How do you explain it?

[Alneyan]

dogscoff said:
Exactly, so why would you ever do that? By the time you have that kind of technology, you'd (hopefully) have sources of energy that don't require you to bleed your homeworld completely dry in a matter of years for the sake of delivering a few red-shirts to their grisly deaths around the galaxy.

I see at least one wonderful use of this sort of "bleeding the homeworld dry" plan: wouldn't that be a powerful incentive to get that colonisation programme up and running? In SEIV, it is so easy to find settlers, but it might be a bit harder to convince the Terrans to travel to the magnificient, frozen planet of Tergiverse IV, especially if they have to stay twenty years in a spaceship to get there.

Therefore, the destruction of the homeworld is the key to a successful expansion to nearby stellar systems, so long as you do focus on spreading all the settlers a lot: if they all went to the same planet, you would have to repeat the whole process from scratch.

Don't you just love being a slightly manipulative Overlord, who *has* to convince those mindless sl... your fellow citizens that you are doing all those things for their good? And the thankless masses try to kill you, as a reward for all your years of benevolent rule. Tsk.

[dogscoff]

Alneyan said:
...the destruction of the homeworld is the key to a successful expansion to nearby stellar systems...

You know, one of the reasons I love this board so much is the fact that you guys never cease outdoing one another with such beautifully machiavellian megalomania. It really makes me proud to be a power-crazed dictator.

Thankyou Alneyan, thankyou.

[Aiken]

Alneyan said:Therefore, the destruction of the homeworld is the key to a successful expansion to nearby stellar systems, so long as you do focus on spreading all the settlers a lot: if they all went to the same planet, you would have to repeat the whole process from scratch.

Hidjra (ar.) - massive exodus of terrans from Earth in XXII century due to a cataclysm caused by a black hole placed into the Earth's core. See: "Hyperion"(Simmons), "Dying Earth" b. I-XXXII (Silen).

Those damn scifi writers stole all our ideas before we even make them up!

[dogscoff]

Alneyan said:
I see at least one wonderful use of this sort of "bleeding the homeworld dry" plan: wouldn't that be a powerful incentive to get that colonisation programme up and running?

The Empire of Enforced Entropy... bleeds every last microjoule out of every last atom before moving on...

[Hunpecked]

In theory, a system in a galaxy moving 10 times faster than our galacy will flow 10 times slower than us

Not necessarily (and I'm not talking about linearity vs. nonlinearity of the time effect).

See the article "Miconceptions about the Big Bang" at

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.c...2383414B7F0147

This kind of stuff makes my head hurt, but as near as I can make out, it goes something like this: In an Earth-type bang (e.g. a grenade explosion) the shrapnel "expands" into pre-existing space. The cosmic Big Bang, on the other hand, was an "explosion" of space itself, and all the galaxies are basically just along for the ride. This means that a distant galaxy can "recede" from us at greater than the speed of light, an apparent contradiction to Relativity. I'm no physicist, but my guess is this means "time" in those distant galaxies is pretty much the same as it is here (although of course what we "now" see in the visible distant galaxies actually happened long ago).

[zircher]

Gamma rays are a handy mechanism for pushing that huge reset button on all local civilizations. :-)

http://www.jrmooneyham.com/ctctgam.html

You would not even need a total extinction event, just one that returned all the races to the stone age and left a few interesting ruins behind.
--
TAZ

[atari_eric]

Forget about the gamma ray burster threat, worry aobut the bad webpage coloing effect!

Ow, my eyes...

[Ragnarok]

atari_eric said:
Forget about the gamma ray burster threat, worry aobut the bad webpage coloing effect!

Ow, my eyes...

You just had to say that to make me look, didn't you?! I am blinded for the rest of the day now.