From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Tue Jun 11 2002 - 05:11:59 MDT
On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, spike66 wrote:
> Great post Hal. I disagree with this part. It is easy for me to
> imagine that a very advanced civilization might manage to cross
> interstellar distances of a few light years but not be able to manage
Interstellar distances are only easier because you can leave the bulk of
the drive at home, even doing most of the decceleration with a second
sail. You can't deccelerate that way over very large distances.
However, if you put a largish seed with decceleration drive onboard (say,
antimatter-catalyzed fusion, or a pure annihilation drive) you can aim it
at any remote object. You can only push a few years, but you're almost at
c after that (depending on how much resources you allocate to probe
acceleration).
> the 10K or so light years of emptiness between the Milky Way and even
> the closer dwarf galaxies.
Why? Once you're cruising in a redundant cloud, and have self-repair
onboard, what can happen to you? A classical case of fire and forget, and
takes about as much resources as interstellar colonization (a bit more,
since the seeds are heavier).
> I could even imagine an advanced lifeform crossing interstellar
> space near the galactic core only and deciding the stellar
> burbs out here are just too sparse to make it worth the effort.
You don't decide, collectively. You multiply, and go where there is still
free space. As soon as you start multiplying, there is zero choice in the
matter. The only mechanism proposed so far is stripping of darwinian
evolution via passage through a very narrow diversity bottleneck. If
you're brittle enough you might be able to keep Darwin out after that.
(But you'll be overrun by a Darwinian pioneer wave, because of your
relatively lousy fitness).
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