It is possible though that antimatter can be found out there floating about in space. We may be able to harvest it. The fact that we can't produce it now only means that not enough humans are trying.

AM can be made (it has before), and for all practical purposes, we will always be confined to AM production, not harvesting...the key is reducing the production costs....

Back to my solution then, waiting for the aliens to show up with a faster than light pick-up truck full of anti-matter. Get 'em good and drunk and steal the keys.

You guys are making this way too hard.

Uhmmmm, Why not just work on a time machine, then go to the future and bring back the technology already made?

I don't think freely floating antimatter would long survive, as it would undergo annihilation upon contact with matter...unless...there was a whole lot of the stuff tucked away in a part of the universe with tenuous amounts of matter at best.  But then where did the antimatter come from, and in sufficient quantity to last the past 14 billion years of cosmic evolution?  It couldn't have been present from the Big Bang; things were so tightly packed, annihilation would have nixed it long ago....unless....*<*<SYSTEM OVERLOAD>*>*

Yep, all we'll need is one of those Macbooks from 1996.

     Anti-matter is freely available in space albeit at very small quantities spread out over a very large area. Particles and their anti-matter twins are constantly flashing in and out of existence. An experiment run some years ago confirmed the existence of tiny sparks occurring inside a vacuum bottle and upon further investigation found that these tiny sparks are actually particles and their anti-matter twins annihilating each other. The action was dubbed zero point energy which does occur in the vacuum of space.

     Manufacturing anti-matter isn't cost effective in that, at last count, the price of just one gram ran upwards of a million bucks. A tiny fortune for a gram of not much. On the other hand particle accelerators create anti-matter as a matter of course and these anti-matter particles are contained in powerful 'magnetic bottles', a tightly constrained electromagnetic field. The only problem with this method is that it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep the bottles intact, something on the order of just a few minutes.

      IMO FTL drives are not very far into the future, perhaps another century or so when you consider how quickly technology advances.

Probably because you've been hanging out with RnD too long... adverse effects to that, you know.

Another problem... if the time machine thing worked, wouldn't it have already?

The idea of mining asteroids IS kinda ridiculous considering we have far more material right underneath our feet. Moon mining bases would be more realistic but only for very valuable materials like radioactives (go thorium go). Antimatter is not a way of generating energy as it is a way of storing it. Realistically the best energy source we have within our theoretical grasp is fusion and that's a really good energy source if a long way off. The best energy source we have at hand is nuclear fission and the sooner safe reliable non-proliferating molten salt reactors replace our current generation of energy technology the better off we will be as a species.

@Sarudak......There are two asteroids out there, Vesta and Ceres, between the two there are enough raw materials to build a road from here to Mars and back again seven times. All the resources left on Earth is but a fraction of what is available in our solar system. Mining asteroids will become a high priority.

Leave us time to find out what dark matter is, first. They might be WIMPs, after all.

With current technology, replace "more" by "much, much more". Antimatter production is extremely inefficient. Also, using antimatter as a 'fuel' source create a lot of potential issues (and contrary to popular belief, it doesn't have '100% matter to energy conversion ratio').

Then perhaps you should explain what you mean. I took it to mean the classic definition of the word, metaphysical shedding of the body. That will require technology. It can be done, but not by our species and not without a perfect understanding of the universe. 

Or are you talking about religious mumbo jumbo? 

I think rather than FTL drive we should try to achieve technlogical singularity. Then let the uber-computers solve the FTL related issues for us