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by eloff 2065 days ago
I don't know why this got down-voted. The milky way is 100K light years across. It's 13.5 billion years old. It's entirely possible to blanket the whole galaxy with probes, without even getting into self replicating probes.
1 comments

You have to make an assumption about speed - it certainly won't be more than a tiny fraction light speed. Eg voyager appear to travel now at less than 0.00006 c (16 km/s). Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 M year journey (no it doesn't its 1.8 bn years as mentioned in reply) . Still possible to cross 10.000 times - but that would be a straight line. I suspect the distances will grow somewhat fractally if you want to swing by any stars? (ed: so, not really very likely at all)
To traverse 100k light-years at 16km/s would take approximately 1.8 billion years. FWIW.
Thanks, not sure how I got to just 150 mill years.
To imagine that voyager technology will define the maximum velocity of interstellar travel, a thousand years from now, ten thousand, a million, etc is short sighted. Maybe we never can exceed light speed, but we could get up to a reasonable percentage of it.
Sure, but it puts things into perspective. If we assume 1% of c is feasible - it's still a 10 Million year journey to cross 100k light years. That's much better - it gives 1 000 chances in 10 bn years.
There's current projects on earth seriously working on getting probes up to 1% of the speed of light. Just a small/light weight probe, a solar sail, and a large (but feasible) array of lasers.
> Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 year journey.

Forgive my confusion.

If 100K light years is 100K years at c, how can

> 0.00006 c

yield 0.00150K (150) years?

It can't (unless you mistype into your plain android calculator app). Ed: Fwiw there was a typo there, too - it was supposed to say 150 million - but it's more like 1.5 billion.