Sorry to be a pseudo-philosipher and not contribute scientific gibberish in the thread, but I'd rather see optimism bashing and crumbling the boundries of pessimism and have Humanity move forward in a bright future. One that might achieve FTL travel, when one realizes there're no limits. You may disagree with me Prometheus, but no way are you changing my mind in your expression of so, assuming it is so and not something else.
It just irks me (is "irk" a word?) when people say "It can't be done." about anything and everything, and seeing how far we've gone to disprove the critics that just can't do anything better than say "We can't."... But then, I'm beginning to stress absoutes in a world where there are fewer absolutes than expected.
I'm not the one who said it can't be done, I just happen to agree with the logic of the man who did... This is not pessimism, it is simply the separation of useful endeavours from fruitless ones... There is a solar system out there that belongs to mankind, and it's waiting to be explored and exploited, and this FTL horsesh*t is a distraction from that...
Everybody loves watching Captain Kirk travel at warp nine to intercept some angry Klingons, but show something infinitely more fascinating, like say, Pete Conrad travelling a quarter million miles to land 200 yards from Surveyor III and everyone complains to the Network that they are missing a repeat of the Lucy Show...
FTL stretches the credibility of even the most liberally speculative scientists to breaking point, and I have no liberal instincts at all when it comes to science... When I was twenty years old, I loved pouring over Kaluza Klein Theories, Many World Interpretations and Faster Than Light Theories etc, but now that I'm older and hopefully a little bit wiser, I've felt that these crazy theories do little or nothing to advance mankind in thought or in action, and that science only works with its feet planted on the ground; that basing future endeavours on outlandish unprovable theories is a regression to Medievel times...