On Earth, the cardinal directions are straightforward. The arrow on a compass points to the nearest magnetic pole. You can then use it to travel anywhere on Earth.
In space, the idea of anything being “central” enough to be used as a “North” (since the universe has no center) or being fixated enough to not somehow pose issues is more convoluted.
If you were a pioneer of space exploration, what would your “North” be?
I think FTL or even a substantial percentage of it is pure fantasy.
I used to think FTL was nonsense, but it turns out the universe has a built-in mechanism for time travel at the Planck scale. Particles smaller than the atom swing both ways when it comes to causality and retrocausality.
Now I think that either FTL is completely impossible at the macro scale or it’ll be so easy we’ll be embarrassed we didn’t have it sooner.
I think we would already know about them at Hawking's party. That was the best possible instance to limits the effects of any time paradox. I think all the speculation about it is based on incomplete theories and anomalies of abstraction.
I view our continued reliance on it for story tropes to be one of the prime aspects of literature and culture of our time that will age extremely poorly. Stories about our future will not be so different than our present, just like our past, when closely inspected, is far closer to our present than most realize or believe. Our cultural perspective of the present as any kind of finality or modernity is an absolute fallacy. I feel like FTL is a major mental crutch that is crippling us from reaching for the stars within the scope of the present. The biggest difference between now and the future is the availability of wealth and how far that wealth can reach. Antimatter can take us many places on a one way trip. It is just the most expensive matter in the universe. We probably won’t have access to it in large enough quantities and in a circumstance where we can build a ship and magnetic containment vessels until we are able to build at stellar ring types of scales.
I see no reason to give the FTL fantasy any kind of attention. I can come up with countless interesting stories about the future and I have no need for FTL. If we can’t travel, what is the relationship dynamic between systems, and what protections would get implemented to prevent a rogue group from forming. I think communication would be streaming constantly in one way broadcasts back to Sol and visa versa. Now that becomes entertainment, like otherworldy gossip. What happens if communication is broken. How does that evolve over time while Sol is still the only system with the infrastructure to produce antimatter. Or shifting gears entirely, science is finite. Even the edge cases that can not be known can still be constrained. Eventually, the age of discovery ends and empirically, science is an engineering corpus. At that point, Biology is fully known and understood. I can absolutely guarantee that almost all human scale technology will be biological and in complete elemental cycles balance. The only industrial technology will be handled autonomously and outside of living environments. Living environments will be in total balance. This has so many far reaching and interesting consequences. You get into cultures, and hierarchical display in humans. Now you need to reject the primitive concept of resource wealth based on the fundamental survival needs of other humans. How does that work, and why are academic reputation, the Olympics, and Hollywood red carpet awards more advanced forms of hierarchical display. But wait, how do we have computers, we’ll be primitive! No. A synthetic computer like a human brain would be trivial if we could overcome the massive hurtle of a complete understanding of biology. If you go looking down this path, at the present we know absolute nothing compared to the scope of what is to come. There are a great many stories to tell, but we need to get past our adolescent fantasies about time travel to find them.
As with all real science fiction, this is a critique of the present. Such stories are not told by corrupt cultures. One must tell of impossible fantasy and dystopia to make the present seem futuristic or a final eventuality with advancement reserved for an academic elite, and innovation reserved for exceptionalism.
