> Curt Adams wrote:
> "Absolutely nothing will get you to Pluto (which is 8 light-hours
> away) in 9 minutes."
>
> I respond (whimsically):
>
> "Don't underestimate the force" --D. Vader
Yeah, and look where he ended up :-)
> and then pose (playfully but encouragingly) a question:
>
> What if consciousness (thought) is discovered to be a form of
> organized energy beyond the range of light? Are we still bound to
> light speed travel?
I addressed this in some other post here recently. The way space and time
are defined in our universe; no, it's not even meaningful to travel faster
than light or to get somewhere (or pass information) FTL. Relativity creates
a whole barrel of nasty paradoxes and then discreetly covers them with the
light-speed-limit veil. FTL seems "possible" to us because we don't think in
terms of relativity.
As a loose example, I always wondered why black hole boundaries are absolute.
After all, if you're just barely outside of the event horizon couldn't you
see a light ray peeking up from just inside? Then I saw and interesting
article in Scientific American on the behaviour of light and centrifugal
force near a black hole. Now I understand why you can't see through a black
hole's event horizon, from any distance (and boy, those mothers are even
creepier than I thought).
Anyway, my points is that once you better understand these things, the
physics way makes more sense. If you really want to understand more, get a
good book on relativity with some "paradoxes" in it. Think about what
happens when you have multiple observers, in various places and with various
speeds. After a while you get a little bit of a handle with how space, time,
and motion fit together in this odd universe of ours and notions of FTL
travel/communication start making a lot less sense.