/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8500641
A whole lotta nothing with gravitational anomalous properties corralling galaxies accelerating the expansion of the universe in ways impossible for any sort of normal matter we've ever observed.

...and if OP isn't suggesting space colonization is impossible, I've no idea what he is suggesting.

>>8436560
Even with the materials we have today, it'd be possible, it's only that we can't mass produce a lot of those materials, and thus you'd end up having to dedicate the entire species to the task.

Another, more forward thinking and better united species, might actually do that. And we're not all that far off from being capable of changing, at the genetic level, what kind of species we are.

Plus, unless your a patent clerk from 1899, we're nowhere near our technological peek, having just really started it less than two centuries years ago, and we're talking of hypothetical civilizations that may have been going through that same process for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years.

As opposed to us, who invented the steam engine just centuries ago, just realized the possibility of life on other planets even more recently, and even today, can't figure out how, even in theory, how exactly 95% of the universe actually operates.

>>8260648
While, unlike most people on /sci/, I'm fairly confident they know, collectively, way the fuck more than I do, I am totally on board with the fact that we're similarly all collectively pic related. So many of us are so damned confident that we know everything there is to know about the universe, or at the very least, that everything we know is so absolutely true and unquestionable, it's refreshing to have a star come along and do something wonky enough to remind us of just how false and fragile that assumption is.

Someone has to remind Scotty that the laws of physics defy themselves just fine, every once in awhile, because we didn't write them.

>>7446995
>FTL is the only way to travel without needing generations of people to live on one ship. Ur a fool to believe our current technology is as good as it gets.
Or, you could just get better at biology.

We only discovered there was a speed of light a few hundred years ago, but we unraveled DNA less than a century ago.

Anyone who says either isn't possible, is suffering from the delusion that we know everything, while ignoring all the stuff we've managed to do that we've previously said were impossible, and the fact that we've turned the standard model of the universe on its head four times since we discovered DNA. Never mind that we already have several theoretical models for FTL and immortality.

There's always another way to skin a cat.

>>7003421
>>7003421
We've not really reached the level of scientific knowledge where we can reliably say something on the bleeding edge is or isn't possible with any real confidence.

We've turned the standard model of the universe on its head four times in the last hundred years... It was barely a decade ago we got to thinking that 90% of the universe was made up of some anti-gravitational force unlike any we'd ever seen or detected, based on a single new observation, and only a handful of decades before that, we thought it all ran on greased wheels of Aether.

Science, as we define it today, is really less than two centuries old. Everything we know might turn out to be wrong, and from past experience, both distant and recent, we know a great deal of it will be.

That said, the Alcubierre drive is probably wrong to, but you don't make new discoveries by not investing in proving hypotheses right or wrong, and there's nothing to say you won't find some other method, or something even more interesting, in the process.