PKT_VOL
Veni, Vidi, Vici
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many of the "impossible" things in our past had physic-al limitations for why they couldn't. and over time both our material science and understanding of physics evolved. Not flying, but several others. look at the macro vs micro discussion you were having with Marcus. our current understanding doesn't fully explain both working, meaning to us currently some things are "impossible" just because we don't understand it.
imo part of the reason we think FTL is impossible is because we don't have anything that we know is FTL to measure it. so for us part of the limitation is that we are confined by current understanding of physics. like previous break thrus, it just takes time. and sometimes all the possible needs to happen is for someone to not know that it is impossible. Telsa wrote multiple times he thought it was possible to get FTL speeds out of some things, even claiming to have gotten electricity to travel at higher than FTL speeds. of course all of his research got gobbled up, so who knows what was actually there.
the reverse is also true, plenty of theoretical "physics" solid things we still can't produce in the real world.
and even some simple things we have, still can't be fully explained by physics. The Bicycle Paradox being one of them.
there will always be a part of me that thinks that true FTL is indeed possible, and more than using the sun's full energy potential to push a grain of rice.
I certainly agree on scientific paradigm shifts (Kuhn for the win). The missing caveat here is that since the scientific revolution, most old paradigms don't suddenly become completely wrong; merely incorrect or incomplete in the absolute. Those incorrect or incomplete theories are still quite useful and hold up well at the scale in which they were formed in. For example, Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are both used every day by engineers across the world despite their flaws in the absolute.
Another distinction that gets lost in this discussion is the difference between FTL speed through spacetime vs FTL speed in the absolute. The former is not possible while the latter is possible. To counter your point about measurement, the latter was proven possible precisely because we can measure if something is FTL. For example, entanglement is FTL in the absolute. However, entanglement often gets conflated with FTL communication or FTL speed through spacetime; neither of which is correct. Interdimensional movement would another FTL mechanism in the absolute but would not be traveling through spacetime. Big distinction there.
With respect to the alien discussion, while it is a near mathematical certainly that life exist elsewhere in the universe, it is silly to believe we or they can realistically become intergalactic via traveling through spacetime. So, while it is entirely possible there are other intelligent life in the universe and even that such life has visited Earth, it is quite implausible that such life forms traveled through spacetime to visit. They could have easily used nonlocality, interdimensionality, warping spacetime into a wormhole, or some other unknown physics concept to do so. The problem with most UFO evidence is that it illustrates objects moving through spacetime versus popping into and out of positional spacetime.