In article <1083957015.834587@haldjas.folklore.ee>,
 Sander Vesik <sander@haldjas.folklore.ee> wrote:

If ET in our galaxy exists at all, it knows darn well that are here, 
because it almost certainly colonized the entirely galaxy many millions 
of years ago.  Yet no ETs seem to be in our solar system, which 

In this regard youare almost as bad as Oberg - while he claims with no
real reasoning that no civilisation will ever do anything significant
in space you have the opposite endency - claiming that its manifest 
destiny of teh first civilisation to conquer the galaxy. Your reasoning is 
no better though.

So you say, yet I note that you haven't pointed out any actual flaws in 
the reasoning.

If the validity of this reasoning is not obvious to you, then I suggest 
you work through it yourself.  Write a simple simulation of, say, a 
million agents -- this is of course ridiculously small compared to the 
number of individuals in a civilization, but it's big enough (and it 
should be obvious that more realistic numbers only make the conclusion 
stronger).  Have these agents reproduce, but only within certain limits; 
in other words, have the odds of adding a new agent to the population 
decrease as the population some limit (say, 2 million).  That simulates 
how a population may stabilize due to resource shortage, cultural 
pressure, draconian laws, whatever you imagine.

Run your simulation and watch the population size over time.  It will of 
course level off at right about the limit.

Now, define a fraction of the population to which the limit does not 
apply.  That simulates those freakish outliers who would dare to wander 
to the next star system over, where resources are plentiful, the culture 
is of their choosing, and draconian laws are (at least initially) 
absent.  Make this a very low percentage if you want -- say, 0.001% of 
the population.  Run your simulation again.  What happens?  Look at both 
the total population, and the fraction of the population which is of the 
freakish rejecting-limits sort, over time.

Perhaps you think 0.001% of the population being expansionist is too 
high.  So try making it lower.  With a more realistic civilization size 
-- 10 billion for a single world, or maybe 10 trillion for a solar 
system -- you can make it almost arbitrarily low, and the results are 
hardly changed at all.

In fact, you can even make it zero, provided you also allow for mutation 
-- i.e., randomly changing individuals from expansionist to sedentary or 
vice versa with a nonzero probability.  If both probabilities are very 
low, then it may take a while for the expansion to really take off.  But 
keep in mind that when we're discussing galactic civilizations, we have 
*billions* of years to work with.  That's an extremely long time which 
dwarfs the time it takes for a civilization to expand even under the 
most ridiculously low probabilities.

Finally, note that reproduction and variation are what define living 
things, and a civilization is composed of living things.  That's why the 
simulation above applies well to any conceivable civilization.  It 
doesn't matter what the limits are, or why they exist, or even how much 
of the population is subject to them -- *some* fraction (however tiny) 
of the population will after some amount of time (however long) develop 
in such a way that the limits do not apply, and the progeny of those 
will very quickly outnumber the rest.

This is not that tricky.  It's simple math, as universal as the value of 
Pi.

Expanding 
into new niches is strongly selected for, and while random 
counterpressures can slow down expansion briefly, no technological 
civilization arising in a resource-rich unpopulated galaxy would stay 
contained for long.

Yes, but this assumes that 'move to another star' is a potential niche
or one that a species can undertake several times, esp in row.

Of course.  We are only a couple hundred years from that point 
ourselves; the technology needed is barely more advanced than what we 
have in hand, and we can describe it in some detail.  No warp drives or 
replicators are required.  Surely you don't believe that a civilization 
thousands of years older than us would have any problem with it?

Even assumingthat the probablity of successfully colonising another 
system is 50% (which is *EXTREMELY* favourable) - the chances of any 
significant colonisation in timelines exceeding that of all but the 
most stuborn biological species we know of becomes very hard.

No, it doesn't.  It wouldn't matter if 99 out of every 100 colonization 
attempts ended in failure; this increases the doubling time, but the 
growth is exponential.  And with exponential growth, even with a long 
doubling time, you can colonize the whole galaxy in fairly short order.  
Suppose that instead of doubling the number of colonized stars every 100 
years on average, it took 1000 years.  Now for 100 million stars, it 
takes 26 thousand years instead of 26 hundred.  So what?  Make it 26 
million if you like.  That's still trivial compared to how long it's 
taken civilization to arise on Earth.

Or maybe they are made up solely of people like you and Oberg and never
actually accomplish anything being for ever locked in a futile discussion
between teh zero and infinity hypothesis.

Even if 99.999% of the population were as incapable of using or 
understanding basic mathematics as you, there'd still be a fraction of 
useful individuals willing and able to colonize, and those will very 
quickly (in the grand scheme of things) outnumber the rest.

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