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From: simon@warwick.UUCP (Simon Forth)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: generation ships
Message-ID: <131@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Aug-85 11:09:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubu.131
Posted: Mon Aug  5 11:09:17 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Aug-85 03:28:35 EDT
Reply-To: simon@warwick.UUCP (Simon Forth)
Organization: Computer Science, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 29
Xpath: warwick ubu

I dont know whether this is relevant to the current discussion but I believe
I have read some where that if a species is going to populate the galaxy
using slower that light travel STL, that you get into severe difficulties
due to population growth.
Example.	Take a species that has STL travel and that it has decided
to colonize Space. Then if you assume that the species
tries to get a uniform population density and that the species is growing
with an exponential growth rate (I Think that thats the right growth rate?).
If you say that the population is evenly distributed throughout a sphere in
space then due to the growth rate of population the sphere will have to
expand at a growing rate to keep population density constant. At some point
the sphere will have to expand at a speed faster than that of light.

You would probably find this a problem eventually if you had FTL travel that
took a finite time, at some time in the future your population density would
start growing as you could not expand your frontiers fast enough.

This is not counting the problem of moving excess population from the centre
of your space to the edge, when the edge is receding .

if you want to read a book that deals with the population explosion problem
then read the _cageworld_ books by Colin Kapp. 

Thats enough from me.

			Simon.
-- 
Simon Forth. Dept of Computing. University of Warwick. Coventry CV4 7AL. UK
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