There are three levels of difficulty in innovation: New Engineering, New Science, and New Fundamentals.
What the Wright Brothers did was the easiest of the three: New engineering. It didn't contradict anything then known in accepted science.
Fusion energy is being studied now, and it's substantially more difficult than what the Wright brothers did because it requires New Science. But it doesn't violate any of the accepted fundamentals of the universe, so it will probably happen eventually.
Now we come to the most difficult of the three: New Fundamentals. Traveling to other galaxies falls in this category. For it to work we would have to discover some brand new principle that makes the universe work, and that principle would need to be so radical that it makes what we now know about the laws of physics wrong.
That's not likely to happen. By comparison, the Wright brothers' invention was for all practical purposes inevitable; people had been flying heavier-than-air craft like gliders and kites for hundreds of years. All that was needed was an energy-dense power plant.
Well, fortunately, our rock-solid science has some major holes to be patched. There's no way to guess what consequences those will have to our understanding of what we're limited to exploring.
No, I wouldn't be. The speed of light is a much more fundamental limitation than anything we have ever seen before. It's probably the single most fundamental and most sure fact that we know of, besides perhaps the quantum nature of reality.
And I have heard it all before: worm holes, warp drive, etc pp. A fun exercise, but not rooted in reality at all.
All you can do is to appeal to completely unknown, unimaginable magical breakthroughs, which are inherently difficult to discuss, so I don't think this will be very fruitful.
"Completely unknown" is the main point here. I don't think categorical statements make sense when they are based only on what we know.
The Wright brothers seem like a poor example. But consider the slowing down of time near mass, the tunnel effect, superconductors, super fluids... There are many examples of things that make absolutely no sense in the context of older theories. I don't think our theories are the final ones just because we can explain most things that we have observed so far.
Sure I find it hard to imagine how individuals could travel to another galaxy, absent something like usable wormholes. But some kind of giant world moving through space over the span of millions of years, why not?
The point of these discussions is not to find the correct answer about what will happen. It's just fun to dream and imagine the possibilities, precisely because nobody has the answer (and certainly not those who pretend to know what's possible).
