Re: Fermi's Paradox and FTL drives

On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:28:59 GMT, Gene Ward Smith <gene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>GSV Three Minds in a Can <GSV@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
>>>Why limit it to this galaxy?
>> 
>> Couple of reasons .. 1) The visible signs of our existence won't have 
>> made it to any other galaxy yet (if ever),

Our existence heck, visible signs of our -species- can't have made it even
to the Magellanic Clouds yet.

>> so they'd not have come 
>> specifically looking, and 2) (most) Galaxies are far enough away that 
>> feeble-grade FTL probably isn't good enough to go exploring between 
>> them, you'd want VMFTL (tm).
>
>What the hell is feeble-grade FTL? Why, if it can't handle 
>other galaxies, can it handle ours--or is that out also?

I'll take a stab at guessing it means "FTL that's limited to some small
multiple of lightspeed, like 100c or 1000c". If Andromeda's 2 million ly
away, and the Large Magellanic Cloud is <wiki wiki> 160,000 ly away, then
even at a kilo-c it takes 160 years to get to the Cloud, and 2 millenia to
get to Andromeda. But exploring the nearby stars, at 1000c, would be
fairly
doable.

Dave
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