I feel like the main thing to focus on here should be time travel—some seemingly-physically-impossible things are easier-in-expectation to do (because we may be wrong about physics) than some technically-physically-possible things.
Out of the many things that might be wrong about the current picture, impossibility of time travel is also one of the things I’d least expect to get overturned.
I agree. We still don’t know how 85% the Universe works (dark matter), and our main physics frameworks don’t play well with each other. It means, there is still a lot of undiscovered physics.
What we see as physically impossible today could become a mundane engineering problem in a few decades. Such transitions from impossible to mundane have already happened a few times (e.g. transmutation of elements).
I feel like the main thing to focus on here should be time travel—some seemingly-physically-impossible things are easier-in-expectation to do (because we may be wrong about physics) than some technically-physically-possible things.
While our current understanding of physics is predictably-wrong, it has no particular reason to be wrong in a way that is convenient for us.[1]
Meanwhile, more refined versions of some of the methods described here seem perhaps doable in principle, with sufficient technology.
You can make difficult things happen by trying hard at them. You can’t violate the laws of physics by trying harder.
Out of the many things that might be wrong about the current picture, impossibility of time travel is also one of the things I’d least expect to get overturned.
I agree. We still don’t know how 85% the Universe works (dark matter), and our main physics frameworks don’t play well with each other. It means, there is still a lot of undiscovered physics.
What we see as physically impossible today could become a mundane engineering problem in a few decades. Such transitions from impossible to mundane have already happened a few times (e.g. transmutation of elements).
Some kind of time travel, or at least time scanning (Option 3) seems the best option.