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Comment by richardofyork | Hacker News Reader

Sure thing, but we are smart enough to do better than piston engines and gas turbines used in aircrafts.

I am confident we will one day discover another form of energy, so we can build aircrafts that do not require jet propulsion engines and induction engines. In fact, such a new form of energy will be necessary for us to fly at and possibly beyond the speed of light. And this will allow us to go deep into outer space and other galaxies.

I always thought if we can somehow ride photons, like hop on and go for a ride, then we can move at the speed of light. But right now I am only a programmer, I leave that to the Rocket Scientists to figure out :)

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Current scientific knowledge says that going faster than light is impossible.

Don't be harshing his buzz.

I like Larry Niven's response to this: maybe [they] have different theories.

To be fair, OP was talking about the future.

Where do people get this idea that future science disproves past science? It really doesn't work that way. We're not going to suddenly discover all of modern physics is wrong and oh hey look, it's easy to travel faster than light; that just isn't going to happen.

I am not sure if anyone said that we will disapprove past science. The point here, like with everything we aspire for as programmers and scientists, is to improve what we have. Who knows what the future holds, I don’t.

Incidentally, many theories have been disproved and proved in Physics. And scientists will never rest; they will continue to re-invent, to invent, and to improve on what we have today. That is the simple point, to improve and see where it takes us.

More like the following:

Newton discovered that F = ma, and that acceleration was the amount of speed gained per second. When he said this people were all like "man, if we could only find a vacuum we could take a small amount of mass and a large amount of force and move something faster than the speed of light!" (Which they semi knew due to some sort of cosmological event.) But Einstein came by and said "hold up, Newton is right for slow moving things, but as you approach C most of the force goes into increasing the mass of the object."

Imagine it goes the other way, in a few years some guy says "Einstein was right, but he didn't take into account the fact that we can effect the Plank constant within a certain radius of an horizon-tangle-event, so we can actually build something that will change the relative size of space around us and effectively move faster than the speed of light."

And back and forth all day.

You are of course referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Which does not actually break Einsteins limit, although it does work like a Star Trek warp-drive. Of course the energy requirements are virtually impossible to satisfy in addition to all of the other problems.

> Of course the energy requirements are virtually impossible to satisfy in addition to all of the other problems.

That's what they used to say about powered flight ;)

Perhaps, but you are comparing Jupiters to raisins.

Interesting. I was just pulling a random counter explanation out of my derriere, but of course it has been already thought of before.

> I always thought if we can somehow ride photons, like hop on and go for a ride, then we can move at the speed of light.

That might work, but if we accelerate at the same rate we'd arrive at our destination looking much like sample from a centrifuge.

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