At nearly every science fiction convention I’ve been to, some young kid stands up and asks if Einstein could possibly have been wrong? He or she wants to go to the stars. This is usually met with scorn and derision by some scientist on the panel who insists the Einstein was not wrong.
What all young SF fans with dreams of actually visiting the stars need to understand is that Einstein does not have to be wrong for your dreams to come true. Understand what Einstein really said. You’re not getting to the Stars by pushing down on the accelerator. Guess what? Even if Einstein was 100% wrong, you’re still not getting to the stars by pushing down on the accelerator. We can’t even get up to .1 C yet, much less worry about what happens when you get up to .5 C or so when realistic effects are really relevant. Even at 2xC it would still take you a couple of years to get to Alpha Centauri.
So Einstein wasn’t crushing your dreams. What Einstein did was point out that Hyperspace, or something like it, was going to be necessary to go to the stars. The key to getting the right answers is asking the right questions. Einstein showed us that the question “How can I go fast enough to get to the stars?” is the wrong question. You can’t go that fast. To get to the stars, we need to try something else. We can all thank Einstein for pointing that out to us. Now that we’re looking for something else like hyperspace. Maybe one day we can find it.