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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to post your own estimate. Please include your reasoning.

You don’t need your own estimates to call BS on theirs. Including simply on the premise of the volume of the universe, most of the universe is an empty void. Even if you allow somehow for the traversal of intergalactic void in your local clusters this alone should put a much more serious dampening effect on the expansion of any given species.

It also assumes that species can even get to the technological level required for galactic and then intergalactic expansion and maintain that level pretty much indefinitely.

But then again this isn’t a research paper or even a particularly serious statement.

> this isn’t a research paper

It's the host organization's announcement for https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01522.pdf

You need energy mastery. Ability to harness infinite or practically infinite energy available freely. With this understanding and power you can innovate further, perhaps gaining the ability to create matter and one day transport it along the fabric of space outside the constraints of existing matter (time).

Then again, maybe true advancement means losing interest in manipulating matter, turning inward and finding or developing enhanced mental states that let us see things clearly without understanding everything empirically.

Perhaps the ultimate goal is to be at peace and even joyful at living and dying. Humans are still very believe-y, angry, outward and confused.

If you attain that level of technology why do you need to go anywhere? If you gain access to infinite or near infinite energy source it seems like it would be a waste to use that energy to cross the intergalactic void or even outside your solar system or star cluster since you could simply use it to build w/e you need anywhere in space so you might as well stay put.

Resilience. Being multi-planetary means your species is fundamentally protected from almost all catastrophic events. Having presence among multiple stars systems would mean not even planetary level destruction would be a threat to a species. As it currently stands humans are still very much in a precarious situation as an errant asteroid, even a decade away, could mean game over for all of humanity.

You missed my point, if you can attain that level of technology you don’t really care about your planet at that point either.

The amount of energy required for to cross the intergalactic void is insane.

Our local group is about 3 megaparsecs in diameter the Milky Way is around 32 kiloparsecs in diameter.

Asteroids aren’t a problem if you can expand to other solar systems yet alone across galaxies.

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