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I mean this seems reasonably likely. Who says there's not a cheat out there somewhere? There's still so much we don't understand.
I think you lack imagination. Who says the aliens don't upload themselves, then print new bodies once they arrive in new locations? Not to mention it hardly seems a stretch to surmise these hyperadvanced aliens have developed immortality.
Much of it has been verified experimentally. It’s not so much that it’s impossible that we’re wrong, but that I think that absent a reason to believe very fundamental ideas ideas about physics are wrong, it’s better to assume they’re right. To do otherwise is simply positing magic-by-another-name, where there’s something we really want to be true. If I can simply ignore physics on the grounds that it might be wrong (with no evidence given that it actually is wrong) then what I’d have is magic or the force or something. After all that hasn’t been completely ruled out and there could be a cheat out there that makes a force choke possible.
I think especially with things I really want to believe, it’s much more rational to go with what we actually know to be true.
But isn’t that what people Probably thought before there was a new revolution in physics each time? Why assume we have come to the “end of history” as it were?
I still think it’s very unlikely that aliens visited Earth. The technology permitting the visit would be well beyond ours yet they crashed? Or just abducted a random stranger? Seems…unlikely
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I think it's reasonably likely that we are massively wrong about the laws of physics in general. Separately, I think it's virtually guaranteed that "magic" exists. Just think about how much progress humanity has made in the last 100 years, then multiply that by a billion years. We would have to have nearly reached a totally unprecedented, super extreme technological asymptote for magic to not exist.
The specific form that magic takes is up in the air, but I expect within a few thousand years force chokes will be fairly easy to pull off under certain circumstances. Perhaps Disneyworld will truly be Disneyworld, a planet laced with nanobots just to enable that specifically.
And we do have plenty of evidence that our current model of physics is wrong, or at least incomplete. There is still no unified model. We know for a fact there is more we have yet to discover.
Our models aren’t perfect, sure, but we have done experiments and have mathematical models and so on that have been verified. And absent a very good reason to doubt them, I don’t see it as very rational to simply say “we don’t know literally everything, and it’s possible that what we know is wrong, therefore the stuff I want to be real must be possible once we figure it out.” That’s not science, that’s fantasy and speculation based on only imagination. If we don’t know that it’s physically possible there’s no reason to include such things in our speculations about either advanced aliens or our far future. We are bound by the laws of physics and if it’s not possible within physics, time cannot make it possible. A trillion years from now, F=ma will still be true as will E=mc^2. We may find work around, we may engineer safer craft that can withstand bigger forces, we may make cheap replacement parts for our bodies. But it will all be within physical reality bound by physical laws.
I've seen experiments verifying modeling with the Navier-Stokes equations, finite-strain elasticity equations, Cahn-Hilliard equations for phase decomposition, Laplace-Young for surface tension ... and yet I can't help but notice that all of those equations are continuum mechanics, whereas with other experiments we've become very confident that atoms are things which exist. Set up other experiments where a critical length is in Angstroms (or just one where the Knudsen number isn't negligible, for the Navier-Stokes case) and you'll get a result where the otherwise-well-verified continuum model fails. Perhaps "All models are wrong; some are useful" is too pessimistic to be true forever, but it's a good one for now, because the idea that we have a model which is never wrong is currently false.
And that's not just a matter of engineers being lazy about avoiding expensive atomistic models. Even in the most fundamental physics, there are no mathematical models currently in existence which do not fail verification in experiments outside their individual range of applicability. The goal of finding such a model, a "Theory of Everything", is naturally at the top of our list of unsolved problems in physics, but scroll down that list and you'll find our existing models failing to fit the bill because of a number of cases that are much worse than the continuum/atomistic divide. At least atomic models converge to cheaper continuum models in the limit.
F=ma isn't even true today, except in the special case where both are 0. It's a simplification of F=d(mv)/dt which neglects that inertial mass m is itself a function of velocity. You might say it's "mostly true" - our fastest spacecraft so far hit a speed a bit over 150 km/s, and at 0.0005c Newton is 99.99998% accurate - but the difference between "mostly true" and "relativistic effects are a thing" is where E=mc^2 came from. So at that point, I guess the question is, what would you count as "massively wrong"? If Newton got things 99.99998% right, but hidden in that 0.00002% was "there are rocks with a million times more energy than coal", does 0.00002 count as tiny or does 1000000 count as massive?
Our current theories seem to have gaps bigger than 0.00002. We've been unable to directly observe 95% of the mass-energy in the universe. Five times more than what we've observed is "dark matter", which we don't yet know the identity of but can indirectly observe via galaxy dynamics and gravitational lensing, and double that is "dark energy", which we can only infer by looking at the local shape and accelerating expansion of the universe. From a practical sense, perhaps none of that will turn out to be important - we discovered barely-interact-with-normal-matter neutrinos a lifetime ago and we haven't accomplished anything more than a little interesting astronomy with them, so the prospects for interacts-even-less-with-normal-matter technology don't look good to me - but from a theoretical sense, our best theories say there are gaping holes in our best theories! We are bound by the laws of physics, but we don't actually know what all the laws of physics are yet.
Yes, and I’d agree that in cases where what our experiments show breaks down that I don’t have a problem with putting a bookmark there and saying “we don’t yet understand this part” or something similar. If the data shows a problem as recognized by people working in that field, then sure, I’d trust them to understand the problem and what it implies and what kinds of solutions make sense in that particular breakdown point. On the other hand, breakdowns of specific theories in specific circumstances doesn’t issue us a blank check to put in whatever speculative ideas we particularly want to believe in. We know about relativity, even if we don’t understand it perfectly I think it safe to say we understand a lot of it. Our physics is good enough to be useful in 99% or more of ordinary interactions to fairly high degrees of accuracy. We’re talking about edge cases, and yes they’re important, but it seems like using edge cases to imply that we don’t know what the laws are, when we have a pretty good approximation of those laws, and they work well enough to predict the existence of phenomena long before we can detect them by simple observations. In fact we predicted the existence of black holes long before we ever saw one and we knew quite a bit about their behavior beforehand.
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The very good reason to doubt them is that we've been consistently wrong, again and again, about what is impossible. And to be clear, I'm not saying any particular thing must be possible. I don't know how interstellar travel is possible, but given that our understanding of physics isn't perfect, it is probable that something will arise which makes interstellar travel much easier than it currently appears.
Similarly, if our understanding of the laws of physics is incomplete, there's no reason to assume that it is complete when speculating about advanced aliens or our far future. Our ancestors would have had better predictions regarding humanity's current capabilities if they had posited the discovery of magic than if they had assumed technological progress was mostly complete.
EDIT: That's not to say it will ever be the case that f != ma, but from our current perspective whatever future technological advances are discovered will look to us like the laws of physics are being broken.
I don’t see it as a very good reason simply because it basically throws out verified mathematics and experimentally verified physics without even the fig leaf of a justification. If you have a reason to suspect that a given law of physics is wrong, then present evidence or even an argument for that law of physics being wrong. That’s perfectly reasonable to me. I’m almost certain we’re wrong about things. But to suppose, without evidence that of course this thing should be possible given infinite time isn’t scientific thinking. It’s just a fancy pseudo intellectual way of saying “if we go far enough into the future, then magic.”
And at this point, again, it’s not that we know nothing. We don’t know everything obviously, but we do know quite a bit about how the universe works down to the quantum mechanics level and up to the level of the largest objects in the universe. We can use the things we do know to be true to speculate on possible future technologies and those things we know will work. There are plenty of amazing things out there and I don’t think it’s a failure of imagination. The issue is that until we know exactly what’s wrong with our physics, it’s unreasonable to just throw it out based on speculation.
I feel like we are talking past each other.
The whole point of what I'm saying is that we don't know what we're wrong about. Any law of physics with currently visible cracks in it will probably be resolved one way or another within the next hundred years. Across billions of years, it's virtually guaranteed our understanding of the universe will change dramatically, in ways we cannot possibly predict. This has already happened just in the last thousand years.
Let me lay out my position for you and we can see where we disagree:
Most of our current understanding of the laws of physics is correct
The known unknowns in the laws of physics are likely much, much more important than we think, and will eventually lead to technological improvements which would look like magic to you and me
The unknown unknowns are likely quite important as well
Even assuming our understanding of the laws of physics stops in place, and there's never a new breakthrough across billions of years, the technical possibilities are so varied that they will lead to amazing, impossible things in the future. For example, we mostly understand how DNA works on a physical level, but understanding the implications is another thing entirely which we're not even close to understanding. These breakthroughs will also look like magic to us.
You mean besides the evidence I provided?
Good thing I've been saying it's probably possible, not that of course it is possible.
Change the sentence to the more accurate:
and it sounds obviously wrong.
I mean I have been trying to justify why literal, actual magic is probably a better prediction than one which assumes we retain our current understanding of the universe.
Given how much our understanding of the laws of physics has changed in just the last century, when talking about our capabilities in billions of years, I find it more reasonable to throw it out entirely than to make predictions based on our current understanding. Sure, at the base level, maybe the laws of physics are exactly what we currently think they are, but at the implementation level (e.g. what these aliens or future humans can do with those laws) it may as well be magic to us.
Again, even if all of that turns out to be true--and to be clear we do have large gaps in our understanding at both the smallest and largest levels--what is possible given those laws of physics is something else entirely. Newton's laws have been around for hundreds of years and children still find novel applications of them quite frequently.
What I mean by without evidence is that generally when these kinds of arguments come up (and to your credit, you have given some evidence from the theories you work with) it’s done in a completely hand-waving fashion in which someone points out that the proposed mechanism for aliens coming here is in violation of well understood physics, and the other person simply replies with a variation on the theme of “we don’t know absolutely everything, and they’re a billion years ahead of us, so of course they can violate that law of physics.”
And this is why I especially as a layman think that speculative ideas that aliens or far future human civilizations will do things that violate known principles of physics are often just dressed up fantasy. We don’t yet know that other universes exist. Putting this in the end game of the Kardeshev scale as something that a trillion year old civilization can do isn’t scientific in the least. Saying that we’ll definitely have transporter beams with no real mechanism isn’t science. I’m not opposed to physicists who know what they’re talking about saying that we suspect there are things about our current theories are wrong. They can often given very good reasons to think that they’re wrong and likely have at least an inkling about what’s going wrong, and if they’re going to posit a violation of the laws would at least have a plausible way to go about it.
And I think especially for aliens this is something to be careful about because first of all, we’re obviously biased in the sense of wanting them to not only exist but wanting contact with them. We’re also biased in favor of the kinds of fantasies shown in books, tv shows and films about what this future is supposed to look like. We’ve been treated to thousands of hours of tv that feature FTL travel, laser guns and reversing the polarity as solution to all that ails a spaceship. These things color what we assume would be true about space travel. Even alien hybrid speculation is often colored by the idea that our DNA could mix with an alien’s with no issues. Except that you’re actually much more closely related to a brain eating amoeba in a lake than an intelligent alien. We’re just used to bumpy headed aliens with an alien half and a human half.
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