Einstein’s theories may have doomed us to the solar system—general and special relativity keeps us grounded.
These models must be discarded if there is to be any hope of interstellar travel.
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Fun fact? Light is the universal speed limit for objects moving through space, but space itself can stretch faster than light
The actual curse of Einstein’s General Relativity is that every attempt to do the maths differently ends up either disagreeing with observations (thus it’s wrong) or becomes a version of Einstein’s equations written in a different way. But, people keep trying and failing.
Black holes defy Einstein and break physics—understanding them could unlock interstellar travel. If they bend the rules, maybe we can too.
Gravitational time dilation - Wikipedia
Just spit balling here because this is way out of my league. But I do have an interest in the subject.
Would a gravity drive solve a lot of the problems we don’t understand yet?
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The human eye can only see ~9500 stars when looking at the sky. But in our galaxy alone there is estimated to be over 100 billion stars.
I will walk myself out
I remember looking up at the stars when I was a kid with my dad while he taught me the stars and constellations. I swear I could see more before light pollution to the point I’m lucky to see a planet.
Why?
There’s this:
If you say they can only transfer small particles for now (Since early 10s) and it is impossible to create FTL jump drives, then here’s a story for you:
Year: 1975
Location Eastman Kodak HQ
Engineer Steven Sasson walks into the board room and says:
“I invented the first digital camera!”
Chairman:
“Really? That’s fascinating! Does it take better photos than we have now?”
Sasson:
“Uhhhh, not really…”
Chairman:
“What do you mean?”
Sasson:
“It can only take images of the size 0.01 megapixels, sir. But…”
Chairman:
“No buts! Stop working on this nonsense and improve the color accuracy of our current products! That’s an order!”
Sasson:
" : ( "
Year: January 2012
Company Status: Bankrupt
Everything we have now we take for granted.
But back then the tech was really really primitive.
Don’t be fooled by history documentaries they show, they show only the cutting edge tech stuff of that time so those doesn’t seem so distant to us today.
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I miss my flip phone from Star Trek. 
If I were an advanced cavillation stumbling upon earth, I would consider humas a virus upon the planet as we now are. That said and should we survive that. It seems that over time, the things we can imagine seem to become true. I attribute it to greed. Give a human a reason to get rich and they will invest in such forward thinking projects. Small steps…
Just be noted, information doesn’t travels faster than the speed of light. The entanglement might break simultaneously, but it can’t be detected before the equivalent travel time at c.
Also, as with so many other things quantum, each entangled pair exists only for a fraction of a second and thus the procedure requires generating billions of entanglements so the detector can actually detect some of them, this is a problem quantum computers also have as the more simultaneous superpositions you have, the easier is that one of them collapses and spoils the batch, thus keeeping qubits in superposition state requires generating billions of them per second and hope you can use enough of them for your task. When they say “our processor uses 100 qubits” they mean “we have a quantum processor that is statistically capable of holding up 100 usable qubits out of billions for long enough to do anything with them”.
And once read, each qubit is gone, so quantum computers really work in their own way, constantly creating and annihilating qubits with engineers tyring to keep an edge over chaos so they get the collapses they need, not just random noise.
I won’t tell you to stop dreaming, but FTL is highly implausible for interstellar travel. Wormholes are a fiction loosely based on scientific theories. If you enter a blackhole, your ship will become a compress noodle.
People basing their science upon fictions; Star Trek, Star Wars, and other stories are busy dreaming and not doing the science. The writers admit, when people question their pseudo science, they create made up solutions to explain it;
In 1966, Kirk claims, the transporter can convert matter to energy, beam it to a nearby planet and turn it back into matter. The atomic bombs of WWII turned a tiny slip of matter into energy and made an explosion 13 to 16 kilotons in size. Multiply one or more human bodies and there would be a large crater at the beam site.
In 1986, Riker changes it to, the transporter copies the human body into a pattern buffer, this data is sent to the surface in a stream, and reassembled there. Now we have more issues; the uncertainty principle, the shear amount of data space needed to record the human body, and how the machine on the ship recreates it on the surface without another machine to reassemble all the molecules.
I know, I am not suppose to think about it, just enjoy the show. It is okay to dream of light sabers, meeting aliens, and traveling to other planets in space. The greatest inventions and discoveries came from the need and often by accident. Problem is no one seems to have as much need, when they are content to dream about it, play it, or just watch it.
Humans have only been around for a millisecond as far as cosmic time is concerned. If we don’t kill ourselves 1st, I think greed will find a way to solve many problems so we can be a virus across the galaxy. Short version.
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This is one of the possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox, which questions why, despite the vastness of the universe and the high probability of extraterrestrial life, we have not yet found any evidence of it. This paradox suggests that intelligent civilizations may be rare, self-destructive, or simply not broadcasting their presence, leading to the question, “Where is everybody?”.
Dr. Enrico Fermi posed the question back in 1950 at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Over 13 billion years with billions of stars, no signals, no probes, no ships, and no ruins. Even if life is very rare and intelligent life more so, there should be a vast population of planets a lot older than Earth with beings and societies millions of years old.
Possible Reasons for the Lack of Evidence
Possibility #1: We’re First
This is probably the most vain and narcistic answer. Did it really take 13 billion years for the universe to write the book on how to make humans? This is known as the “early bird” hypothesis.
Possibility #2: They Were Here… and Left
The hypothesis is a good one and even illustrated in the movie 65. Civilizations rose up millions of years ago, explored the galaxy, and left. Other empires may never be able to reach space or the industrial stage, getting wiped out by a comet or asteroid or some other cosmic event. They might have reached a point where their thirst for science cost them their very existence.
Possibility #3: They’re Listening, Not Talking
For the last century, we’ve been broadcasting radio signals into space, we’re now shifting to cable, fiber optics, and laser-based communications. These are less detectable from space. It’s possible that civilizations go through a brief “loud” phase, for only a few hundred years long. Then they develop new communications and go silent.
Possibility #4: They’re Too Alien
Maybe they are nothing like us at all. We expect them to use radio signals but they use something we can’t understand or have yet to discover? Maybe we seem far too privative of a species to bother any attempt to communicate. Would you want to try to explain your existence to an ant colony?
The Fermi Paradox has a lot of possible answers and some agree the majority of intelligent life is self destructive.
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Einstein’s theories don’t doom us to the solar system at all; they’re actually the reason we can talk about interstellar travel in a serious scientific way. Special relativity doesn’t forbid traveling at extremely high speeds—it just tells us what happens as we get close to the speed of light, mainly that it takes more and more energy. That’s an engineering barrier, not a cosmic prohibition. General relativity goes even further by allowing exotic solutions like wormholes and warp bubbles, which aren’t science-fantasy inventions but mathematical consequences of Einstein’s own equations. Far from “grounding” us, relativity is the toolkit that lets physicists imagine how faster-than-light effective travel could work.
Throwing out relativity wouldn’t open new doors—it would actually collapse modern physics. Everything from GPS to particle accelerators to satellite communications depends on relativity being correct, and the fact that these systems work proves the theory’s accuracy. If we discarded it, we’d be throwing away the most tested and reliable framework we have for how space, time, and energy behave. The real obstacle to interstellar travel isn’t the physics; it’s our current level of technology. We haven’t yet built engines powerful enough, energy sources dense enough, or materials durable enough to make the journey feasible. In short, relativity doesn’t trap us here. If anything, it’s the foundation that will eventually help us leave.
Since light is the universal speed limit according to Einstein, interstellar travel is impossible—it would take too long between stars even at max speed.
While relativity sets the speed of light as the maximum speed for information and matter, it does not make interstellar travel impossible—it only limits how fast we can travel using conventional propulsion.
Einstein didn’t ban interstellar travel; he just made it inconvenient.
That is why I brought it up. 
I never thought of it that way before. 
Gravity affects time. Maybe that’s the way around this problem?
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@Adada_Tuesday Great thd! Thanks for making me think! 