But… maybe there is magic which will let people have their cake and eat it too, make square circles, and let you weigh animals which don’t exist. Dreams and fairy tales don’t have to make any sense because they are not real.
Only say never when it applies and not when it is a contradiction in terms like what you said, “never say never.” “Man was never meant to fly” is more like Klax’s claim that people will never have star travel or fusion power plants – dubious claims since just because we see no way to accomplish such things now doesn’t mean we never will. But faster than light is completely different because it is a matter of logical coherence – complete gobble-dee-gook with no coherent meaning.
Wormholes and hyperspace? Maybe. But are these suppose to change the structure of the entire universe into a dreamworld? If that happens then I can only conclude that I am no longer in the world but in a dream or dead. It is worse than that thread we had a while ago asking us to suppose we have proof of creationism. That is after all just a contradiction of all the evidence making God a bald face liar. This is far worse.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
42
111,745,461.6 s @ 1g - using the Julian year of course.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
43
They aren’t dubious at all. Nobody anywhere has achieved them or they’d have been here. It cannot be done under any circumstances. Not clever enough for you I’m sure. Like artificial sentience, reverse time travel, curing arthritis, aging, the common cold, Down’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, name it although they wouldn’t leave traces of ET activity here or out there. There are none therefore there will be none. It’s called strong - which is redundant - uniformitarianism.
Yes we continue to disagree. Nevertheless, the point is that there is a difference between what we haven’t been (and may never be) able to do and what is logically incoherent.
The logically incoherent includes only time travel (into the past) and faster than light (travel or communication). But there is nothing incoherent or logically inconsistent with the other things you mentioned. And there is even a few of them which I would bet otherwise like Down syndrome, since we are already using gene therapy to deal with similar problems.
That is just the point. It does mean no rules at all. It means throwing causality out the window.
The problem is that the a notion most people have of space-time like a motion picture with a series of snapshots strung together is all wrong. That isn’t how space-time is put together at all. You can only think faster than light is possible when you imagine that there is some simultaneous now in distant places. But that is not the case. Right now in Alpha Centauri is a period of time 8.6 years long. So getting to Alpha Centauri any faster than 4.3 years is a reversal of the temporal ordering and means that you can get back here before you even left.
The speed of light is not a speed limit. It is an infinite speed and thus getting anywhere faster than that is to get there before you left, which obviously leads to logical contradictions.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
47
I’ll take your money. Down’s syndrome can only be ‘cured’ and only ever will be by basic eugenics; screening embryos. Not by CRISPR.
Aye, I know the difference between incoherent, meaningless and infeasible, but the outcome is the same: it’ll never, ever happen. My conclusion is correct for the right reason, unlike Fermi’s.
And as a said, the number of seconds one would experience getting to Proxima (@4.244 ly, not the Alpha Centauri binary AB of A Rigil Kentaurus and B Toliman @4.37) Centauri (Alpha Centauri C) is ‘111,745,461.6 s @ 1g - using the Julian year of course.’. A hundred million. 3 & 1/2 years.
Baxter’s Proxima and Ultima are peerless. I was gutted by the first, elated that there was a sequel and now hope against hope for the next instalment.