Bay 12 Games Forum

You're acting like all this started from him personally walking to the nearest Mosque and taking a dump during the middle of the prayer, then getting kicked around a little. He did a A Series of Sketches for a small art exhibit in Sweden, and got a bounty placed on his head, and now has had several assassination attempts directed at him. He's very lucky to be alive.

Relatively small steps do not cut it here. Hate to be cliche, but in the face of violence, I suggest bringing down a hell of a lot more violence in turn.

Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn't matter. Then it's just a bunch of robots fighting each other.

No Shia! You don't understand. That's all Transformers is suppose to be. That is all I want. I don't need your painfully forced romance with Megan Fox or "Wacky Family Antics!". Just give me 90 minutes of Giant Robots kicking the shit out of each other.

Aliens? Stephen Hawking? Please Barbarossa, stay on topic~~

Keep in mind that your estimate is also for purely earthlike worlds capable of sustaining life on their own. Add in some simple terraforming of marslike planets and that number jumps dramatically. Add in spaceborne habitations orbiting stars and the number begins approaching something rediculous.


Hell, i don't remember the exact numbers, but a single Dyson Swarm around a Sun-type star would provide enough energy and habitation to support the earth something like a million times over, or something similarly ludicrous. I can't say i really care enough to go find the exact numbers, although they're probably on Wikipedia.

Eh, give it another 50,000 years and the number would cover every star in the milkyway nearly 3 times over.

I'm not saying that we'll suddenly run out of room, then curl up in a ball and die. But as I said, a planet like earth would be very valuable, and not for it's minerals.

Quote from: Creaca on May 07, 2010, 11:08:28 pm

*words*

The main flaw with your argument is this: Growth would not be exponential, or at least not in such a simple way. The limits of lightspeed would slow our possible rate of expansion greatly. we could, at most, colonize a sphere of space growing at the speed of light. We would still run out eventually, but in a much greater span of time than you predict. Not to mention, there is no reason to colonize so quickly. Just because we could reproduce so quickly doesn't mean we will. Migrating due to using up resources makes sense, but once a planet cannot support more population... stop making more. It's a simple solution, that might even come up on earth.(we are estimated to still only be using a fraction of the maximum population earth can support)

If we're working under the theory that FTL travel is impossible than any worries about meeting hostile aliens or then meeting us is virtually non-existent anyway.

There is plenty of reason to colonize quickly. If an area offers opportunity that the current area doesn't some people will always take that. I'm sure 200 years ago the east coast of america could have support lots of people. But tens of thousands of people still moved west.

As for people just choosing to stop breeding one they hit a large population. Sex is a big biological imperative. However, birthcontrol that far in the future is going to be pretty spot on, so no worries. Motherhood another big biological imperative, also the idea of creating something that lives, thinks, and breathes and will carry on your DNA an in a way help immortalize you is another big one. Frankly, I don't see everyone on the planet up and leaving when they can't have kids, but oh yeah, a good number will move onto greener pastures. Figuratively Speaking.

I was a Dishwasher in a local Country Club, but I quit recently and am now a full time student, living off my savings. I'm in my second year of getting an Associates in Computer Science, and I'll see where I can go from there.

Okay, I keep getting told I have no idea of the number involved, so I'll use some numbers to help clear things up. The milky way is theorized to have anywhere from 200-400 billion stars.

 Of course not all of these stars have planets orbiting, many are far too large to even have the life 'sweet spot' others, like brown dwarves are much too cold. In many cases you'll have a planet in that sweet spot, that just wasn't able to have those first amino acids form. Let's use Neruz's assumption that 1/10,000 stars have a planet that is harboring life, has a gravity field we can live in, and an average temperature we can live in.

 I don't agree with that, but I'll use it for the sake of argument. That's Ten Million planets that can support life. I'll use 2*2 to represent us colonizing more and more as population increases , and then assuming every 'rotation' of that is 5000 years, as in it'll take 5000 years for the planet to reach a population level where large groups migrate to other planets.
2 to the 10th power is 1,024 50,000 years.
2 to the 20th power is 1,048,576 100,000 years.
2 to the 30th power is 1,073,741,824 150,000 years. We'd have run out of planets by now, perhaps colonization of other galaxies is in order?


Certainly there are a few liberties taken here, but the point I'm trying to make is it most certainly would not 'probably take us longer than the lifetime of the universe' to branch out across habitable planets in the galaxy.

Disasters another thing to consider. What do you do as a FTL Civilization when your planet runs out of resources, is on a collision course with a huge asteroid in the near future (Comets, I wouldn't be to worried about, nothing too troublesome about a giant ice cube burning up in the atmosphere.) Frankly, I'd move to a new planet. Not as a single concise group of course.

Black Holes aren't a big worry, you'd have plenty of prior warning before a star collapsed into one, and we can reasonably locate them even with our 'primitive' technology today. Sickness is a good question. I guess I'd have you ask yourself where the field of medicine was at 100 years ago, and to imagine where it will be in  tens of thousands of years.
War is an excellent question, and I'm even less comfortable guessing how it'll be fought in the future than I am guessing the rest of this. Though needless to say any war brutal produces lots of wayward refugees.

Quote from: Creaca on May 07, 2010, 04:40:41 pm

Quote from: Neruz on May 07, 2010, 04:27:02 pm

Maybe; we don't actually know how common Earth-Type planets are. They could be a dime a dozen.

We can make an educated guess.

Yeah, and that educated guess puts earth-type planets as surprisingly common.

Hell, even if they were suitably rare, say one per ten thousand stars, there are enough stars in the galaxy that that still means millions of the damn things.

One of the cool things about a growing population is size alone doesn't make it slow it's grow. If there is room to expand, birthrates rocket up to accommodate. For instance, settlers in America had an average of 6-8 kids in the early years. The same is true in Africa today. Livable land will always be a valuable commodity.

In other words, lots of life-sustaining planets just means a bigger alien population, not a lot of unused habitable planets.

Also if life isn't guaranteed to happen on a earth like planet they will probably prefer one without life so they can more easily create a ecosystem like their own and grow crops they can use.

This is simple enough to remedy, alter the atmosphere artificially to what you need it to be, that'll kill off the majority of unwanted life. Some creatures will evolve to cope, the number depending on just how much the atmosphere changes. Then just begin ecosystem. Much easier then trying to say, start an ecosystem on Mars the same way.

Some things, like the Gravity of the planet would be much harder if impossible to alter.

Earths minerals are not valuable. Billions of other planets have those, without the annoyance of trading, enslaving, or even talking to another species. Earth is a planet that sustains life. That's a valuable commodity in the Universe. If an aliens force comes to earth, and decides they want to colonize, it is very possible to have trillions of aliens escaping from overcrowding and low economic opportunity come to earth to find that. And we would be the 'ignorant' 'savage' species that was in the way.

If you're still not sure how this is going to turn out, ask the Native Americans. They know.