At some point in the future science and technology will reach a point where we figure out how to go faster than the speed of light. I know this seems impossible at this point because mass increases to infinity at the horizon of the speed of light, but just because the problem seems impossible almost guarantees that someone will find a solution. We will laugh at our own simplicity, our primitive nature of sticking to our old scientific paradigms even in the face of real proof that upholds a hypothesis and turns it into a theory. I suppose our tendency to stick to an established paradigm is only too human. We want to explain our world, so we deem that which we don’t fully understand as impossible. Traveling faster than the speed of light will probably have something to with creating energy fields which move mass outside the boundaries of standard time and space, whatever that might mean. I don’t believe we really understand three-dimensional space or this thing that we call “time.” We move through space and time in what we perceive to be a lineal fashion, but these are only our primitive and conventional manner of describing a complex and chaotic process which we simplify so we don’t go mad. To imagine that all times and all spaces exist all in the same moment and space doesn’t make sense to our little brains. We fall victim to our own egos and hubris by imagining that we understand “reality” just because we live inside of it. For century we could not get past a geocentric universe even in the face of the truth because not being the center of the universe is more frightening than changing the paradigm. Warp speed won’t be discovered tomorrow, or the next day, or even next year, but we did land a two thousand pound rover on Mars last week, and that seemed impossible not too long ago. The fact that we can imagine warp speed means that sooner or later an engineer and a physicist will figure it out. When that happens, we will move out toward the planets and eventually the stars. When that happens, we will marvel at our simplicity. And the answer will have nothing to do with our preconceived ideas of motion, work, speed, mass and velocity. The new paradigm will cast aside ideas of fuel, propulsion, and everything else we know about concerning the speed of things. Change is not the only constant in the universe, but we may have to revise our idea of constant. From our relative perspective, light travels at a specific speed, but what about other perspectives? We didn’t think that communicators were possible, but now we all have them. We also did not think that Ipods or digital music were possible, but now they are commonplace. Warp speed may take a little longer, but the way technology is progressing, I might see it in my lifetime. We will redefine things like time and event horizon, and velocity will mean something else. Understand the implications of warp speed, hardly, but without having the ability to imagine it, we just grow old and boring.
