The slow, slow way to spread throughout the stars…

Island hopping to the stars? That’s the interesting title of this blog post at Centauri Dreams, and it’s something that I would like to someday explore in a novel, as I really think it’s a more hard SF, and interesting, way of looking at the way in which life actually would slowly proliferate across solar systems.

I really wonder if anyone has tried to run mathematical models on what kind of time frame it would take for this to take place?

Let’s say, for example, that we only manage to get up to about 1 percent of lightspeed (3000 kilometers per second) before we run into technical challenges that are at least temporarily insurmountable. Speeds like that take well over 400 years to get a payload to Centauri A and B, but they make movement between planets and out into the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud a straightforward proposition. A civilization content to create way-stations and take its time could establish habitats all along the way, its distant descendants reaching the next solar system.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on February 14th 2012 at 11:56 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.