(May 14, 2014 at 5:40 pm)Napoléon Wrote: Why do you also assume they would be at least a million light-years away? They could only be 50. 500. 5000.
Indeed - any point a million light years away is far outside our own galaxy - in fact, it would probably be outside *any* galaxy, except for possibly a dwarf galaxy gravitationally bound to the milky way, possibly an unobserved one.
There are probably on the order of a million stars within a thousand light years of earth. Every point within the Milky Way and it's hundreds of billions of stars is within ~75 Kly.
As you said, once you've solved the problem of (faster than or near) light speed travel, solving the shielding issues ought to be easy by comparison.
