Resolves, somehow, to HOD*'s ~spherical expansion rate as a fraction of the speed of light (c).
Resolves NA if we never become grabby or if we only expand in one or a few directions for some weird reason, and resolves YES if we expand faster than c.
*Humanity Or Descendents (includes beings and probe-like objects created by humans, doesn't include light or other particles; for others I'll resolve with a pannel of judges 🙄 or by myself by following the spirit of the question).
Close date updated to 2099-12-31 11:59 pm
Related questions
Any arguments for <.99c given the analysis here?
It seems to me the key paragraph is:
In the estimation of the authors, the assumptions on intergalactic dust
and on the energy efficiency of the rockets represent the most vulnerable
part of the whole design; small changes to these assumptions result in huge
increases in energy and material required (though not to a scale unfeasible on
cosmic timelines). If large particle dust density were an order of magnitude
larger, reaching outside the local group would become problematic
But the authors discuss some alternatives to rockets in 3.2.1, and it seems like you might be able to compensate for dust density by just sending more probes. (Or maybe not? I guess if x amount of dust means one out of 40 probes survives, then 10x amount of dust means one out of 40^10 = 1e16 probes survives. Then again, they calculate 8310 seconds of the Sun's energy to send 40 5kg probes with antimatter rockets to each of 4e9 galaxies, so maybe sending 1e16 probes to 100 galaxies is also doable.)