Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would, say, FTL travel being possible imply that we needed to be “impossibly lucky” to build the things we have? I’m not a physicist, but I am mathematically literate, so please feel free to direct me to technical sources.
Because if reality works in a way that lets little green men fly ships across galaxies and secretly hang out with world leaders, then we’re incredibly wrong about how the universe works. And the problem with just being okay with our wrongness is that it doesn’t match up with our ability to predict and rely on the science to complete complex engineering projects. Here’s a math example: it’s like saying 1+1 is sometime…
But a theory can be false while still being predictively accurate.
Classical mechanics predicts that quantum tunneling should be impossible. But as it turns out, quantum tunneling is possible. So classical mechanics is false - or at least partially false. But classical mechanics is still predictively successful in a wide range of scenarios. So, a theory can be both false and predictively successful.
The most natural way to explain this is to say that classical mechanics is an approximation of a deeper, more accurate theory. Similarly, our current best theories could be approximations of as yet unknown theories - theories that allow for certain phenomena that are currently thought to be impossible.