Without electricity, how well would we understand it? Just that some mysterious rocks that stick?
Wonder if one day in the distant future we’ll discover a new force we never imagined.
Why should we believe it will continue to advance exponentially? And even if it does, we many find none of the hypotheticals pans out - perhaps we advance exponentially and there is nothing feasible to reach even 0.01c
But when we observe the universe we see nothing. Therefore either no advanced life exists in the universe besides ourselves, which seems unlikely, or none have spread to space in any significant degree and FTL is either impossible or so difficult no one bothers. There doesn't seem to be a secret third thing that both satisfies our observations and obeys known physics.
Currently focusing on imaginary money crypto schemes and ML chatbots whose data centers use as much power as entire US states, sorry.
Fixed that for you. Rev up those stealth fighters!
The closest analogue in the real world to the ideal that you describe is, I think, Cuba. It does guarantee food and housing, and it does have a remarkably advanced healthcare system plus what is reportedly a united community. Perhaps most interesting of all, it's politically isolated like a starship would have to be by its nature. Even then, one would have to be either pretty brave or desperate to go along on the journey, as modern Cuba has only been around for half a century and that's at the absolute minimum of an intergalactic starship's practical mission duration.
Anything that exists within spacetime is bound by this rule. The only odd exception people point to is quantum entanglement, but while the correlations appear instantaneous, they can’t be used to send information faster than light. Sending matter is distant second.
So, if we ever hope to travel faster than light, we wouldn’t do it by "outrunning" gravity. Instead, we’d need to find a way to manipulate spacetime itself, like bending, warping, or reshaping it ... since that, in the first place itself, is what is defining the limits of motion.
eg: maybe they exist(ed) but once a civilization gets advanced enough to build FTL-like travel, they invent AI and use it for warfare and then soon cease to exist. This would mean there are potentially many civilizations (and AI?) that are budding and could travel through the universe.
eg: We aren't in an interesting enough place to bother visiting.
eg: they exist and know about us but have "prime directive" (Ala: Star Trek) laws that state they can't make contact until we reach a stable enough civilization to invent warp drive (or some other advancement.)
eg: There is some exotic reason that our pocket of the Milky Way is un-navigable.
A few of these:
* Astronomical: the sun is unusually calm for a star. Jupiter blocks comets. Saturn blocked Jupiter from destroying the Earth.
* Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In the next 0.5-1 billion years Earth will become unhabitable because the sun's luminosity is increasing. We're in the twilight years of the (life-supporting) planet.
* Above point + think about all the species that came before us. Life appeared 3.5-3.8 billion years ago. It took that long to get to humans.
* Dinosaurs got wiped out. Would humans have even evolved if a cosmic event hadn't cleared the board?
* We think that human ancestors dropped down to about 1000-100,000 individuals about 900k years ago.
There's also the question of how many sun-like stars in terms of metallicity there are that preceded the sun. Our sun inherited a lot of heavier elements from a previous generation of star(s).
Add all of these together and we might be early to the party.
Physical world is big and getting from one point to other takes lot of energy and involves lot of mass.
I believe historically it was either for profit, which there is unlikely to be much in medium term. Or because the new place was expected to be better. Mostly due to resource constraints. But generation ship should be quite optimal. And well outside magic level tech there is not much to do on empty planet.
“The next step is crucial. The simple organic molecules have to be shielded from the ultraviolet radiation of the primary. That requires a large body of water—an ocean—to protect them. No protection and the molecules break up as soon as they're formed. And oceans of water are … extremely rare.”
…
“But something else is rarer still. The next step in the creation of life is when the amino acids form into long chains.
Left in the ocean, they drift apart as easily as they join together. There has to be a means of concentrating them. Once a certain level of concentration is reached, they'll form long chains, more complex molecules, automatically. Heating isolated bodies of water would help, say tidal pools warmed by hot lava and occasionally replenished by the sea.”
…
“Do you understand, Sparrow? Tidal pools implies tides and that means a moon large enough to raise them—though not too frequently, because you might dilute the pool too much. A combination of the primary and the moon would raise larger tides less often, and that would be a happy medium. What's required, then, is a planet that has land surfaces, oceans, and a large enough satellite to raise suitable tides. The action would concentrate the simple amino acids and they could combine into the longer chains.”
The novel is The Dark Beyond the Stars, and I recommend it highly.
Not that humans with their troublesome egos are necessarily anywhere near global maximum.
"It is inconceivable that inanimate Matter should, without the Mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual Contact... That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro’ a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the Consideration of my readers."
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/qm-actio...
For all we know there have been thousands of technological species in our galaxy, but never two at roughly the same time and roughly close together, and never will be.
What I was trying to get at is I argue that historically we had no reason to assume magnets to exist until we discovered them. (Sure, today we can explain them in terms of the effects of electrons traveling at relativistic speeds.)
It otherwise seems a safe assumption that we cannot move into a 4th spatial dimension (even if such exists) or do many other outlandish things. I don’t think we can prove them impossible but likely just don’t know how.
But imagine if Newton had been shown an electromagnet and asked to explain it… It would have been witchcraft!
But even that doesn't guarantee anything. Modern humans are ~100k years old. It took us nearly all of that time before we discovered agriculture. And it still took thousands of years after that to end up with industrialization. Before then our societies barely improved. It's entirely possible that if society had gone differently that we could've delayed or avoided industrialization altogether. The same could've happened with dinosaur-people.
I'd expect that the time scales between spurts, while getting shorter over the past 350 years or so, were generally much, much longer.
We first started using stone tools more than 2.5 million years ago. We didn't start effectively using fire for another 500-750k years.
It was another 1.75 million years before we began harvesting seasonal "crops" we identified in our nomadic travels, and another tens of thousands of years before we founded permanent agricultural settlements.
Doing so (and the food surpluses enabled by such) allowed for specialization and R&D into stuff that wasn't directly related to food production.
That really kicked off a technological spurt, which included writing -- a technology that was, perhaps, the biggest step forward, until Liebniz/Newton's Calculus.
Given the immaturity of our current understanding of physics (Standard Model/General Relativity), biology (DNA research) and the like, it seems we're likely to continue without another spurt for quite some time.
I, of course, could be wrong. But since history is often a good guide to the future, I don't think so.