, im inclined to accept the well stated and logical reasoning backed by sourced evidence by someone who not only has both, but specialises on this exact topic. You cannot yet call it flatly impossible for the simple fact that the laws of physics are not 100% understood to all extents known and currently unknown. We have yet to discover the last thing we will ever discover, and discoveries love to change the game around on us.

So much time was invested in Alchemy and the results were always the same, lead cannot become gold. So solid was the evidence against, and so absent the evidence in support, that it was deemed by the world at large as a scientific fact, a basic law, for hundreds of years. Enter the particle accelerator, and it is in fact very possible to produce gold from lead, albeit one atom at a time. Not exactly practical, but certainly not impossible.

A billion measures all with the same result, can become irrelevant once a new measure can produce a different and repeatable result.

Science and the evolution of our knowledge base proceeds in stages.

Define a question

Gather information and resources (observe)

Form an explanatory hypothesis

Test the hypothesis by performing an experiment and collecting data in a reproducible manner

Analyze the data

Interpret the data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis

Publish results

Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

we have some issues in testing special relativity against c itself.........

Relativity and Special relativity both come apart at the event horizon of a black hole. A place where energies and forces vastly exceed the levels our experiments can reach. There is something more to it that the theories aren\'t covering. I\'ve no inklings of what that might be, but that its incomplete as a theory of everything is obvious even to those with limited understandings who\'ve done a little reading and read what it cannot predict for us. Just the same, many people understand that bricks cannot fly, while not understanding why wings do allow flight. I may not be an expert of relativity, but for some things, you don\'t need to be, like comprehending material thats been published at a reading level within your reach by those that do understand it.

A law is a law until it is no longer a law.

The Theory of special relativity states we cannot reach or exceed c because our mass will reach infinity as we do, and so because our mass will be increasing while we accelerate while our thrust will not increase accordingly, our acceleration will be decreasing, and we will never get there, although due to time dilation it will measurably appear to us aboard the ship that we have indeed gone many times faster. It is not a law just yet because it cannot yet be proven to be impossible to prove false. It is currently inscrutable. The laws of thermodynamics have made that jump and hence, are Laws. They definitely are not inscrutable, they can be explored fully from one end of the possibilities to the other.

The theory of spontaneous generation, second paragraph on for a little ways. Thats a good one. And it applies here. It held its position as verifiable and beyond the possibility to prove false for nearly two millennia. Supported by 1900 years worth of experiments, and it was wrong, the method for all of the experiments flawed. Flawed by a lack of understanding of things not yet known to humanity at the time.

Why does this apply here?

the Theory of relativity, and special relativity have a life of less than 100 years behind them. There is much we have high confidence in that we cannot detect, such as dark matter, and the Higgs Bosun. What possibilities do they open up once found, if ever, and how will those change the tools we have at our disposal for scientific evidence gathering? What other unknowns will we find that change the game? Will the game change sufficiently that we will prove relativity and/or special relativity to be incorrect? Certainly seems unlikely, but then, they\'d have said the same of Spontaneous Generation sometime after Aristotle and before Francesco Redi, look where we are now.

the point? We do not 100% know that there is absolutely no possible means of breaching the speed of light in any way, shape or form, practical or otherwise. We have confidence levels, we have limited experimental evidence, and we have a theory that has predicted things seeming insane and found to be true. For our current and projected capabilities as a civilisation it is for all intents beyond practical possibility, if not also legitimately impossible. The theory has gaps however. If you do 100% know(not believe, know, and provably) these things, then you do not belong here talking to us, you should be meeting the heads of prestigious universities seeking tenure, and the chance to share that proof and cement your place in our history.

Until we can explore the possibilities provided by wormholes, and understand both wormholes and black holes, and have fleshed out string theory and proved additional dimensions to either be false or of no use in FTL, and last of all can in some way detect and measure the actual fabric of space and time itself(since for relativity to be true, they must exist), then we aren\'t done here.

until then, the jury remains out on whether getting from point A, to point B, in a time period less than that needed by light itself is in fact a possibility. Spatial shortcuts, moving reference points, stretching or shrinking the fabric itself, or just straight up exceeding the limit(by means not yet known, theorised or other) all remain possibilities at this time, although not ones we can be very confident in.

I\'ll put it here as well. I cannot prove it, nor can i disprove it.

There is plenty of evidence against, and i do not consider it likely that we will achieve it in any form we will recognise, likewise im not overly confident we will accomplish it at all. I am however certain that we haven\'t proven it completely impossible just yet, just proved it definitely well beyond the limits of humanity at this time and for the near to distant future.

one doesn\'t need to exceed the speed of light to change the rate time passes either. GPS satellites must be frequently adjusted due to relativistic effects and they definitely are not in excess of c. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day because of the slower ticking rate due to the time dilation effect of their relative motion.

Exceeding C may reverse time, or it may stop entirely, i don\'t have enough understanding of it to say which. i do know that time goes slower the faster you go, such that it appears to you as if you have traveled forward in time, since in one hour, years may have passed outside your little relativistic capsule. Take it far enough, and it will appear that time has stopped, because it moves so much more slowly outside your reference point.

[Ydoow]

Thank you amram. You reiterated what I said, but with a lot more detail explanation and backing.

Something I really should have done.

[Amram]

You people seem to forget one important rule:

-Time runs backwards when you travel faster then light.

seems odd, given that im out of order in quoting this, but whatever.

you seem to forget one little quibble.

We do not know that. We think it true. The theory has held up very well indeed, and proven useful in so many applications, but short of completing the scientific process, there is no fact here, only conjecture.

Is it an accurate conjecture, may well be, but do we know that? Not yet we don\'t.

If you want to seem above this by leaving one little forgotten item, please do be sure it is indeed forgotten, and in fact, relevant to your point.

We have no experimental evidence supporting your claim. We know time slows when you go faster, GPS offers plenty of evidence there. Do enlighten me however, share an experiment involving speeds faster than c in which time was measured to move backwards? I\'ll accept material at any technical level you happen to find on that.

Until then, the scientific method is incomplete, the theory isn\'t vetted in that respect, and as such, it isn\'t fact, merely theory. Probability does matter, but not as much as knowing the difference between fact and conjecture, Law and Theory.

I submit, that changes nothing. We have not forgotten any facts, or rules as it were. Merely left alone one piece of a theory, a detail which offers no specific issue with FTL itself, merely a rather unique, and possibly disastrous consequence of succeeding.

This brings us back to whether or not it would be practical, not whether its impossible.

[Johno]

Alpha Centauri is a binary star system that has two stars.

Betelgeux is spelled Betelgeuse.

I am aware of Alpha Centauri, so I\'m oversimplifying (a Science teacher - my default explanations are the ones for 12 year olds, and I actually find that this is a good level to pitch it to for the general public [because there is such a variation in levels of understanding about Science]).

Actually, if we want to be technical, the nearest star to the Sun is actually PROXIMA centauri; however, without a telescope you won\'t be seeing that one (as it\'s just too faint); so few people outside the Scientific community know of its existence. So I just shrug my shoulders and talk about Alpha Centauri, since lots of people know about that one (pick your battles, I say! )

As for Betelgeux/Betelgeuse: We can actually spell it any way we like (as it\'s a transliteration from Arabic, not an English word!). I prefer to use Betelgeux, though, because 1) It\'s closer to how an Arabic-speaking friend pronounces it; the terminal X gives a nuance to it that I like; and 2) Putting an X at the end is aesthetically pleasing to me - gives the name a little touch of mystery!

OT:

We need to learn to send data and travel faster than speed of light, so we can send an orbiter to the planet to see if it\'s still there.

Say if we were 300 Light Years from a planet, we see it as was 300 years ago, it could of been burnt by it\'s star in that period of time.

Absolutely. And this is something that many people fail to grasp about space exploration - it\'s a moving target. Yes, planets and stars have billion-year-plus lifespans, but that doesn\'t mean that the universe is changeless! The light that gets to us from Betelgeux was actually emitted from the star 640 years ago today; and there\'s a significant chance that some time in that 640 years the star actually went supernova. We just have no way of knowing.

[VincentMcConnell]

You\'re a science teacher who plays KSP? Ha! That\'s awesome. I think you should just help your students with this game all day. Afterall, spaceflight is the only important scientific field (I don\'t mean that.)

[Johno]

Heh, I use KSP as a learning resource when we cover the physics of spacecraft!

(Early version, though - I\'ll have to update it!)

[McLuv]

I think it\'s highly possible that we were visited by aliens, only not sentient ones. It\'s been shown that extremophiles can endure the hardships of space, unprotected in some cases, and there\'s evidence of possible extraterrestrial microbial life found in meteorites from mars.

The theory itself is panspermia, and it deserves a look at because it has its merits. Ultimately, however, there\'s no evidence which proves that either life originated on Earth or elseware, nor even to assess the probabilities in any detail, but the possibility for either certainly exists.

Any form of sentient alien having visited the earth within humanity\'s life time, however, would appear highly improbably. Since the dawn of civilization, that probability quickly approaches 0 (8,000-10,000 years passes in the blink of an eye when compared to astronomic scales).