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Faster than light travel is discovered
 
or
 
Technology is developed to launch and maintain spacecraft for about the same amount of money it takes to create and maintain a small car

 
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jonnyt_

There is no limit to the speed you can travel, as long as you have enough energy. Lets say, currently we can travel 1000 times the speed of light, but that number will go up over time

TaylorBK3

Jonny, yes there is a limitto speed for physics as we know it. As you near the speed of light it takes more and more energy to move, increasing at an exponential rate. It would, in theory, take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light

bryan.derksen

I think his comment was meant to clarify the meaning of "faster than light travel is discovered", since the WYR itself doesn't give specific parameters.

bryan.derksen

FTL travel has a lot of worrisome implications that are hard to account for. If it's possible, then aliens can discover it too and the whole universe could be in the process of being overrun by some species from a billion light years away that just happened to figure it out before us. That's my main concern. The speed of light isolates solar systems from each other, which also *protects* them from each other.

I'd also want to know just how expensive it is. We can barely send up slower-than-light spacecraft as it is, if FTL travel is significantly more expensive we're not going to see it in our lifetimes anyway. Whereas cheap spacecraft that can get us tooling around the solar system right now would give us plenty of interesting places to explore and develop for the next century. So I'm leaning toward cheap-and-easy slower-than-light travel.

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