>>11729386what? it's ftl that requires new exotic physics, stuff like stable traversable wormholes and matter with negative mass, which for all we know don't exist. Terraforming doesn't require that. It's more likely that by the time we have the technology to terraform we don't need to do it, at least in the way we now conceive of it. We are probably post-biological at that point.
That in general is the implausible thing about a lot of sci-fi. Not so much that the technology is fantastical, rather that such technology exists simultaneously with easily relatable, recognizably human characters.
But to think that we exist at anywhere near the apex of technological possibility strikes me as an extraordinary claim. Dumb blind evolutionary processes created human brain out of dead matter, surely the same level of intelligence can be recreated with the help of intelligent deisgn, and it would be an odd coincidence if that was anywhere near the maximum level of intelligence. Human brain is just the best natural selection could bring about so far, it's likely very suboptimal. There may be hard physical limits where no amount of intelligence helps, but our current understanding of physics doesn't seem to suggest those are awfully limiting, besides stuff like speed of light.
