Star Trek Actor George Takei Comes Out

On 11/1/05, Dan Wylie-Sears wrote:
> > Our galaxy is very vast, it can hold any population explosion.
>
> Expontentially many >> astronomically many.
>
> Given a continual expansion into space at a constant velocity, call
> it c, the population at time t is limited to what can fit into a
> sphere of radius ct. For simplicity, I assume that people have a
> mass of 100 kg and the density of water, and thus take up a tenth of
> a cubic meter each. The volume of people can't exceed the volume of
> the colonization sphere. Then I look at exponential growth with a
> doubling time of 30 years, and calculate how long it takes before
> the volume of the population exceeds the volume of the colonization
> sphere: the exponential growth can't go on that long.
>
> It's been a while since I last plugged in the numbers, so I would
> have to find the calculator. But it might be instructive to take a
> guess how soon unlimited growth becomes unfeasible, and then do the
> calculation yourself.
(...)

That's it, a mere power law will always loose to an exponential one.
Of course you are being overly optimistic in your assumption because
you are assuming only a limitation of space, while a realistic
estimation would be limited by the amount of matter (resources) in the
space considered.

The only way to escape the inevitability of population problems would
be... To also *create* new space and new matter exponentially as
needed. Perhaps creating baby universes with some sort of godlike
space-time engineering. Not a likely possibility, as far as we know.