Also, surely you mean “interstellar”? I was only thinking of interstellar travel for now; assuming intergalactic is impossible or whatever.
When you look at it from a Fermi paradox perspective, you have to be able to account for many hundred million years of expansion, because there can be many civilizations that are that much older than us. We are talking about some crazy thing that is supposed to be able to consume a galaxy with almost-optimal speed. I don’t expect galaxy boundaries to stop it completely, neither by intention nor by necessity. I am not even sure that it has to treat intergalactic space as the long boring travel between the rare interesting parts. Maybe all it really needs is empty space.
0.999c would get you a lag behind the light of 100 years, which is on the same order of magnitude as the time between detectability and singularity (looks like < 200 years for us).
Interesting point.
How would one eat a star without slowing down, even in principle?
Note that I speculated about photons as a substrate. Maybe major reorganization of atoms in unnecessary, and it can just fill the space around the star, and utilize the star as a photon source.
When you look at it from a Fermi paradox perspective, you have to be able to account for many hundred million years of expansion, because there can be many civilizations that are that much older than us. We are talking about some crazy thing that is supposed to be able to consume a galaxy with almost-optimal speed. I don’t expect galaxy boundaries to stop it completely, neither by intention nor by necessity. I am not even sure that it has to treat intergalactic space as the long boring travel between the rare interesting parts. Maybe all it really needs is empty space.
Interesting point.
Note that I speculated about photons as a substrate. Maybe major reorganization of atoms in unnecessary, and it can just fill the space around the star, and utilize the star as a photon source.