On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 03:06:29PM -0700, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
> So, maybe, 40,000 years?
>
> Even so, they still have quite a ways to go...

It's a very long way, yes.  Barring radical new advances in jump
technology, even in the best possible case I doubt they could do it in
less than three thousand years.  Though once they did get there,
they'd have something like a hundred Billion settled worlds behind
them.  Probably more, given that by then even the inhospitable
rockballs would likely have been kuzuformed.

Advanced jump technology could reduce that time, but not by a great
deal.  The actual starship travel time to do the round trip is only a
few hundred years, and the expense and time of jump ttravel just acts
as a possible deterrent against sending fleets to the frontier from
the interior worlds.  It takes a long time to develop both the
population and capital to fill a hundred billion worlds, even with
exponential growth.

All these figures assume that there is nobody out there to oppose
expansion.  I think we can make a pretty confident extrapolation from
Traveller canon that there are actually a great many other
interstellar civilizations.  It is quite likely that there would be
many that are more advanced than any yet published, and unlikely to
look kindly upon massive settlement of the galaxy by a single species.

I don't think Aslan expansion would ever "wrap around" the galaxy --
nor that of any other species.  I suspect that even an attempt to do
so could have very adverse consequences.

- Tim