Speaking of faster than light (FTL) travel, this is an area which I think scientists have determined is very likely to not be possible

As far as our theory goes (and it's really far), it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and if you do travel faster than the speed of light you're also traveling 'through' time, but this is pretty much impossible. It might not be though because quantum particles may actually do that. They do things like teleport and exist in more places at once, but I don't think anybody yet knows if they travel 'through' time.

I say 'through' because dimensions are rather misunderstood concepts. We don't realize that we can't travel 'back' or 'forward' through dimensions, and we forget that time is a dimension. It could very well be that anything in the past or the future doesn't exist because there are no dimensions within which it could exist, and so it's not possible to travel through time. What we are doing now is essentially existing in certain dimensions at the present. Nothing is static, what has 'gone' has gone, and what 'will come' has not come. So FTL/time travel would be travel through dimensions, but that's just not possible since you can't travel through dimensions, you can only exist in the dimensions in which you exist because no other dimensions exist. Or something like that

Also, FTL/time travel would violate the first law of thermodynamics i.e. matter cannot be created or destroyed. Essentially, if you travel to a different different dimension then matter would have been both created and destroyed.

One thing that may be possible, however, is station to station teleportation. IOW, one pod could break down an object into it's quantum particles then those particles could change existing position and realign into the object they made up in a different pod. Quantum mechanics is the most whack shit ever, and we have much to learn about it, but something like this and more may be possible.

But even then, it may be possible to go way beyond what our current understanding of physics determines. It looks to us like we've got most of it figured out, but it's possible that we're only dealing with a certain paradigm, and if we ever figured out a higher paradigm, it would change everything. An example can be found in M-theory. The theory says that the universe is one of many (perhaps infinite) and exists on a brane in a higher dimensional plane occupied by many other branes, and that the force of gravity travels somewhat freely between different branes or universes, while the other three forces in our universe are stuck here.

This type of thing suggests, and we have evidence to implicate such, that on the quantum level, particles may be able to exist in multiple dimensions and universes at different times. The speculations we can make over this are amazing, but nobody understands them, and I suspect that humans never will. It's quite the testament to our egos that we think we could understand the nature of all of existence.


On a slightly different note, something I've thought of recently related to the Big Bang and universe creation: I think it may be likely that our universe is made up of several universes, and that we've had several big bangs, but that we can never see them due to limits in physics. I get this idea from M-theory and how they suggest that the Big Bang was caused by our brane colliding with a another brane. This would explain how we could essentially go from zero energy, zero dimensions to the creation of the universe. But what this suggests to me is that branes likely collide all the time, and if they did we still wouldn't know about it. Our brane could have collided with another brane in the same spot (if branes even have spots) as it did for our Big Bang, but when looking through our telescopes we still wouldn't see the effects of this collision because of the speed of light and expansion.

Everything we see in the cosmos now is essentially happening now, even though it happened in the past. If we see a supernova 8 billion light years away we are experiencing it in real time even though it happened 8 billion years ago. But here's the point I'm making, if in the same 'spot' in the universe, there was a supernova 7 billion years ago, we would not be able to see it, we would not even know it existed. This suggests that events like the Big Bang could happen all the time in our own brane covering dimensions in which our universe has existed, yet we could never ever know about them, and if we ever did encounter another Big Bang in our current 'spacetime' it would simply wipe out our universe and it would be like we never existed. I suspect this is what happened before the Big Bang, even. Our universe is likely an itty bitty bubble in a vast ocean of bubbles