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Mercury, September/October 2005 Table of Contents

Courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives.

by Robert Jackson

Simple models of the expansion of a star-faring civilization predict that our entire galaxy could be colonized in a small fraction of the Galaxy's age. Based on such considerations, physicist Enrico Fermi is said to have asked "Where is everyone?"

One of the parameters of these models is the time delay between founding a new colony and the new colony sending out colony ships of its own. During the time delay, usually considered to be on the order of a thousand years, the new colony is building up the industrial base necessary to create more colony ships. There are consequences to this time delay that are significant yet rarely articulated.

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