> Even at the SOL it would take a really advanced civilisation far less
> time than appears to have been available to spread across the
> universe.Just not good wrt human lifetimes.

Make that "galaxy".
Spreading across any given universe when the maximum speed of travel,
which happens incidentally to require infinite energy to achieve * is
not fast enough to get you from one "side ** to the other inside the
time that the whole system  is believed [tm] to have existed for. ie
no matter how fast the speed of light was set to, if the universe is
further across than light can travel in the life of the universe then
"you can't get there from here".

This is perhaps the only situation in existence where that old joke is
true - and is the reason that inflation was needed to make the
theories  work. In a system where one side CANNOT "talk to" the other
but they both obey the same complex rul book and share history,
something special must have happened. (Mustn't it ? :-) )
Occam feels decidedlyu shaky when almost any sort of cosmology gets discuss=
ed.

* Unless you have zero rest mass. Photons and other light speed
particles (which may or may not include neutrinos)  MUST travel at the
speed of light in current medium and live in a blissful timeless
existence where everything be's here now and the whole of creation is
one big timeless, positionless happy family, where there is no
position or time ordering or even variation. This is all obviously a
pack of rubbish BUT if it is not so, why not. If travelling at the
speed of light, from where comes time to measure velocity or time
priority. How CAN a photon leaving Sol and the same time as one
leaving Alplha Centauri Proxima arrive "first".

That this matters was shown nicely a while ago when a physicist
commented thaty they were not using photons for and experiment related
 to "locality" (Einstein's "spooky" action at a distance.) The
experimenter noted that using a "timeless" particle in such cases made
him feel uneasy that something could be overlooked.


  Russell

** the universe has no sides.
--=20
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