Quote:
Originally Posted by Prof_Sai
The speed of light is factored into the colonization time. (it was Actually 5 million years.)
http://stuff.mit.edu/people/etekle/Articles/aliens.html
Assuming a typical colony spacing of 10 light-years, a ship speed of 10 percent that of light, and a period of 400 years between the foundation of a colony and its sending out colonies of its own, the colonization wave front will expand at an average speed of 0.02 light-year a year. As the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes no more than about five million years to colonize it completely. Though a long time in human terms, this is only 0.05 percent of the age of the galaxy.
Edit:
You've got to be kidding! Look how few science fiction stories came close to predicting the Cell Phone or the Internet. Captain Kirk's ship holds vital data on a library of floppy disks, and needs a human to plug it into the reader! The nature of new ideas is that often no one foresees them until they are all over the place. No one thought that there was anything wrong with smart phones until the iPhone hit the market, and now everything else is trying to be a clone. In 1898 someone wanted to close the patent office, because everything that could be invented had been! |
Um....
The original Star Trek had them all walking around with cell phones. Communicators, they were called. For the 60s, hey were effing close to cell phones.
And they didn't always use floppy disks, they used something closer to flash drives with no moving parts. In fact, they didn't even have to be plugged in.
I haven't found a clip or pic of it, yet, but I remember Bones taking a solid state memory block and simply setting it into a slot and using it to save or bring up information.
In the 60s.
Actually, Science fiction actually inspired a lot of our current tech.
That being said, I doubt we will ever go faster than the speed of light or be able to matter transport.