Impossible isn't impossible

The impossible is impossible unless its not and then it really never was. When scientists use the word impossible it often has some caveats which are hardly worth mentioning. It is impossible to fly faster than the speed of light. Relativity shows us that doing so would cause our mass to become infinite and would take an infinite amount of energy. This is quite clearly impossible. However, there are plenty of ways to go faster than the speed of light distance wise if not speed wise. It might be possible to travel through a wormhole displacing more distance than time would allow at the speed of light. Further it would be possible to thin-out space time and travel through less spacetime to achieve a greater distance. Further there could be any number of quirks with reality which permit what is actually acceptable. You simply cannot have your velocity exceed c, it doesn't really matter where you end up. Also, despite your claim, I don't see how your argument could possibly succeed. Impossible is impossible by definition. Scientists may be wrong at times, for example a few of them thought space travel was impossible because there's nothing to push off of in space, ignoring Newton's third law. But, impossible actually is impossible. You cannot create or destroy energy you can just convert it sometimes from one into the other, but never end up with more than you started with. There might be some additional quirks to the universe to note that inflation is able to convert energy from the production of additional spacetime. However, that's far from violating the impossible. You can get to one star from our in a number of days. All you need to do is fly close to the speed of light and time for you will slow down. A couple of days will pass as you travel the 4.36 light years to Alpha Centauri on Earth however more than 4 years will pass. There are often caveats on things, and acceptable loopholes by which you actually could do such things and not violate the impossible bit. But, things which are actually impossible are actually impossible. You cannot instantly convert a baseball into energy and destroy the planet. There's simply not enough energy to do that. A baseball would convert to (142.54 g) * (c^2) = 1.28108563 ï¿½ 10^16 joules. Which is on par with the energy needed create Meteor Crater in Arizona, a million tons of coal, or 100 Hiroshima atom bombs. Such an energy release would leave a giant hole where a city use to be but it is "impossible" that it would destroy the world. The reason you say that such things cannot actually be impossible is because we are building science up from scratch and it cannot be perfect. Well, yes and no. We are building science up from scratch and it isn't perfect, however it gets progressively better by showing us more refined ways of seeing things. I highly recommend reading Isaac Asimov's Relativity of Wrong: http://chem.tufts.edu... It isn't that things science said before are wrong. Rather things science says now are less wrong than they use to be. It is wrong to say that the world is flat, even though it looks pretty flat as I'm walking around on it. And strictly speaking, it's wrong to say the world is round because there are abnormalities: it's wider at the equator and fatter at the northern end and has mountains. As Asimov put it, "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." We should be careful with our words, but when we say the universe is 14 billion years old give or take a billion years... we are right. If we determine that it's 13.7 billion years old give or take a fifth of a billion years... this didn't make that previous answer wrong. The previous answer is still right. The newer answer is however much more exacting and much more complete. To say that, "Every thing up to now that we have said is impossible may in fact be possible" is a bit silly. We are ruling out more things and not completely jumping to another answer all together. You are simply noting that there have been some notable overstatements as to what is not possible in the past, so all statements about what is not possible are false. Is it possible that you're wrong about this statement? Are you not suggesting it's impossible that something is impossible? It actually is impossible to have a velocity above the speed of light for a number of very cogent reasons. It might be possible to displace a greater distance than light would traveling through normal space. This loophole (or wormhole if you prefer) does not negate the impossibility of this type of travel. Rather, that is simply to say we need a different way to do it because there is this boundary here which cannot be exceeded. This is the same thing we have done throughout history when things seemed impossible. It's impossible to fly in outerspace because there's nothing to push off of... well then don't push off of things use Newton's third law. It's impossible to reach land sailing west from Europe, unless our assumption that there is a giant ocean-sea there are wrong. Sometimes things are impossible assuming our premises are right. And its impossible to be wrong all the time. It is impossible for me to gain superpowers and eat the sun. It is impossible to blow up the Earth with just a baseball. It is impossible to be wrong all the time. Science gets less wrong and as that happens we sometimes rule in things as previously impossible which weren't really impossible, but more often than not we rule out new things as impossible. Science knows what is possible by ruling out the impossible and taking a good hard look at what is left. Because we were wrong about what we were wrong about, doesn't mean we aren't right about what we are right about.