Star Trek Actor George Takei Comes Out

> Of course you are being overly optimistic in your assumption

Lol, I think this has got to win some sort of understatement contest.

Let me count the ways: We're not going to start expanding into
space at relativistic speed any time soon. People can't survive
packed together in a space-filling configuration. That much matter
would collapse on itself into a black hole in a few seconds' worth
of this hypothetical cubic expansion. That much matter doesn't
exist in the universe within probably a few days' worth.

I was deliberately choosing the assumptions to be ludicrously
optimistic. Yet exponential growth, if it could be sustained at a
rate that's realistic for short-term growth, would exceed it on a
historical time scale, not a geological one.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Lucio de Souza Coelho
wrote:
>
> 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.