Given my relative lack of scientific credentials in the field, I'm sure you will understand it when I say that I can't make heads nor tails out of all this heisenberg uncertainty stuff... But Please don't punish me with your stinging wit, bro...

But if you were to force me to say something, I would chose in particleure to say (continuously and discretely) that I don't go in for this binary stuff of 'is or is not FTL possible'? (or some statement that is the analog of that)... But to be consistent with the spirit of this post and of your post, I would prefer, in the best of many universes, not to be pinned down on what that means. Lets just let my position on matters quantum be undefined.... As abe said: 'tis better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and be observed as one. Or he said something like that- I am uncertain as to exactly what.

Lets just say often times the universe ends out stranger than we thought it ever could. (Observe Johannes and SDAI). We must remember, man is the measure of all things, as our greek-greek-grandfathers used to say.

In all Sirius-ness. I hope that for the sake of man as he is now, that FTL is possible, and that there is some revision of 'the model' in which the impossible paradoxes are exhibited as artifacts of using the wrong analytic tools. But given the depth of the paradoxes, and given the predictive power and accuracy of the current set of tools, I just don't see that as likely. Its not like its just a detail subject for revision.... it goes straight to the pith of relativity.

We may find that while man may not inherit the stars, man has inherited a mind. And I don't mean this in some sort of westernized crystal-corrupted eastern philosophy squeezed through the inadequate lobes of freudian deconstructionism.

I do mean this in a very Artificial Intelligence sense, however. I think nanotech, The Universal Turing Machine (computer), Quantum computing (a whole new realm beyond digital and analog!), genetic engineering and artifical intelligence will eventually bring more change to the experience of 'being human' than the last 100,000 years has.

We may not be able to fundamentally alter the size of the universe that mankind inhabits, but I think we will fundamentally alter our experience of the universe.

A. C. Clarke said something like that our childrens chindren may not be human as we know it. This is true. They may not even live in a 'world' as we know it. We might not even be able to point to their 'brains'.

But the kid in me still hopes that spacemen and 'skyfarmers' are somewhere in the future of 'Human'. Even if they are just hives of replicators with a human mind implemented on very different hardware hitching thousand-year rides on solar winds....

(oh, and yes, I am very aware of the epistemological, ontological, cognitive and metaphysical questions I am begging in this post- lets just not and say we did.)

Davin L.