Re:It's not that simple (Score 1)

I am a bit older than most and I remember very well discussions about exceeding the speed of sound during and after the second world war. There were many stories of high performance military aircraft breaking the sound barrier in a dive. Unfortunately (so the stories went) the effect of the control surfaces became reversed with unhappy results so the thought was, when you break the sound barrier, you must reverse the operation of the control cables (avionics and fly-by-wire hadn't been invented then). Regarding travel at the speed of light the daunting barrier is that one must convert the entire mass of the spaceship to energy in order to accelerate it to the speed of light. E=mc^2, you know. So it looks like a 'conventional' spaceship might not be the best conveyance but there may be other methods. Regarding colonizing the universe, I think we have nowhere near enough foresight to make such predictions. Remember, according to current estimates, mankind discovered fire around 400,000 years ago; we invented the spear about 100,000 years ago; the bow and arrow about 25,000 years ago and we have been flying for a bit over 100 years. I believe the curtain between today and tomorrow is exceedingly heavy and we have no clue about tomorrows technology. As we speak, scientists are preparing to fire up the LHC in Cern and some of the proposed experiments involves aspects of string theory and possible other dimensions- so, who knows?