3 ms·
1% the speed of light is stupidly fast to colonize a galaxy. It only sounds reasonable in the same way startup claim if we can just capture 1% of the X market,
by Retric 3y ago
1% the speed of light is stupidly fast to colonize a galaxy. It only sounds reasonable in the same way startup claim if we can just capture 1% of the X market, while forgetting numbers much smaller exist.
Let’s assume super tech they can build that somehow allows vastly faster speeds than we can today ~120 km/s worth of DeltaV. Half that is spent slowing down so we’re talking 0.02% c.
Now let’s assume half the time is spent in flight and half the time is spent colonizing stars before launching ships. So now we’re down to 0.01% C. Suddenly 1 Billion years is a more reasonable estimate and even that takes super tech we don’t have any idea how to build and assumes nothing fails.
Several more advanced civilizations could be colonizing the galaxy today that are still 10 billion years from finishing.
- DennisP 3y agoFusion rockets would be able to get over 1% c. I think the theoretical maximum for fusion is around 10%.
- Retric 3y agoFusion rockets might be able to get a sufficiently large spacecraft over 1% c. If you’re instead sending multiple generations of craft and waiting until each succeeds then it’s 1/n %c etc. Colonization using a massive habitat capable of extreme redundancy and asteroid mining could be a completely viable solution to colonization. But such a structure wouldn’t be light. Hitting 1% c could very well take megastructures that a civilization would rather spend on redundant craft etc. We can dream, but we’re nowhere close to being able to say what’s actually viable.