In all this excitement hopefully we don’t forget the horde of luddites that’s the modern physics community that couldn’t imagine the possibility of faster than light travel. Like I get it, it’s absurd to consider FTL in regular space time, but when a normal person asks this question all they care about is whether they can realistically imagine going from one star to another in meaningful timespans. Pretty much every physicist I talked to online and offline would scoff and call the concept “absurd” (which is technically true in regular space time). I even believed them for a while. They’d shut down any discussion or imagination before it was even possible. Even now you see the same backwards thinking instead of being excited at least by the theoretical possibility.
Even last year when I brought up the Alcubierre drive to a physics PhD he wasn’t aware of it, and couldn’t imagine this being anything other than a joke (even after showing him the Wikipedia page).
Like a bunch of science fiction writers could think of something called “warp drive” and it took decades for some dude in Mexico to imagine a theoretical potential method to do this?
The last great physicist in my opinion is Carl Sagan, the entire field just like most sciences have rotten to the core into completely unimaginative folks who cannot fathom a world that’s only marginally different from what’s currently around them.
Richard Rhodes spends a lot of time in his “making of the atomic bomb” to figure out if the original inspiration for the atom bomb might have come from HG Wells. We’ve had great imagination in our science fiction, only our scientists have lost whatever mojo used to be there (and I suppose a gun to the head in the name of Nazism) to inspire from it.