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"And what kind of human arrogance makes you think that we could even begin to grasp a FTL technology if it did exist?"

What arrogance? The same arrogance that said traveling beyond the sound barrier was biologically impossible? Or that horseless carriages were either impossible or would alter your physical health at speed?

C'mon, give us a break. The technology is not yet there, but the concept of FTL is being worked out. Look up a fella named Alcubierre, and you'll find a whole different set of possibilities for FTL theory.

This goes back to my whole feeling on ET's - physics is physics, and behavior of ALL systems, including biology, relies upon it. The motivations of an ET will not be all that far removed from our own, other than he/she/it may not see that we have anything they need beyond raw materials. Their physics and technology may be more advanced, but not necessarily incomprehensible.

"The motivations of an ET will not be all that far removed from our own...."

You are still humanizing something utterly alien. They might know nothing of altruism or morality. For all you know, they might be Borg, totally dedicated to finding foodstuffs from other worlds. Or maybe they'll be irresistably drawn to our sewage.

All we can do is guess.

What arrogance? The same arrogance that said traveling beyond the sound barrier was biologically impossible? Or that horseless carriages were either impossible or would alter your physical health at speed?

That is to say, the jump between moving THROUGH space to the technology of moving AROUND it is vastly greater than the jump between a slow horse and a fast car. FTL may well be possible in a hundred years or a thousand...where the science behind it is devined and understood in a million little breakthroughs made by men and women who devote their lives to it. However, backward engineering a completely alien technology without an understanding that "you absolutely cannot touch the red glowing glass cone if the air drops below 41 degrees, while the blue pulsing thing only causes gamma ray bursts if the black thing is spinning, unless the green light is on or else you vaporize everything in a two parsec radius" is a pretty chancy R&D project for the hairless apes who have no operations manual, when the manual is a black cube designed to interface ONLY directly with the mind of the operator. (Who is a three-toed reptillian panda who died in the crash at Roswell.)

Look up a fella named Alcubierre, and you'll find a whole different set of possibilities for FTL theory.

Hypersurfing!
Less than a hundred years ago science taught that travel to the moon would never be possible. I'll bet that men will be hypersurfing all over the place less than a hundred years from now.

The only question now is, where is ET?
Maybe they're already here.

Whether functional FTL occurs by virtue of some gravity/space bending technology or by virture of a given craft actually going that fast . . . or by some variation of STARGATE technology . . .

there are evidently VARIOUS ways to travel beyond the speed of light.