I don't see why they make the Apollo Program lead to Alpha Centauri in the first place. After all, the moon landing was what "won" the Space Race (historically). And it was called the Apollo Program (historically). And the technologies in the Modern Age obviously wouldn't lead to Alpha Centauri, since those technologies exist right now, and we couldn't possibly go to Alpha Centauri right now. If I were to make a civ3 space mod, I would make it possible to do similar things once you research a tech called "String Theory" or something of the like.
Also, I think if a future era were included, it should be possible to disable it, for people like rhialto.
rhialto said:
launching a spaceship to another star and expecting it to arrive within the next thousand years is NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE. It isn't even a what-if. Basic physics prevents it.
This bothers me
You are acting as if we(the human race) know everything about the laws of physics in the Universe. We might, but there would be no way to tell if we are truly correct(as a matter of fact, we
do know that our current theories are incorrect). There are plenty of things that current scientists admit they have no explaination for at the moment. For instance, at the singularity of a Black Hole, when spacetime bends back infinitely on itself, they suspect that the very basic laws of physics would be broken or changed. Also, they haven't discovered how to link Gravity to the Electroweak force, so no Grand Unified Theory. People are currently researching String Theory, an attempt at resolving the conflicts between the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. These three things could alter our views on, as you put it, "basic physics." Could we move faster than the speed of light? The Theory of Relativity (our current view) says no, but who knows? A theoretical physics breakthrough could prove that it's not only possible, but perfectly accessible as well.
In the past, scientists (such as Ptolemy) have made breathroughs, and then used their models to explain things definitively. In the present, scientists are making theories, but we know (from past experience) not to rely too much on them, since they are likely to be proven incorrect. Not only should we assume that our theories are possibly incorrect, scientists have found things that they can't explain using our current theories, meaning they are
certain that they are incorrect to some extent. (for example, serious descrepancies with the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics)
In short, the only thing that we understand is that we
don't understand.