You really think our model of reality and what is possible will apply in 5,276 years? What did we understand 5,276 years ago? Most certainly countless things that we have now would be considered impossible or witchcraft back then.
Everything we've built so far, obeyed physics, and I expect that to remain true in perpetuity.
You can always argue that we know more now, that there are fundamental limits, etc., but there’s always more to learn and revise.
Instead, many things that seemed possible 50-150 years ago have turned out in the meantime to be impossible - speeds faster than c (before Maxwell's equations and SR), arbitrary precision measurements (before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), uniquely determining the future state of a system based on a previous state (before wave functions), arbitrary amounts of matter and energy (before quantization of these and other properties) etc.
The history of physics is usually one of discovering new constraints, not one of discovering new possibilities. Before physics, we used to believe in unconstrained magic. Not only have we always believed we can reach the stars, we used to believe we could do it by finding the right magical formula or praying hard enough.
Of course there are some exceptions - electricity and quantum computing come to mind.
5000 years is before Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
It's like complaining on why people don't try to build a perpetual machine - it's because it is not possible. You're welcome to keep trying though.
There's now a scheme that doesn't require negative energy.
https://newatlas.com/physics/ftl-warp-drive-no-negative-ener...
It may be almost impossible to build due to the energy required, but it isn't prohibited by the physics we currently know.
Stating that our current models of physics preclude X neglects to mention it's our current understanding of physics which preclude X.
Our models may change to better match reality in the future.
Is a statement that nothing can go faster than the speed of light not a model? And if not, how did we arrive at that knowledge? God? Direct experience of the speed of light?
At least until we solve general relativity vs quantum mechanics (theory of everything), I would be hesitant to claim we know enough to state definitely what is or isn't possible.
We also know this very clearly from relatively simple direct measurements: there never was and there never will be a way for matter to accelerate to speeds greater than c.
The likelihood of your statement is similar to that of mine. It's just nicer to conjecture about the former because the increased complexity brings the illusion of potential.
Even Newtonian physics 300 years ago largely remain the same, relativity complemented it and explained issues on edge cases. It did not completely overturn Newtonian Physics and gravity did not became repulsive instead of attractive.
The discovery of more fundamental models may reveal dualities between our existing theories and new ones.
These duals may show that our current models are accurate, but only to an extent, or don't apply in certain circumstances.
It's hard to fathom, but with gaps to fill in our knowledge of the universe, we may let our imaginations run wild yet :').
This is such a glaring and huge blindspot in western scientific thought process - a blindness to the human element of the scientific process. As if "physics" is something that has been around forever and we just found it in perfect form like some ancient artifact in a cave, rather than the truth of the matter, which is that it is a human creation that is modified with time and is a complex communal phenomenon with many different facets and pieces that not everyone agrees upon. In fact many of the most fundamental elements of physics are under revision and without consensus.
Either life is virtually non-existent thus far, virtually always suicidal, or discovering it is tremendously unlikely.
Neither of the last two bode well for us. It seems to me most likely that ftl suggestions an empty universe or one in which we too are likely to die without learning it.
What’s wrong with a species of sentient house cats that just want to nap all day?
Nothing wrong with that, but if life is common, you’d need all life to be like that to explain the Fermi paradox, which seems unlikely.
We aren't far from such technology already. For instance imagine just a few generations of biotech and computational technology - it may already be enough for us to transform and evolve into some biomechanical hive that bears little resemblance to our current selves.
It could also be that once you are advanced enough, you transcend this physical universe. For example, the entire universe to a deep sea squid is cold dark water without much other life. They have no way to comprehend that there is so much more to reality. They just aren't capable of it. We are not special and also likely not able to detect or comprehend other levels of reality that would be more vast and interesting to advanced beings than simple FTL leaps around the galaxy. Perhaps they just aren't interested in our little ant hill the milky way.
The lack of imagination around what is possible and the supposed paradox posited by Fermi is disheartening.
I think similar reasoning could apply though. If advanced civilizations escape into a different dimension or state of being where they are undetectable, we’d need all of them to do that to explain the Fermi paradox.
I think there is a reason to believe that this represents a unique threshold rather than one of many and that even highly advanced beings would be fundamentally comprehensible and describable even if their technology is not in a way that probably isn't true of the squid because our abstract reasoning can represent the basic facts needed to describe what they are doing even if it misses the why or how.
Even a biomechanical hive would have greater longevity and resources by expanding even if we don't much recognize what they are doing with said resources.
Or they tend to sublime [0], or advanced societies prefer to live in virtual reality, or they tend towards being enlightened enough not to mess with species in an earlier stage of development, or they're not very interested in us, or we've been unlucky/lucky to have avoided discovery so far, or FTL is possible but can only be exceeded slightly, or FTL is possible but requires billions of years of technological development to achieve, or FTL requires a prohibitive amount of energy to travel at longer distances, etc., etc.