If FTL was developed and practical (a hypothetical scenario)

[Junghalli]

OK, let's say it's the year 2100. Scientists have discovered a drive that lets us go FTL, and Earth has managed to build a fleet of about 5,000 commercial FTL ships. Each ship can carry about 800 passengers. Habitable planets are fairly common beyond Earth, and many thousands of them are in range of the FTL ships should we want them. Earth is about the same that it is now, population of 10 billion. Earth has a colonial program going and offers incentives for people to move to the colonies.
How many people do you think would try to emigrate? How many colonies could be established within fifty years, and how well developed would the oldest colonies be by then? Discuss.

[Chardok]

are you asking who HERE would go? Or just 'would the colony ships be full'

If A. Not me. I read too much Anne McCaffery and saw too many alien movies to want to do something stupid like colonize a planet.

[Junghalli]

are you asking who HERE would go? Or just 'would the colony ships be full'

The latter: what sort of emigration rate would be realistic in this scenario.

[wolveraptor]

Hell yes, preferrably if I could get a buddy to go along. Some of them I know would reject, but hell, seeing an alien planet is worth that. Besides, I'd like being one of the original colonists. I'd be a larger percentage of the population, so the world would have more of my influence than Earth ever could.

[Zero]

Personally, I think many would want to be able to emigrate, but it would be a bitch to get them all in orbit. Assuming we can somehow manage to create an easier method of getting into space, perhaps a space elevator or something, I think as many people would leave as could. Everyone wants to do something new, something interesting, and nobody wants to live in an overcrowded, overpolluted shithole.

[Junghalli]

Assuming we can somehow manage to create an easier method of getting into space, perhaps a space elevator or something, I think as many people would leave as could.

You're limited to ~5,000 commercial spacecraft, because the world can't afford to produce many more FTL drives than that without straining the economy severely (they're expensive). The ships are capable of taking off and landing, so that's taken care of.

[wolveraptor]

Everyone wants to do something new, something interesting,

Well few would want to do those new great things at the expense of family and friendship ties.

[Adrian Laguna]

Find emmigration rates from Spain into the newly discovered Americas. Then try England to the newly claimed claimed North American eastern seaboard. This should give you a pretty good idea. As a rule, emmigration rates are inversely proportional to socio-economic status.

[Zero]

Everyone wants to do something new, something interesting,

Well few would want to do those new great things at the expense of family and friendship ties.

There's actually a lot of people who want, at certain points in their lives, to leave everything behind, including these things you mentioned, but I see your point. I also believe that they could convince many others to come with them, including many friends and family members, but it would still be quite tricksy. The thing is, with FTL drives, there's a chance of coming back, and a better chance of sending mail back.

[gizmojumpjet]

Everyone wants to do something new, something interesting,

Well few would want to do those new great things at the expense of family and friendship ties.

People commonly sacrifice family and friendship ties in order to gain a better life. Observe, for example, history. Or current events.

It would be nice if the OP more accurately defined the term "habitable," but for the sake of my analysis I will assume that this means "Earthlike." If someone gave me the opportunity to move to another planet and go Frontiersman on that blue marble, with "incentives" offered, I'd be sorely tempted. The devil's in the details, so I'd like to know what the incentives were, etc. and blah blah.

In summary, I think the ships would be packed to the gills. I'd certainly consider it.

[Drunk Monkey]

If the colonization of the Americas is any precedent, we’ll have shit loads of people going to the colonies because of

A) fleeing from discrimination
B) Economic reasons
C) Imperialistic motives

[CaptainChewbacca]

If I can go there and get some land to call my own, I'll head out now and send for my girlfriend once I've goy my fiberglass cabin built. In the days of "Manifest Destiny" you saw whole New England communities packing up and moving en masse to the west. I can picture large groups hiring a dozen ships and moving a church congregation or an intellectual society and their families to a new world.

[Xero Cool Down]

Well the most important question is, how fast is the FTL. If you can get back and forth in a week or two, then a hell of a lot of people, mostly because they have the ability to get back to the comforts of home. If it's a life time committment, then probably a lot less.

[Molyneux]

Okay, but we have to have a rule - NO PSYCHO RELIGIOUS COLONIES. Except maybe the Amish, they're okay.

[Xero Cool Down]

Okay, but we have to have a rule - NO PSYCHO RELIGIOUS COLONIES. Except maybe the Amish, they're okay.

Don't see why not. Religious organizations are very wealthy, and this would be the perfect opportunity to establish worlds free of the influence of outsiders and laws requiring religious tolerance. Once again, the speed of travel matters. Religions like Mormonism would have to spread since they are obligated to spread the world of God, while religions like Islam would be screwed if travel was impractical within the lifespan due to required travel to the holy land.

[Mr. T]

Well the most important question is, how fast is the FTL. If you can get back and forth in a week or two, then a hell of a lot of people, mostly because they have the ability to get back to the comforts of home. If it's a life time committment, then probably a lot less.

I'd say that this is a pretty important determinant as well. Even when Europe was colonizing the America's, I'm sure many colonists at the time were comforted by the fact that if things got too hard, they had the option of going back home.

In my opinion, out of a population of 10 billion, I'd say that there would be more than enough applicants to fill all the ships. Of course, after 50 or 100 years after colonization, as the colonies have become even more established, willingness to move off of Earth will become even greater.

[Xero Cool Down]

One important thing is that unless the ship are incredibly fast the removal of even 4 million people at a time won't make a dent in the earth's population. So any incentive for governments to get people to leave to avoid crowding goes out the window, especially since most of the people leaving would be skilled workers that the earth wouldn't want to leave.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

OK, let's say it's the year 2100. Scientists have discovered a drive that lets us go FTL, and Earth has managed to build a fleet of about 5,000 commercial FTL ships. Each ship can carry about 800 passengers. Habitable planets are fairly common beyond Earth, and many thousands of them are in range of the FTL ships should we want them. Earth is about the same that it is now, population of 10 billion. Earth has a colonial program going and offers incentives for people to move to the colonies.
How many people do you think would try to emigrate? How many colonies could be established within fifty years, and how well developed would the oldest colonies be by then? Discuss.

A) How fast is the FTL drive? It's fine if the farthest habitable planet is only a month or two away by this FTL drive (assuming thousands of c), but if the closest planet is months or years away, and the furthest planet is is decades away (assuming single or fractional multiples of c, after all, a drive that can push a ship to 1.0000000001 times the speed of light is FTL too), you're going to have problems.

B) Depends on how this colonial venture is set up. How free would the people be once they're dumped on Omicron Persei 8? Would the government provide them reduced cost/free passage to the planet, only to reveal that they own them and their children down to the tenth generation to help pay for the ruinous costs of building 5000 colony ships and the associated infrastructure all in one go?

Earth's not going to be a rich planet 95 years from now. About two thirds of the industrialized world will be struggling to complete the switch over from increasingly scarce oil while suffering the effects of global warming. And you're dumping four more billion people on the planet to boot. Come to think of it, people might be willing to sell their souls to the government to get away from this morass. Especially if it doesn't involve living on a little asteroid crushing rocks all day, or living in a fishbowl on Mars.

Right at the start, you'll only have enthusiasts who want off the planet, wannabe frontiersmen, squatters looking at the enormous profit to be made by being early adopters, and folk who are finding it intolerable to live where they are now, such as freethinkers from the United States of Greater Jesusland. This assumes that, if by habitable, you mean Earthlike, since we're not likely to even begin to have the ability to transform marginal worlds into pleasant ones in 95 years.

You'll probably end up sending a few ships to the same planet. Say, thirty ships per habitable world, which would give you 8,000-24,000 people per world (it would be pointless establishing a pissant colony of just 800 people for the entire planet, if it fails the next year due to unforseen problems with the system, so there's a benefit in establishing a large enough network of towns that they can support each other in times of trouble,) depending on how much space you fill up on each ship. So, the first wave will probably establish a maximum of 167 colonies.

In reality, it will probably establish a lot less, since you'll have much more than ten ships going to the really prime slices of real-estate. So the first wave could well have four major colonies with a million people apiece, plus a smattering of smaller colonies. It could just as easily have one major colony of a million people, ten modest colonies of 100,000 people, and up to 85 colonies of 24,000 people or less, or even 167 small colonies of 24,000 people. This will probably take place over, say, a decade, and the numbers wil start out small, and get larger, as the largest colonies develop some of the infrastructure needed to be attractive to the more indifferent potential colonists.

In fifty years, I would think that you would have between one to three major colonies with populations in the low millions, between five to twenty modest colonies with populations over 100,000, and between twenty and a couple hundred tiny colonies of fewer than fifty-thousand.

[Molyneux]

Okay, but we have to have a rule - NO PSYCHO RELIGIOUS COLONIES. Except maybe the Amish, they're okay.

Don't see why not. Religious organizations are very wealthy, and this would be the perfect opportunity to establish worlds free of the influence of outsiders and laws requiring religious tolerance. Once again, the speed of travel matters. Religions like Mormonism would have to spread since they are obligated to spread the world of God, while religions like Islam would be screwed if travel was impractical within the lifespan due to required travel to the holy land.

I'm not talking about religious folk coming along as part of the colonies - I'm talking about a group of loonies going and taking over a planet on their own and sealing themselves away for a hundred years or so, and then going all batshit and declaring a holy war to convert the other colonies.

[Patrick Degan]

Okay, but we have to have a rule - NO PSYCHO RELIGIOUS COLONIES. Except maybe the Amish, they're okay.

Don't see why not. Religious organizations are very wealthy, and this would be the perfect opportunity to establish worlds free of the influence of outsiders and laws requiring religious tolerance. Once again, the speed of travel matters. Religions like Mormonism would have to spread since they are obligated to spread the world of God, while religions like Islam would be screwed if travel was impractical within the lifespan due to required travel to the holy land.

I'm not talking about religious folk coming along as part of the colonies - I'm talking about a group of loonies going and taking over a planet on their own and sealing themselves away for a hundred years or so, and then going all batshit and declaring a holy war to convert the other colonies.

And how do they manage this without a large industrial infrastructure to build the war machine required for such a venture, and what prevents the expansion of the Earth/Colonial industrial, population, and military bases in the intervening 100 years?

[wolveraptor]

Okay, but we have to have a rule - NO PSYCHO RELIGIOUS COLONIES. Except maybe the Amish, they're okay.

Heh, the Amish could never migrate from Earth. No technology allowed, remember? It'd be blasphemous to be using an FTL drive. Nope, they're stuck here for good.

I'm not talking about religious folk coming along as part of the colonies - I'm talking about a group of loonies going and taking over a planet on their own and sealing themselves away for a hundred years or so, and then going all batshit and declaring a holy war to convert the other colonies.

Trust me, religious wars often end up as failures, because zealousness is no replacement for good tactics and training, especially in the age of the firearms. Just look at the Crusades. The church sure got fucked up. Besides, religious loonies rarely place enough emphasis on science to develop any really dangerous technology.

There is another thing to point out: by 2100 people will probably have established space colonies, and colonies on planets within the solar system. You really don't need FTL in order to make intrasystem jumps to Mars or anything. With a large percentage of Earthlings already in Earth's orbit, what's the incentive to be shoved off to some backwater colony with no infrastructure so far from home?

[Sea Skimmer]

People in the developed world would have no incentive to leave, but from the third world you could probably find tens of millions of willing immigrants at the bare minimal. For many people, simply moving to a place in which they've got a waterproof roof and four walls would be enough incentive. How devoloped things get depends entierly on how much money people want to spend.

[Zero]

Besides this, there can be other reasons to leave. It may be considered quite an incentive to be good if we sent many criminals away to new colonies. Aside from that, there's still always the odd appeal of doing something truly new, stepping foot where no man ever has. I don't believe that people would all be content with their lives, even in well-developed areas. After all, people don't always make rational decisions.

[wolveraptor]

Even if people feel the need to set foot where no man has before despite their relative comfort, why do it through permanent colonization? What's stopping the rich from buying/renting a single family ship to go on a sightseeing vacation. Moving is a big decision, and only the truly desperate would resort to such colonization.

[Junghalli]

Okay, but we have to have a rule - NO PSYCHO RELIGIOUS COLONIES. Except maybe the Amish, they're okay.

Why not? It's a great way to get the fundies off the world's back. Just give them a planet of their own and let them rot there.

Well the most important question is, how fast is the FTL.

1500 ly can be covered in a year. Or 125 ly in a month. In this scenario there are habitable (Earthlike) worlds around a large percentage of the galaxy's sun-like stars, so there would probably be at least several hundred of them within a month's journey of Earth.