Black hole swallows earth

[thejakeman]

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!

cell phone: a portable phone. wow. so revolutionary. it combines two existing technology (radio and phone) to make one. not that original. internet is a collection of computers accessing documents from each other. not that original. iphone: fancy phone with touch sensitive screen. touch sensitive screens have been around for over 30 YEARS. only now are that handy enough to fit in a phone. not the original. really, you can't name anything made in the past 5-10 years that isn't a composite of older ideas.