So, 3308 is finally here! And with it comes the information that ED players have only explored some 0.05% of the Milky Way. This game is huge, with 400 billion systems to visit, and it made me wonder how long it would take x number of players, each exploring y number of systems a day, to fully explore the galaxy.
The sample size I used was 100,000 players discovering 5 systems each, every day, for a year. While this is a rather unlikely number (I bet fewer than a thousand players discover that many systems in a day), but that, in and of itself, helps with the scale of the result. In a year, these 100k players would hypothetically explore 182.5 million systems.
Running this (frankly unrealistic) result against the total number of systems in the Milky Way, it would take almost 2200 years for the galaxy to be fully explored. If systems-discovered-per-year raises, this timeframe will lower. However, I expect SDpY to actually be much lower than 182.5m which of course means more than 2000 years to fully explore our home galaxy.
Just some math. I'll see yall in 5499 (or 4213 IRL) when the galaxy is fully mapped and we're living in persona downloads to the mindnet allowing us to live in eternity to complete the above task.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/s8p1o1/just_some_math/
