Re: Fermi's Paradox and FTL drives

In article <slrnfqc3fq.8ij.dbd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
David DeLaney <dbd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>On Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:28:59 GMT, Gene Ward Smith <gene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>>
>>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.

	There are the occasion weird hybrids which offer long ranges
but only for a tiny fraction of the universe, like WJW's Praxis books).
There are also books with slow FTL which nevertheless could be used to
explore the universe as long as the explorers never want to go home: ACTS 
OF CONSCIENCE has a 400 C drive where the passengers experience no
duration during the trip.  
-- 
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll
(For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-****rt, cup and tote-bag needs)