Adrian Tymes wrote:
> Billy Brown wrote:
> > If you think SIs might be capable of FTL travel you need
> > an even more extreme sparsity of civilizations - really fast FTL would
imply
> > that ours is the first civilization to achieve the capacity for
expansion
> > into space.
>
> And this would be impossible because...? Last I heard, the universe
> itself (15 billion years old) was only about 3x older than Earth itself
> (5 billion years). If we're on the fast side of planet formation->
> technical civilization, and planets capable of sustaining life (and
> which would hang around long enough for technical civilization to come
> around) did not start to form until the universe was about 10 billion
> years old...
I didn't say it was impossible. It is merely an important parameter to take
into consideration - if FTL travel turns out to be possible, that implies a
much more powerful 'Great Filter' than if expansion is limited to sub light
velocities. So, any information we have (or discover) about one side of the
relationship can be used to make more informed guesses about the other side.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
http://www.transcient.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:12:54 MDT