That's not what I meant. Ironing silk is a very delicate procedure, if your iron is too hot in the slightest the fabric could be ruined. I am guessing that it's not so with Tholian silk.
Do you believe at some point, everyone in the Milky Way joined the Federation?
- Thread starter The Rock
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That's not what I meant. Ironing silk is a very delicate procedure, if your iron is too hot in the slightest the fabric could be ruined. I am guessing that it's not so with Tholian silk.
That's why I drink it every morning...
...oh, wait silk.
Also, now imagining Tholian Spider-Man.
If you spead out as soon as you can, you won't need a last dtich effort to save your species from some disaster, since your species will already be spread across many systems.
I used to get annoyed at old science fiction stories where an advanced citivilization lived on their planet countless thousands or millions of years and then discovered that their home planet was doomed and started a crash program to develop intersteallar travel to find and conquer a new planet to live on, which naturally was Earth.
It is perfectly possible to build artificial space habitats capable of supporting thosands of people, built out of materials from asteroids and comets. After centuries or millennia, there could be countless milllions of them in the solar system with a total population of trillions or quadrilllions.
If such a space habitat, or a fleet of them, is sent on a mission to a star 10 light years away at one percent of the speed of light, it will take it 1,000 years to arrive. If it takes the colonizers 1,000 years to build up their society enough to send out expediitons of their own, it will take about 2,000 years to expand a distance of of 10 light years, or about 200 years per light year.
So after about 16 million years the colonized area would expand to the far edge of the galactic disc about 80,000 light years from Earth.
Suppose that the habitats/ships travel at 10 percent of the speed of light, and a 10 lightyear voyage takes only 100 years,and it takes only 100 years at the new star to buld up the abillity to send out colonizing expeditions. In that case it will take 200 years to expand 10 ligh tyears, or a rate of 20 years per light year.. At that rate it will take only 1,600,000 years for the colonization process to reach the far edge of the galactic disc about 80,000 light years from Earth.
You mentioned travelling at relativistic speeds. At speeds fast enough for significent time dilation, a journey to a star only 10 light years from Earth would take only a little longer than 10 years, and will seem much shorter to those aboard. If they need help from their home star, a message back will take only 10 years, and help could arrive an another 11 or 12 years. And 21 or 22 years is a long.time to wait for a rescue mission, but it is a lot better than the thousands of years you claimed would have passed on the home planet.
Scientists now estimate that the vast majority of star systems have planets, and those with planets should have smaller bodies including asteroids and comets. So the vast majority of star systems should be suitable for colonization by such a space habitat civilization. And the nearest suitable star sytsem should usually be a lot closer than 10 light years from the home system.
So I think that waiting until a disaster threatens the survival of the species instead of colonizing otther sar systems as soon as possible is a silly course of action.
You seem to have forgetting the various math problems in high school where you were given the speed and distance and had to claclulate the travel time, or given the travel time and the distance and had to calcuate the speed. (And a lot of space opera writers seem to have also forgotten those problems>)
Suppose that a space travelling civilization arose one million years ago with ships which could travel 1,000 the speed of light, and it arose on a planet one point one billion (or 1,100,000,000) light years from Earth. Even a ship which travelled at 1,000 times the speed of light for one million years could have travelled "only" one billion (1,000,000,000) light years in one millinyears, so that civilization's cimit of colonizatins would still be about one hudnrd million (100,000,000) light yers from Earth.
You can not claim that a faster than light civilization would have already colonized the entire universe unless you specifiy:
1) How large the universe is.
2) How fast their starships either accelerate or travel at a constant speed.
3) When the civilziation developed faster than light travel and began to colonize.
4) How long it takes the average colony to begin sending out colony expeditions of its own.
And of course you need to do the calculations to make certain that the civilization owuld have already filled the universe.by now.
If your ancestors have lived in space habitats for thousands of years, you probably won't be interested in colonizing any habitable plaents you may find, and will leave them alone.
If you have a faster than light spce drive, you can send faster than light space probes to check out a star system, or even send some kiind of manned starship to study the system, before deciding whether to colonize it.
Who worries about asteroid thickets in real life?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsteroidThicket
Running into a grain of sand at high slower than light speeds would be a disaster. But a faster than light drive would bypass most of the laws of motion and there would be no reason to assume that a ship on warp drive would suffer from hitting a grain of dust.
Do you known how many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy?
As long ago as 1964, there was a book written about the probability of planets habitable for humans. Habitable Planets for Man, Stephen H. Dole, 1964.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/2007/RAND_CB179-1.pdf
According to Dole's calculations and estimates, only a small minority of all stars would have a human habitable planet,and thus there would be only about six hundred million human habitable planets in our galaxy.
Modern estimates of the numbers of habitable worlds in the galaxy are for the number of worlds habitable for some types of liquid water using life in general, and not for planets habitable for humans in particular. Planets suited for the specific needs of humans will no doubt be a minoority of planets habitable for liquid water using lifeforms.
But since mosdern estimates of panets in our galaxy habitable for liquid water using life in general are billions of planets, human habitable planets should at least number in the millions.
And of course it is my suggestion above that almost every singe star system would be suitable for dwellers in artifical space habitats.
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For this thought experiment you have to specify one important thing. Does FTL treat Space like it’s completely separated out from time like it does on TV?
Real FTL would probably involve shortening space and therefore time and would not prevent a huge amount of time passing on homeworld for the trip.
Yes, if there were FTL that worked like it did in sci-fi, basically making the universe Newtonian, yeah, there’s nothing stopping mass colonization.
Real FTL would probably involve shortening space and therefore time and would not prevent a huge amount of time passing on homeworld for the trip.
Yes, if there were FTL that worked like it did in sci-fi, basically making the universe Newtonian, yeah, there’s nothing stopping mass colonization.
I'm a big fan of Space habitats, but I would prefer to park them at Lagrange 1-5 to minimize energy needed to maintain a stable orbit around the planetoid of choice.
Even in a Newtonian universe, it would take one year to reach the speed of light at one G acceleration. It would take ten years of constant acceleration followed by constant deceleration to reach a star a hundred light-years away!
Which is another thing likely to be wholly negated by the avalanche nature of the expansion. Not only will the originating civilization expand outward, shell by colonized shell - those colonies will expand sideways and eventually also backward, with constant waves washing across the Milky Way and enforcing a degree of homogeneity. Drift in genetics, or political views, or technology - doesn't matter, because it will be diluted into everybody else's drift, or stomped out if it is too radically different from the average.
The pulsating mass of galactic existence need not be stable, of course: at some timepoint, certain heresy in a certain location may grow big enough that it amounts to an all-new galactic colonization by said heresy, until the waves again quell and heresy becomes universal policy. But such punctuations need not be frequent enough to shatter our impression of a stable galactic empire.
How slow would we need to be speaking to allow for genetic drift to be a real factor? Let's not assume the drift is deliberate engineering, perhaps reaching significance in a single generation. A trip from suitable star to another would be a matter of millennia at most even with the feeblest of spacecraft capable of defeating the rocket equation. Would a hundred generations or less allow for major deviation? And when visitors from all sides came calling, each having deviated in slightly different directions for different lengths of time, what sort of survival strategy would work that considers the differences casus belli? The more differences, genetic or cultural or otherwise, this putative expansionist power comes up with, the more insignificant these differences become in terms of galactic unity.
We really have a well-working microcosm in which to model this right here on Earth. We have expanded across the globe at a speed that on the average results in functionally separate populations (settlements a couple of miles apart) in a generation, and then (and simultaneously!) cross-expanded sideways and backward. We have averaged over cultures, stamping out those we abhor and reinforcing those that serve us well, long before we invented global communications or transportation. We have learned to tolerate our differences or capitalize on them. If anything, faster comms or travel have posed problems in that respect! Based on that, a galacic empire might be far better off STL than FTL, really...
Timo Saloniemi
Goats milk has been adapted to produce silk. Thanks a bunch Moreau
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