[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
Huh? Reversing your math, 4000 years, with 100 year stops at each system, and 100 years between systems, is 200 years per system expansion. 4000 / 200 = 20 systems wide, the galaxy. Sounds more like an SE4 quadrant than a galaxy, to me.

No, no, that's only true if we use "proportions". Your number is only correct if the new colonies never make colony ships and only the homeworld is producing new colonies at the rate of 1 every 200 years. With the colony ships makign new colonies in turn the growth goes up exponentially.

It does appear I had a couple small errors in computation. You are right it would be new colonies every 200 years, not every 100 years. I think I had another error somewhere that I am not sure of cause I didn't write all my work down. When I figure it now with all the assumptions I get that it would actually take 15,000 years, not 4,000 years to colonize the entire galaxy. But by point is still valid because compared to the age of the galaxy and the history of our own civilization, that's a drop in the bucket.

2 on year 400
4 on year 800
8 on year 1200
16 on year 1600
32 on year 2000

1024 on year 4000

32,768 on year 6000

1,048,576 on year 8000
...

At this rate of growth you pass 200 billion sometime around year 15,000. Of course this number is modified up or down by some significant factors. First of all, even if there are 200 billion stars, it's unlikely that all of them have habitable planets. So that will decrease the time needed for complete galactic colonization.

On the other hand, I must concede it would likely take longer because of one major factor. As the colonized territory got larger, the systems in the interior would be unable to efficently send out new colony ships. Available planets would be farther from them then the assumptive 100 year trip time would allow for. Of course that is an average figure and it's assumed that some trips would take less time, so it balances out to a degree. But once you reach the point where it takes multiple centuries for your core systems to send clony ships I would expect that those would stop and only teh colonies on the periphary would continue expanding. This would cause the overall rate of expansion to drop. By what ammount I don't know. The math get's a little over my head at that point.

Originally posted by PvK:
Or they aren't doing anything that we have been able to observe, not necessarily because they care if we know about it, or not.

I believe I suggested that p[ossibility as well in my Posts. Maybe not the Last one, but definetly somewhere in this thread I said something along those lines.