Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site warwick.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!ukc!warwick!simon 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 {various backbone sites in US}!mcvax!ukc!warwick!simon