What the fudgenuggets? Really? Give me my space ship.

Jonny, yes there is a limitto speed for physics as we know it. As you near the speed of light it takes more and more energy to move, increasing at an exponential rate. It would, in theory, take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light

I think his comment was meant to clarify the meaning of "faster than light travel is discovered", since the WYR itself doesn't give specific parameters.

FTL travel has a lot of worrisome implications that are hard to account for. If it's possible, then aliens can discover it too and the whole universe could be in the process of being overrun by some species from a billion light years away that just happened to figure it out before us. That's my main concern. The speed of light isolates solar systems from each other, which also *protects* them from each other.

I'd also want to know just how expensive it is. We can barely send up slower-than-light spacecraft as it is, if FTL travel is significantly more expensive we're not going to see it in our lifetimes anyway. Whereas cheap spacecraft that can get us tooling around the solar system right now would give us plenty of interesting places to explore and develop for the next century. So I'm leaning toward cheap-and-easy slower-than-light travel.