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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

Ever notice how all the "Ya just gotta believe, man!" are largely non-technical SF fans whereas the people who say it's impossible are mostly scientists who are intimately familiar with the relevant science and engineering?

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I recommend you read the Accidental Scientist book. Its insane how many of human inventions were discovered out of luck. A super fast propulsion tech may be just around the corner and we don't know about it.

My point here is that you can never say never, its not a matter of belief its a matter of the future being unpredictable.

You can never say never. But you can often say "not at all likely".

0.000001% odds are "unlikely", but across a sufficiently large number of attempts by a sufficiently large number of scientists over a sufficiently large number of years, something great is bound to be discovered.

Sure. The odds of any particular "wouldn't it be cool" great thing are fairly low, though.

While we cannot say never, we know enough about the laws of physics to say that FTL won't happen. While there are still unknowns in physics, since those unknowns have to decay to our known physics in all areas we currently know about. That makes finding a loophole hard - assuming one exists.

Note that some physics predicts loopholes, but it isn't clear if they are real loopholes or places where out model isn't right in some detail.

I see your point but the same way as having loopholes which may be a mistake in our model our model can also be flawed in the sense that there are actually more loopholes than we can currently see.

I understand its inconceivable that something can exist that we haven't predicted with our current understanding of physics but we also need to realise that scientists 150 years ago thought the stuff we understand and use daily today were also inconceivable. I am talking about breakthroughs that may arise and after a few decades we'll be looking back and thinking how blind we are not to see them earlier. It happened before it may happen again.

Ever heard human flight was impossible?

Ever heard that faster than sound was impossible?

Ever heard splitting of atom was impossible?

I understand that I might sound dreamy but here is the thing it's far better to believe, try and fail than to never believe.

There have always been scientists or natural philosophers or shamans (or whoever else was the most learned of their respective times) who have said "X is impossible" for some X. So far, they've always been proven wrong by a new discovery, often from an unrelated field, that somehow makes X possible. Are we so certain that it's different this time? Interstellar migration won't come soon enough to save us from the climate crisis, but to say it'll never happen is a strong statement.

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