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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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