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Comment by brogrammer5 | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I don't think the aeroplanes will ever been able to achieve lift. I'm skeptical of anyone who attempts anything that hasn't been done before.

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New revolutions in science have tended to be less "we were totally wrong" and more "in extreme cases things don't quite fit the models". It's conceivable that FTL communication and travel aren't as impossible as we currently think, but that would require that things we've demonstrated fairly well are completely wrong. The same wasn't true with heavier than air flight, which (as the other comment notes) we had proof of it being possible (in birds). We knew it was possible in theory, but figuring out how to actually work out the mechanics of the process were the sticking points.

https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...

There are huge parts of physics that remain a mystery( dark matter, dark energy, the big bang, like how on Earth does inflation make sense, a ton of crazy particle physics that go completely over my head). And the funny part is that a lot of these can't be really fit into our current models in a meaningful way. So until we deal with all those I still have hope for an FTL drive.

Physics is very difficult, and magical thinking is much easier and more fun. Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe, and any subsequent theory will need to explain the same observations. These observations both prohibit any form of FTL, and suggest that a universe with FTL would almost certainly contain causality violations. The hope that down will someday become up is ill-founded, and the effects of this would not be what you would want.

We saw birds flying around when we were cavemen. It's always been clear that heavier-than-air flight is possible. We don't currently know of any space-birds flying around black holes.

It's also reasonable to assume that more and more extreme physics is going to be harder and harder (if not practically impossible for any future humans) to come up with new gee-whiz uses.

They’re being built by bicycle mechanics for goodness sake.

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