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At 20k c? Hahahahaha, no.

 mattyrm wrote:

 Kain wrote:
Billions in a little splinter fleet, big hive fleets outnumber the stars and planets themselves, and even those are apparently absolutely puny compared to the full weight of the entire species, and the Tyranids appear to be a very ancient species, perhaps older than the Necrons themselves, billions of years old even. They have had time.

See this is what I'm on about, the fluff doesn't make any sense, you can tell that they don't employ any scientists.

Outnumber the planets?

There are around three trillion planets in our galaxy alone, and there are an estimated 500 billion Galaxies.

If the nids were that big, they would never be able to sustain themselves, also bear in mind the distances, they would have to eat each other before they arrived anywhere near another galaxy, because the closest one to us is 25.6 trillion miles away.

As I said, I don't know why IIt kinda winds me up, but I like movies where the characters don't do ridiculously dumb gak, and GWs awful numbers annoys me as well!

I mean, I like my ridiculous fiction to be at least somewhat believable ridiculous fiction!

Heres another statistic for you, why do they never go past the billions? They always say "billions of guardsmen" and "billions of tyranids" when current fluff stated that hives contain around 300 billion human beings, and there are a million inhabited worlds, so what.. tens of thousands of hives?

Ergo, there are what.. Trillions? Quadrillions? of human beings?

It baffles me.. but the point is, nids cant eat entire galaxies!

Im pretty sure anyway...

Well, one, the Tyranids do eat one another, at the conclusion of every successful taking of a world.
Two, they have devoured entire galaxies already.
Three, because if you have a thousand billion, you have a trillion... you also have a thousand billion. Numbers are fun that way.
Four, most Hives don't contain 300 billion people. A single Hive might have anywhere from several hundred million to several billion people. This will vary by Hive and by the world on which it sits. Some Hive Worlds have multiple Hive Cities on them.
Five, the Hive Fleets are huge. Having trillions of individual organisms in them is not out of the realm of possibility. Them outnumbering the stars and planets may be a reference to the stars and planets contained within the Milky Way.

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

The Tau can barely travel anywhere in THIS galaxy, they are not reaching another galaxy anytime soon. Hell, the Silent King was travelling for at least 30 million years without hitting another galaxy, and I'm pretty sure he'd have used far better tech than the Tau have.

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

I'm sure they (or anyone else) would sleep through the trip. Even then, who cares? Why would anyone want to go to the next galaxy over unless they could literally take their entire population, or a good portion thereof, to resettle in a "hopefully" peaceful galaxy to start over.

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

The IOM does not contain 1 trillion worlds, they have just over a million and the tau have barely over 100

 40kSpartan wrote:

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

The IOM does not contain 1 trillion worlds, they have just over a million and the tau have barely over 100

Depends if it's an American or English trillion. A million million planets is an English billion, but an American trillion, but a million billion is an English trillion.

So, Iom may have a 'trillion' (1,000,000,000,000/ 1*10^12) planets, but no way it has a trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000/ 1*10^18) planets. I'm not saying it does have x amount of planets, just that one number is possible, another isn't. The fluff is vague on this subject, bearing in mind that not all Imperial planets are inhabited either.

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

To answer your questions, the tau have a reactor wich powers their craft indefinately. They also have stasis chambers so there could.be 5 crews each on a cpiple of years cycle and if rhey bring an etherial along rhen no eaty eaty

With regards to the Imperium's population, we do have an upper limit given by GW data:

The Hive Worlds of the Imperium are classed as having upper limit population of 500 billion (3rd edition 40K rulebook, p. 114). The 5th edition rulebook on p. 115 estimates there to be 3.238 * 10^4 or 32,380 hive worlds in the Imperium. If all 1,000,000 worlds of the Imperium were hive worlds with 500 billion people that is 5 * 10^17. That is an UPPER limit for the Imperium's population because we know that not all worlds are maximum population hive worlds. 5 * 10^17 as an upper limit is 5 million billion people, or 500 quadrillion people.

Minea from that page in the 5th edition rulebook is described as a typical example of a hive world, and it has 154 billion population, well under the 500 billion maximum. Assume we are still generous and give all hive worlds a population of 250 billion to account for less populated worlds elsewhere in the Imperium. 32,380 hive worlds of 250 billion population each is 8.095 * 10^15.

That is more than "500 trillion" for the hive worlds alone.

As for Tyranid populations, there is very little data. The only known nugget is from the 2nd edition Codex:

A billion times a billion Tyranids stand at the rim of the galaxy yet each one is no more than a single cell in the living body of the hive mind, the devourer of worlds. (2nd edition Tyranid Codex, p. 4)

A billion times a billion is 10^18.

 Harriticus wrote:
A lot of people have misunderstood the Ork comment. The Mechanicus Probes have been sent across all of our galaxy, and wherever they go Orks are observed. It's not a different galaxy.

This. There's a large part of the galaxy not covered by the Astronomican, where warp travel is extremely perilous. The IoM knows little of what goes on there except from those AdMech probes and a few insanely brave Rogue Traders that go out in search of tresures. But in any corner of that largely uncharted area one might run into orks.

And let's stress the warp travel bit again - it really needs the Astronomican to be "safe" and quick. Navigators can guide their ships in jumps up to several thousand lightyears if they have the beacon of the Emperor clear in their sight, if not the jumps will be limited to a few (3-4) lightyears and all at great risk. There's small star clusters and spheres spread out between us and the Andromeda galaxy (out closest real galaxy neighbor) but without the beacon travel there would be extremely perilous and slow for IoM ships. The Andromeda Galaxy itself? We're speaking of 2.5 million lightyears which would surely be too much for warp travel. Without the beacon it's (assuming a generous 4ly "safe" jump) 625000 jumps.

Once you leave the part of the warp that corresponds to the milky way, it should quiet down considerably as you go beyond the grasp of Chaos, of course other galaxies may have their own equivalents or you could run right into a hive fleet generated shadow.

The milky way is slowly cannibalizing two nearby dwarf galaxies, causing a bridge of gas and stars to form between ours and the smaller. It is conceivable that you could travel via the warp across this bridge to the dwarf galaxies orbiting our own. The Space Wolves may have done so during one of their great hunts, where they follow a warp gate that takes them beyond the edge of space and they travel for years in the dark before finding another system.

Likewise, before the retcon Necrons had an inertialess drive. That would let them travel to nearby galaxies.

The Webway could also have nodes in other galaxies, as it operates independently of local spacetime.

If I may - a lot of people are assuming that the laws of physics and indeed space/time:

a) are correct per our 20th century understanding, which most experts will tell you is spotty and still improving/being corrected when it comes to understanding the universe;
b) still apply 38,000 years from now;
c) still apply in the Warp, described as an alternate entity which drives ordinary men mad just to observe it for a moment.

Or, to put it in a way that I think is a brilliant concept, but sadly poorly described - there are known unknowns, but there are also unknown unknowns, things that we don't yet know that we don't know.

 hey801 wrote:
the Tau have a reactor which powers their craft indefinitely.

I've never heard of this but considering how old their species is and how long they would have had this particular tech, I don't think they can gauge how long it will last during an inter galactic trip. the race could repeat it's history 10000 times before they hit anything.

 hey801 wrote:

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

To answer your questions, the tau have a reactor wich powers their craft indefinately. They also have stasis chambers so there could.be 5 crews each on a cpiple of years cycle and if rhey bring an etherial along rhen no eaty eaty

Tau only live to the age of 40. It doesn't matter how many Tau you put on those ships, even if you ice them for 95% of the journey, they'll never live to see the end.

 Psienesis wrote:
Tau only live to the age of 40. It doesn't matter how many Tau you put on those ships, even if you ice them for 95% of the journey, they'll never live to see the end.

And with "normal" humans reaching 80 or so it's pretty much the same, unless the AdMech have an endless supply of rejuvenat treatments to send along. At the speeds 40K factions move across space (once the Astronomican is lost) any journey to another galaxy would require a generational ship. Perhaps the Eldar could do without, if the webway reached another galaxy - but I've never heard of it.

 hey801 wrote:

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

To answer your questions, the tau have a reactor wich powers their craft indefinately. They also have stasis chambers so there could.be 5 crews each on a cpiple of years cycle and if rhey bring an etherial along rhen no eaty eaty

Yes, but the Tau crew would die of old age long before they reached another galaxy even with Stasis chambers. It takes them years to cross a span as small as the Daemocles Gulf, it would take millions of years to cross the span between Galaxies. Plus Tau only live for around 40 years.

It would have to be a multi-generational colony ship to even have a chance at making it between galaxies with a viable population. And we are talking about hundreds of thousands of generations to make it across.

Spetulhu wrote:

 Harriticus wrote:
A lot of people have misunderstood the Ork comment. The Mechanicus Probes have been sent across all of our galaxy, and wherever they go Orks are observed. It's not a different galaxy.

This. There's a large part of the galaxy not covered by the Astronomican, where warp travel is extremely perilous. The IoM knows little of what goes on there except from those AdMech probes and a few insanely brave Rogue Traders that go out in search of tresures. But in any corner of that largely uncharted area one might run into orks.

And let's stress the warp travel bit again - it really needs the Astronomican to be "safe" and quick. Navigators can guide their ships in jumps up to several thousand lightyears if they have the beacon of the Emperor clear in their sight, if not the jumps will be limited to a few (3-4) lightyears and all at great risk. There's small star clusters and spheres spread out between us and the Andromeda galaxy (out closest real galaxy neighbor) but without the beacon travel there would be extremely perilous and slow for IoM ships. The Andromeda Galaxy itself? We're speaking of 2.5 million lightyears which would surely be too much for warp travel. Without the beacon it's (assuming a generous 4ly "safe" jump) 625000 jumps.

There would likely be a few star clusters in intergalactic space (the gulf between galaxies), but not much. And because the spans are so enormous, and not beacon to navigate by, those clusters would be unuseable as a point of reference. Even reaching one as a waypoint would be nigh impossible.

Again, the only way to realistically do this would be either (1) a sleeper ship capable of carrying millions of people, in stasis; or (2) a generation ship capable of carrying many millions of people would would be born, live and die on that ship for many hundreds of thousands of generations (depending on the life expectancy of the species attempting it).

There is also a question as to whether or not "the warp" extends beyond the bounds of the galaxy - calling into question whether or not short, beacon-less jumps would even be feasible.

In any event... final summation... not possible.

 Traejun wrote:

Spetulhu wrote:

 Harriticus wrote:
A lot of people have misunderstood the Ork comment. The Mechanicus Probes have been sent across all of our galaxy, and wherever they go Orks are observed. It's not a different galaxy.

This. There's a large part of the galaxy not covered by the Astronomican, where warp travel is extremely perilous. The IoM knows little of what goes on there except from those AdMech probes and a few insanely brave Rogue Traders that go out in search of tresures. But in any corner of that largely uncharted area one might run into orks.

And let's stress the warp travel bit again - it really needs the Astronomican to be "safe" and quick. Navigators can guide their ships in jumps up to several thousand lightyears if they have the beacon of the Emperor clear in their sight, if not the jumps will be limited to a few (3-4) lightyears and all at great risk. There's small star clusters and spheres spread out between us and the Andromeda galaxy (out closest real galaxy neighbor) but without the beacon travel there would be extremely perilous and slow for IoM ships. The Andromeda Galaxy itself? We're speaking of 2.5 million lightyears which would surely be too much for warp travel. Without the beacon it's (assuming a generous 4ly "safe" jump) 625000 jumps.

There would likely be a few star clusters in intergalactic space (the gulf between galaxies), but not much. And because the spans are so enormous, and not beacon to navigate by, those clusters would be unuseable as a point of reference. Even reaching one as a waypoint would be nigh impossible.

Again, the only way to realistically do this would be either (1) a sleeper ship capable of carrying millions of people, in stasis; or (2) a generation ship capable of carrying many millions of people would would be born, live and die on that ship for many hundreds of thousands of generations (depending on the life expectancy of the species attempting it).

There is also a question as to whether or not "the warp" extends beyond the bounds of the galaxy - calling into question whether or not short, beacon-less jumps would even be feasible.

In any event... final summation... not possible.

"Life.... Well, life always finds a way."

 mattyrm wrote:
It baffles me.. but the point is, nids cant eat entire galaxies!

Im pretty sure anyway...

They've eaten 12 before ours. 5th edition rulebook Tyranid section. Their numbers are also without question - what has hit the Milky Way so far is merely the vanguard. The vast majority of the Tyranids are still on their way (Tyranid section, 6th edition rulebook).

The fact that it doesn't make sense doesn't mean it didn't happen in 40k. I haven't seen an ape-like, walking, innately psychic mushroom, but they exist in 40k.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sir Samuel Buca wrote:

 40kSpartan wrote:

 BrotherOfBone wrote:

 hey801 wrote:
The tau could travel too a different galaxy if they wanted too.

Think about what you just said. Do you have any idea how much resources it would take for a Tau vessel to travel through *realspace* and get to another galaxy? It takes them a while to get between planets, they live in their own little starsystem, they can't even comprehend the scale of the Galaxy in terms of the Imperium of Man, who has controll of over a trillion planets.. They own a few hundred, if that?? So think about how the Tau could sustain a crew of.. However many and then take said crew to another Galaxy without them going crazy, or eating eachother because of lack of food..

The IOM does not contain 1 trillion worlds, they have just over a million and the tau have barely over 100

Depends if it's an American or English trillion. A million million planets is an English billion, but an American trillion, but a million billion is an English trillion.

So, Iom may have a 'trillion' (1,000,000,000,000/ 1*10^12) planets, but no way it has a trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000/ 1*10^18) planets. I'm not saying it does have x amount of planets, just that one number is possible, another isn't. The fluff is vague on this subject, bearing in mind that not all Imperial planets are inhabited either.

The IoM doesn't even have an American trillion planets. It's always been described as 'an Empire of a million worlds'. Even as we learned more about the actual galaxy and how many planets are in it, GW just revised it that the human populated systems are very scattered with vast gulfs between them inhabited by other races, but never altered the IoM to be anything more than an Empire of a million worlds.

There are extragalactic, but not intergalactic, elements in 40k (excluding the Tyranids). The Mechanicus have detected Ork signals from outside the galaxy, but that doesn't mean that they've reached another one, just that they're bumping around in the intergalactic void for some inscrutable orky reason or other. The Carcharodons operate outside the galactic plane, but only just. Given how long the Milky Way has been inhabited by space-faring civilizations, it makes sense that the periphery of the galaxy is fairly dense with xenos, threatening or otherwise, and that is what they concern themselves with. But as bogglingly fast as warp travel is, it's still not enough to travel between galaxies on a time scale less than geologic. To travel between galaxies would require a completely different paradigm of FTL.

Of course, the Tyranids do it by just floating through space and giving zero feths that a billion years will pass before they get anywhere.

 Bludbaff wrote:
But as bogglingly fast as warp travel is, it's still not enough to travel between galaxies on a time scale less than geologic. To travel between galaxies would require a completely different paradigm of FTL.

It's not speed that limits Warp travel, it's the astronomican. It doesn't even reach the outer limits of the galactic edge, let alone beyond it. Without the astronomican, humans can't safely travel long distances.

Durandal wrote:
The milky way is slowly cannibalizing two nearby dwarf galaxies, causing a bridge of gas and stars to form between ours and the smaller. It is conceivable that you could travel via the warp across this bridge to the dwarf galaxies orbiting our own. The Space Wolves may have done so during one of their great hunts, where they follow a warp gate that takes them beyond the edge of space and they travel for years in the dark before finding another system.

Likewise, before the retcon Necrons had an inertialess drive. That would let them travel to nearby galaxies.

The Webway could also have nodes in other galaxies, as it operates independently of local spacetime.

Actually as of IA12 they have Inertialess drives again.

 mattyrm wrote:

...
There are around three trillion planets in our galaxy alone, and there are an estimated 500 billion Galaxies.
...

No, the universe is infinite. That's waaaaay more than 500 billion.

And there's an estimated 200 to 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. By your number of 3 trillion planets, that would clock in the average solar system at 10 planets, minimum.

Look at the Nids. They have evolved sufficiently to accomplish Galaxy nomming once (presumably galaxies not unlike our own). However long that took them round the first time it is liklier they do it faster the second, a little faster the third, etc. This may be their second galaxy, but probably not. Given how fast they're moving through the galaxy consuming all in their wake, it would suggest that they CAN eat the galaxy, and that quickly.

For them, what matters is genetic variety (and thus being more responsive to change), but they lack the individualized intelligence to achieve creativity genomic sciences like we could, and so must hunt for it in the universe. They could travel in straight lines, and never lack for food (because it is an apparently ABUNDANT universe).

And as for traveling the deep void, they probably have a a huge dressing room of hibernation and space-hull Zerg-transport skin genes to choose from (get it? alright, I almost sickened myself with that joke).

Why couldn't life get wiped out by them?

P.S. "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions." That means maybe trillion, quadtrillions, etc. Too many to fething count!

DarkApothecary wrote:
Look at the Nids. They have evolved sufficiently to accomplish Galaxy nomming once (presumably galaxies not unlike our own). However long that took them round the first time it is liklier they do it faster the second, a little faster the third, etc. This may be their second galaxy, but probably not. Given how fast they're moving through the galaxy consuming all in their wake, it would suggest that they CAN eat the galaxy, and that quickly.

We're their 13th.

DarkApothecary wrote:

 mattyrm wrote:

...
There are around three trillion planets in our galaxy alone, and there are an estimated 500 billion Galaxies.
...

No, the universe is infinite. That's waaaaay more than 500 billion.

And there's an estimated 200 to 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. By your number of 3 trillion planets, that would clock in the average solar system at 10 planets, minimum.

Look at the Nids. They have evolved sufficiently to accomplish Galaxy nomming once (presumably galaxies not unlike our own). However long that took them round the first time it is liklier they do it faster the second, a little faster the third, etc. This may be their second galaxy, but probably not. Given how fast they're moving through the galaxy consuming all in their wake, it would suggest that they CAN eat the galaxy, and that quickly.

For them, what matters is genetic variety (and thus being more responsive to change), but they lack the individualized intelligence to achieve creativity genomic sciences like we could, and so must hunt for it in the universe. They could travel in straight lines, and never lack for food (because it is an apparently ABUNDANT universe).

And as for traveling the deep void, they probably have a a huge dressing room of hibernation and space-hull Zerg-transport skin genes to choose from (get it? alright, I almost sickened myself with that joke).

Why couldn't life get wiped out by them?

P.S. "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions." That means maybe trillion, quadtrillions, etc. Too many to fething count!

The Universe is not infinite. It is much larger than the observable universe, but it had a finite starting mass.

Well from Dead Sky Black Sun we have "galaxies of billions upon billions of souls harvested and fed to the Lord of Skulls, the Blood God." and from the old 3e Necron codex we have the Old Ones having an "intergalactic network" which is lost when breached by warp gribblies.

 Kain wrote:

DarkApothecary wrote:

 mattyrm wrote:

...
There are around three trillion planets in our galaxy alone, and there are an estimated 500 billion Galaxies.
...

No, the universe is infinite. That's waaaaay more than 500 billion.

And there's an estimated 200 to 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. By your number of 3 trillion planets, that would clock in the average solar system at 10 planets, minimum.

Look at the Nids. They have evolved sufficiently to accomplish Galaxy nomming once (presumably galaxies not unlike our own). However long that took them round the first time it is liklier they do it faster the second, a little faster the third, etc. This may be their second galaxy, but probably not. Given how fast they're moving through the galaxy consuming all in their wake, it would suggest that they CAN eat the galaxy, and that quickly.

For them, what matters is genetic variety (and thus being more responsive to change), but they lack the individualized intelligence to achieve creativity genomic sciences like we could, and so must hunt for it in the universe. They could travel in straight lines, and never lack for food (because it is an apparently ABUNDANT universe).

And as for traveling the deep void, they probably have a a huge dressing room of hibernation and space-hull Zerg-transport skin genes to choose from (get it? alright, I almost sickened myself with that joke).

Why couldn't life get wiped out by them?

P.S. "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions." That means maybe trillion, quadtrillions, etc. Too many to fething count!

The Universe is not infinite. It is much larger than the observable universe, but it had a finite starting mass.

I think we may subscribe to differing physicists. But if your into Steven Hawking and Einstein, then the universe is UNENDING, you can keep going in a straight line forever and keep on finding new stuff. Which means that yes, there are an infinite number of Earths out there exactly like this one, but they're effectively unreachable because they're impossible-to-imagine far away.

Also, who told you that there was at any point a finite mass? What was it, 42 units?

DarkApothecary wrote:

 Kain wrote:

DarkApothecary wrote:

 mattyrm wrote:

...
There are around three trillion planets in our galaxy alone, and there are an estimated 500 billion Galaxies.
...

No, the universe is infinite. That's waaaaay more than 500 billion.

And there's an estimated 200 to 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. By your number of 3 trillion planets, that would clock in the average solar system at 10 planets, minimum.

Look at the Nids. They have evolved sufficiently to accomplish Galaxy nomming once (presumably galaxies not unlike our own). However long that took them round the first time it is liklier they do it faster the second, a little faster the third, etc. This may be their second galaxy, but probably not. Given how fast they're moving through the galaxy consuming all in their wake, it would suggest that they CAN eat the galaxy, and that quickly.

For them, what matters is genetic variety (and thus being more responsive to change), but they lack the individualized intelligence to achieve creativity genomic sciences like we could, and so must hunt for it in the universe. They could travel in straight lines, and never lack for food (because it is an apparently ABUNDANT universe).

And as for traveling the deep void, they probably have a a huge dressing room of hibernation and space-hull Zerg-transport skin genes to choose from (get it? alright, I almost sickened myself with that joke).

Why couldn't life get wiped out by them?

P.S. "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions." That means maybe trillion, quadtrillions, etc. Too many to fething count!

The Universe is not infinite. It is much larger than the observable universe, but it had a finite starting mass.

I think we may subscribe to differing physicists. But if your into Steven Hawking and Einstein, then the universe is UNENDING, you can keep going in a straight line forever and keep on finding new stuff. Which means that yes, there are an infinite number of Earths out there exactly like this one, but they're effectively unreachable because they're impossible-to-imagine far away.

Also, who told you that there was at any point a finite mass? What was it, 42 units?

If there was infinite mass, the big bang would have needed infinite energy to decompact it, which meant the Universe would have never cooled down.

This clearly isn't the case.

 Psienesis wrote:

Three, because if you have a thousand billion, you have a trillion... you also have a thousand billion. Numbers are fun that way.
Four, A single Hive might have anywhere from several hundred million to several billion people.

Three, indeed they are.

Four, heh. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. I must have a better grasp of the fun than you do eh? Read the 5th edition rulebook. Read lexicanum, or alternatively, simply use some common sense, a few billion on a HIVE world? So, less than we currently have on our not grimdark, and entirely not overcrowded, pleasant green earth?

There are approximately 32,380 Hive Worlds in the Imperium, (page 115).

Ichar IV population, 500,000,000,000.

Minea population 125,000,000,000.

Coronis Agathon 120,000,000,000.

There are almost 8 billion people on our overwhelmingly empty planet. And you claim, in the grimdark setting of the far future, with "Imperial planets distinguished by vast, continent-spanning cities, often built high into the sky and deep beneath the earth" might have "anywhere from several hundred million to several billion people"

I didn't need to check Lexicanum that you were entirely wrong. Common sense dictated it considering that the majority of planet earth is uninhabited and will remain so even when the population surpasses ten billion, I was just pleased to see that once I did check that you went from being entirely wrong to being as wrong as it is possible to be.