Newtonian ships or not?.

[PvK]

Roughly 100,000 light years to travel across, colonizing (actually we're about 30,000 LY inside, but there will be slowing factors such as having to branch the colonizers to multiple planets, regions where there are directions with no direct hop of sufficient shortness, systems without usable planets, etc.), so say 100,000 LY to cross. With the assumption we can achieve 10% the speed of light effective travel speed, eventually, and with the IMO huge assumption that we can set off for a system and expect to find a planet which we'll be able to land on, survive there, settle, build a usable infrastructure on, and be ready to send out another identical ship within 100 years...

200 years per 10 LY covered. 100,000 LY / 10 LY / 200 Years = 10,000 * 200 years = 2 million years.

So, yes not a lot in astronomical time. I just wanted to clear up the idea from a human perspective, that we could wrap this puppy up in 4000 years. Note too it'll take another 70,000 years to send the virtual postcard back to Earth with the words "game over". Also, expect lots of break-away republics, lack of willing volunteers, and so on to put some cramps on steady adherence to the master plan for 2 million years straight.

Continue that line of thought, and notice that the more difficult assumption is probably that people really want to go trying to set up another planet in every system in the galaxy. What is the chance that a planet full of humans with space flight tech might get envious or mean and stop playing nice, and/or even become hostile? After some thousands of years at least, colonies which actually found useful planets (part of the assumptions above) would develop their own cultural identity, and not just be possessions of Earth.

So even if we manage to colonize the whole galaxy in 2 million years, the result is a populated galaxy with perhaps billions of potentially independent self-interested governments in it.

In SE4, it usually makes perfect sense to colonize absolutely everything. In the real universe, perhaps not everyone wants to do that.

Therefore, aliens advanced enough to be able to travel around the galaxy, may also be advanced enough to have no desire to go conquering and disturbing natives everywhere. Some kids and entomologists like to play with ant hives they discover, but most ant hives get ignored by humans unless they happen to be in an inconvenient place.

If an alien race were based on my own personality, and had existed for a few million years, I think I'd send exploration ships out to see what's in the quadrant, carefully and humbly at first in case there was something dangerous or more advanced out there. First we'd focus on sustaining and making nice the homeworld, and then play on the home system planets a bit, and perhaps eventually set up communities on some planets that were empty but very similar and pleasant compared to the homeworld, if any. But probably they'd be limited to a very manageable number, rather than spreading like an inconsiderate plague everywhere. An exploration/science process might involve spreading out over the galaxy over the course of a few million years, but it would be done cautiously and without colonizing everywhere. Knowledge of the galaxy is perhaps desirable, but I wouldn't want to over-procreate and thus create a huge number of communities with the potential for lots of unhappiness. Discovering a planet like Earth with 21st Century humans on it, I'd be inclined to allow scholars to study them but wouldn't make contact, since a preliminary psych study would no doubt show that humans are still very uncouth, selfish, violent, and probably wouldn't react in a desirable way to news that they were way behind the science of an alien race. It might depend though on the number of such planets in the galaxy. Some or all would probably eventually be talked to and helped out, once it was certain they had achieved a place where they wouldn't be harmed or otherwise act negatively.

PvK