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“For a significant length of time, the speed of sound was said to be a barrier, that exceeding the speed of sound would cause a human body to be crushed.”

Sure, but you’re talking about two entirely different kinds of barriers. There is a barrier at the speed of sound; that was no myth. If you simply accelerated a human body past the speed of sound, they really would be crushed, because the medium would not be able to get out of the way fast enough, and the human body is not aerodynamic enough to “cut” through the medium and remain intact. That’s a simple physical barrier that human ingenuity managed to find a way to bypass.

The speed of light is not such a physical barrier, because it is there no matter what medium you are in, or if there is no medium at all. It is possible that it is an effect of some non-physical medium, a temporal ether or something like that, but there is no way that we can simply bypass it like we have the sound barrier. If the most energetic, least massive, least reactive things in the universe can’t break the barrier, then we have no chance of doing it.

I think all this talk of going “faster than light” is really missing the point, because people are not looking at things from the proper perspective. We desperately want to get to light speed, but in the 3-dimensional, physical universe. On the other hand, I deduce we’re already moving at the speed of light if we take into account our motion through time. The sum of our motion in all dimensions is c, and the sum of the motion of anything in all dimensions is c for that matter. C is not a “speed limit”, so much as it is just “the speed”. It’s the speed of everything, you can’t go faster, and you can’t go slower, you can only change the direction of your travel between the temporal and spatial dimensions. That’s the real revelation that should be deduced from the length/time dilation effect and relativity.