You mean the fighting stopped once they got back to their own planet?
Do you believe at some point, everyone in the Milky Way joined the Federation?
- Thread starter The Rock
- Start date
You mean the fighting stopped once they got back to their own planet?
I don't find that very convincing. First, expansion is exponential: If one planet colonizes, one planet, in any given time, then two planets will colonize two planets in the same time, ten times and it's a thousand planets, twenty a million, thirty a billion. If colonizing takes say one thousand years then a civilization only thirty thousand years in advance to ours (which at the scale of the universe is nothing) would have conquered every habitable world before we even invented the wheel.
If our parasites pose a problem then they'll likely sterilize our planet before colonizing it. If their own people need convincing then a bit of propaganda telling them that we are but filthy diseased animals compared to them and that we're hoarding valuable resources that they need to live will convince them... Although by then it'll be most likely a formality and they'll go ahead with the program without a second thought. Do you think we are unique in that area?
There’s another option. Maybe faster than light travel is impossible so any travel to other star systems inherently means traveling at relativistic speeds. So you COULD get to other Star systems, but by the time you got there your planet would have gone through thousands of years and then you’d be on your own with no way back.
If that’s the case, the only reason it’d ever be worth it to go was as a last ditch effort to save the species.
If that’s the case, the only reason it’d ever be worth it to go was as a last ditch effort to save the species.
The problem is that if we are in danger of extinction we'll no longer have the resources to send a handful of people to another star system. Only a prosperous people can spare the enormous amounts of energy and matter necessary for that, however, a prosperous people has no reason to do so. That's a sort of paradox.
Depends how far in advance we realize we're screwed. How do you know the world's wealthy aren't designing this craft as we speak?
I think you're vastly underestimating the size of the universe...
I think you're missing the point. No matter how vast the universe a space-faring civilization will eventually fill it. And it won't take very long because, as I said before, expansion is exponential. If it takes you, say, ten thousand years to double the size of your empire then in ten times as much it will be multiplied by a thousand, twenty times a million, thirty a billion, forty a trillion, fifty a quadrillion... No matter how big the universe you can see that it won't take long for it to be filled.
That's based on one hell of an assumption.
You've heard that the universe is expanding, that in addition it may not last forever, and that, even if does last forever, its heat death is hypothesized, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble's_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
There are many kinds of resources that could easily run out before your filling up of space that supposedly won't take long could have time to transpire.
The short version is that the situation is way more complicated than you're making it out to be.
No, what you don't understand is that what I am saying is that if FTL is possible and if one space-faring civilization had begun only a million years ago, it would have already filled the universe. Just as one single virus can infect an entire population in no time. IOW, expansion is exponential. I don't believe it's that hard a concept to understand. And one million years at the scale of the universe is nothing.
Well, imaginary things that haven't been proven possible are hard to understand, actually. But this is silly, and off-topic, and I'm done with it.
No need to introduce FTL there. If travel from star to star is possible in the first place (and there's no known reason why it wouldn't be), the Milky Way could be covered in a jiffy. Actual travel at, say, one percent of lightspeed would probably still take an eyeblink compared to how long it might take to set up a starship factory at the destination.
It's the inevitablilty of an avalanche against complications like shrubs and sheep on the slope. And thus the question of why the Milky Way hasn't already been overrun a dozen times over requires some pretty fundamental assumptions to be satisfactorily answered. No, it doesn't suffice that a civilization might die after mere thousands of years - a billion other incarnations of that civilization elsewhere in the wave of expansion would survive. It doesn't matter much if the expansion loses coherence, either: the billions will average out to give a galactic monobloc culture nevertheless, at the resolution we need to be concerned with.
To stop the avalanche, we have to postulate that the downslope somehow becomes an upslope, or that there is a deep chasm to swallow it all in mid-run. We just don't know of any good candidates for such out there in the physical world, and might have to turn inwards to surmise that any sapience with enough drive to expand will always consume itself in war, long before reaching galactic dominance. The Goldilocks minds that want to sail past the horizon but aren't sufficiently interested in it to try and sink the competition might not exist as a thing.
Timo Saloniemi
It's the inevitablilty of an avalanche against complications like shrubs and sheep on the slope. And thus the question of why the Milky Way hasn't already been overrun a dozen times over requires some pretty fundamental assumptions to be satisfactorily answered. No, it doesn't suffice that a civilization might die after mere thousands of years - a billion other incarnations of that civilization elsewhere in the wave of expansion would survive. It doesn't matter much if the expansion loses coherence, either: the billions will average out to give a galactic monobloc culture nevertheless, at the resolution we need to be concerned with.
To stop the avalanche, we have to postulate that the downslope somehow becomes an upslope, or that there is a deep chasm to swallow it all in mid-run. We just don't know of any good candidates for such out there in the physical world, and might have to turn inwards to surmise that any sapience with enough drive to expand will always consume itself in war, long before reaching galactic dominance. The Goldilocks minds that want to sail past the horizon but aren't sufficiently interested in it to try and sink the competition might not exist as a thing.
Timo Saloniemi
If people spread outward that way at a very slow pace (a fraction of the speed of light) then after a while the genetic drift alone would turn them into a different species than the one that started it. In fact, they could meet other descendants of that species and think that they're dealing with aliens.
If FTL were possible, that doesn’t mean it‘s safe and practical for living organic beings. Or they have any practical way to determine for sure that exoplanet they see in the distance supports their life. Or if it does they won’t immediately die from the microorganisms there. You have to solve radiation protection, you have to be able to navigate any asteroid dense regions, and you have to hope you don’t slam into a grain of dust at over a c.
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I think it's a matter of spreading logistics / infrastructure to support everything you need for new colonies.
Finding exact planets that are suitable for your species shouldn't be a simple thing, it takes time to make sure everything is compatible.
Let's look at the Tholians, they have very specific Temperature requirements to exist naturally.
Tholian biology required high temperatures around 480 Kelvin (207 °C, 404 °F). They could tolerate lower temperatures for a brief period of time; if they were exposed to temperatures around 380 Kelvin or less, their carapace would fracture. This was painful or distressing; a Tholian subjected to such a temperature regime could be coerced to cooperate. In temperatures even lower, a Tholian would freeze solid and shatter.
There's got to be a small list of planets that are designed for the Tholians to exist naturally.
Same with the composition of the air needed for a species to breathe.
There's got to be only so many M-Class planets out there that are compatible with us standardized BiPaB's.
Finding exact planets that are suitable for your species shouldn't be a simple thing, it takes time to make sure everything is compatible.
Let's look at the Tholians, they have very specific Temperature requirements to exist naturally.
Tholian biology required high temperatures around 480 Kelvin (207 °C, 404 °F). They could tolerate lower temperatures for a brief period of time; if they were exposed to temperatures around 380 Kelvin or less, their carapace would fracture. This was painful or distressing; a Tholian subjected to such a temperature regime could be coerced to cooperate. In temperatures even lower, a Tholian would freeze solid and shatter.
There's got to be a small list of planets that are designed for the Tholians to exist naturally.
Same with the composition of the air needed for a species to breathe.
There's got to be only so many M-Class planets out there that are compatible with us standardized BiPaB's.
Also, despite the often-advocated conception of the Federation as a post-scarcity economy, it really isn't, especially in ways that the magic tech depends upon. Dilithium is something that has to be mined, regeneration of it is problematic, and conflicts are fought over it. Colonies can fail or get into jeopardy because of environmental conditions (e.g., radiation, again), disease, or loss of food supply. Even unopposed by other civilizations, there are frequently difficult or even intractable problems resulting in various kinds of scarce resources, that put the brakes on expansion.
Tholian silk must be extremely resilient to exist in both our conditions and the Tholian's, plus it must be pretty if Cassidy likes it so much. Normal silk is so fragile.
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