This short post is a sort of extension on my post from a couple of weeks ago about skeptical readers. In that post I talked about people who had been talking about SF elements as unbelievable, and as such a bad thing to have in a book. This was to the extent some of them were getting quite nasty about writers who include things like FTL (Faster Than Light) travel. FTL was in fact one of the most highlighted “utterly impossible” things these people were abusing. I already mentioned a few others in my prior post.
Well, we have all heard recently of the confirmation of the discovery of the Higgs Boson Particle by scientists at CERN. This was yet another thing that a small number of those naysayers, these doom and gloom negative nancy all is absolutely fixed fanatics, said was never going to happen. Well bravo CERN for shutting them up.
It seems now NASA is set to shut them up once and for all, with talk of actual laboratory experiments into a method of FTL travel that doesn’t even break the rules of Special Relativity that those naysayers worship so strongly. Keeping in mind that special relativity is based on THEORY, their assertions were always rather foolish. Strong theory, respected theory, accepted as fact theory, but theory nonetheless. A theory is always open to new facts, new modifications. We know that time and space can be bent. Black holes do it. And now, NASA hope to do it too.
Even should the experiments not achieve fruition in our lifetime, this throws the gauntlet down, and demands attention from the naysayers. It commands attention and acceptance that, regardless of your convictions otherwise, nothing should be seen as impossible beyond belief without any attempt to go there. Should it eventuate that something IS impossible, then work around it so that the impossible factor becomes irrelevant. Humanity has intelligence (believe it or not), it has tenacity, and it has innovation. As surely as we clubbed each other on the heads in millennium past, we will club the universe on the head (figuratively) in order to continue our advance. And as long as there are scientists who dream, nothing will ever be truly impossible.