JeroOfBaconGrease wrote:I've heard it suggested that were it possible to exceed the speed of light that the power requirements would be so enormous as to require the full backing of the civilization's capabilities. Then again, maybe the only reason no aliens have visited is they haven't started getting our oldest radio transmissions yet, & the time travelers are too busy with more cosmically relevant time periods, like the beginning of the universe, or even just the Solar System.
It took me a while to come up with something I thought might be slightly relevant here.
Actually, the lightspeed barrier is to conventional acceleration as zero kelvin is to advanced refrigeration research; the energy required per-unit-change increases at a geometric rate the closer you get to 1c or 0K. So, unless you have wormholes cutting down the distance or some fancy-as-new particle field generator tricking physics into thinking you weigh less than zero, you can even get to lightspeed or any pertinent fraction thereof without significant time allotted to slowing down again which makes going that fast and dragging along enough armor to survive any deep space microdebris impacts fiscally prohibitive for any civilisation.
And, frankly, I'm beginning to get a little irritated, Mjolnir; physics as we know it can only postulate what wormholes or FTL particles like tachyons might do let alone what sort of timey-whimey effects they have on people using those phenomenon (mathematically postulated phenomenon in the case of tachyons) for travel purposes. So I'll have none of your party poopery in saying that the math says 'it doesn't work that way'. Anyone remember when Hawking had to retract his claim that Black Holes are, and I heavily paraphrase here, "impossible because they destroy information"? at which point somebody suggested that hawking radiation (it was named after the guy, for Pete's sake) might have a connection to what the black hole eats and the man himself pretty much said, with all the synthesized authority he could muster "yeah, you might be onto something".
Human science isn't perfect, hell, that's the entire point of the "scientific process"; running with what seems to work in a repeatable fashion until some yokel plumber comes up with a better definition of "that stuff over there" and addresses problems with the previous solution that weren't seen until several decades after everybody said "it seems to work, that's good enough". A lot of people seem to forget that science only ever says "this is good enough
for now" not "this is it, forever, period".
So, in conclusion: dammit, let me think we at least have a chance at it until the hard numbers get back in the next several decades! Psychic powers have been dead and buried for almost the last two decades, don't take away my FTL drives just yet, we aren't even on Mars.