On Saturday 2007-12-29 16:46, jon louis mann wrote: > ... why does it take millions of years to fill the galaxy with > sentient life... > jlm > > The galaxy is one hundred thousand light years across. At 1% light > speed, i.e., 3000 km/sec or 1860 miles per second, that is ten million > years. At one-tenth that, i.e., at 0.1% light speed that is > one-hundred million years. > > We humans have a hard time going at 30 km/sec (19 miles per second) or > 0.001% light speed. At 0.001% light speed, that takes ten billion > years to cross the galaxy. > Robert J. Chassell > > i see, now, the rule limiting interstellar travel, but what is the > effect of acceleration as velocity increase and possibly approximates > the speed of light?
At near light speed it still takes about 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. > if there is advanced forms of life on one planet, then it seems > reasonable to assume that intelligent life could have evolved elsewhere > in the galaxy, and colonize near by planets. under that scenario we > should have observed the signature of some of those civilizations by > now, especially those from stars much older than our own. That's the Fermi Paradox. Intelligent life should exist, but if it exists it should be apparent that it exists by now. > perhaps the > singularity only exists for a short window before transcending? could > this be the explanation why we have never been able to verify the > existence of extra terrestrial life? Being Luddite the Red Galaxy should would probably not have what are commonly thought of as "transcendents". All intelligence would need to have a material basis. However, since some intelligence might consist of system-wide networks of computronium, there would be intellects that make human intellect look like that of an ant in comparison. > is this the reason you say humans > will be extinct? No. The reason humans are assumed to be extinct is because the world is situated 10 million years in the future at a minimum. Homo sapiens dates back maybe as much as 100,000 years. The entire history of Homo is maybe four million years. Apes as a clade are not much older than that. The odds of Homo sapiens surviving are just about nil. Indeed, some futurists expect dry technology (dry nanotechnology and computronium) to make organic, biological life and technology obsolete. It is possible that biological life could be extinct. However, there would be a habitable zone in a dyson swarm. I expect that many systems would include a (small) biological component in the overall ecological-economy. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
