rbandrews

Reason 1: Physical Evidence
Without any research, my understanding is something like this: the faster something goes, the more mass it has (since it has more energy and energy and mass are the same thing). So, the closer to the speed of light it gets, the more energy it takes to accelerate it, until finally you can't any more, the energy required is infinite.

Seems self-explanatory, right?

The thing is, it doesn't make any sense. If the speed is correlated to the mass, and light speed is constant and finite, then why should the energy be infinite? That's just contrary to logic. Plus there's that whole time being relative to speed thing, which is just bizarre. Terminology gets used like "atomic clocks" and "gravitational lensing" and "you're an idiot", which doesn't convince me.

As far as I know, we've never seen anything abruptly stop accelerating at 3x10⁸ m/s. The fastest any human has ever gone is probably the Apollo astronauts, which wasn't even 0.1% of the speed of light. We can't make anything go that fast so we say it's impossible? I don't know how I can make that jump.

Now admittedly, I am not a physicist. I don't think that people who are are dumb or necessarily mistaken (unless they can't grok sarcasm). I have just not been convinced that FTL travel is impossible.

Reason 2: Aliens
We've all seen Star Wars, and Stargate, and dozens of other things with "Star-" in the name and cool aliens. One thing that we can believe in is that if there are cool aliens, they are not anywhere near us. They must be very far away, many light years.

That means if we ever want to meet them, we'll need a way to travel faster than light. I refuse to believe that it will never happen. It makes no sense to me that the same universe which gave me about fifteen shelf-yards of pulp SF paperbacks would also see to it that I never meet any aliens at all ever. It just doesn't seem the universe is that much of a tease.

One could argue that maybe SETI will pay off and we can at least talk to them, but is that really as good? It goes in the "damn it I need a starship" pile for me.

Reason 3: I don't have to
There may be a touch of relief to this, but whatever.

I took honors physics in high school for two years, and then two more physics courses in college. I finally passed my last physics exam (which dealt largely with light, though not so much relativity) in 2003. During those classes I had to at least act like hyperdrives are science fiction or I would fail and have to start all over again taking geology or something, and digging up fossilized monkeymen would have been really boring.

But now, since I'm out of school, it's a free country and I can say whatever I like about traveling to faraway galaxies! So there!

I can't deny evolution though. That would just be crazy talk.

With apologies