Interstellar Colonisation - Take your time

[Drashner1]

An article by Stuart Armstrong about Interstellar expansion.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hll/to_reduce_as...time_then/

So, in conclusion: To efficiently colonise the universe, take your time. Do research. Think things over. Go to the pub. Saunter like an Egyptian. Write long letters to mum. Complain about the immorality of the youth of today. Watch dry paint stay dry.

But when you do go... go very, very fast.

The problem is that any initial interstellar expansion wave is likely to be overtaken by a second wave of faster expansion, and so on. But there will be an eventual limit to the speed at which expansion can reallistically progress; once that limit can be reached, there's no need to wait any longer.

.

This sort of assumes some sort of expansion 'wave' which isn't the only option or is an option that only comes into play above a certain tech/resource level. As we see in OA, early (and slow) starships were rare and went to specific (presumably deemed desirable) star systems. They traveled slowly but also didn't travel far and so the transit times were fast enough that there wasn't time back home for tech to advance to the point where a faster ship could catch up to/pass the first ship. Even when faster ships were developed, there are were so many places to go that they most often went elsewhere, leaving the slower ships to go on their way.

Eventually, Terragen tech and resources advance/expand to the point where a sort of expansion wave (actually several of them) is heading out in all directions. But by that point, tech has also started running into the limits of physics and ships can't go vastly faster. And as the expansion wave grows the number of possible places to go grows at a huge rate. So faster ships are still more likely to go somewhere new (at least if they know a slower ship is on the way to some particular place).

There is some mention of generation/world ships in the setting which apparently did run up against this issue to some degree (and perhaps still do, it's implied some are still in transit), but also evolved to a macrolife lifestyle in which they just travel and use star systems as way stations as they go about their business. So they seem to have sort of checked out of the expansion/colonization race.

Todd