Ω Centauri

As long as I'm looking at games, let's check Exodus. Its backstory anyway since the game's not playable yet: ... humanity was forced to abandon a dying Earth. Taking to the stars in massive ark ships, we found a habitable galaxy, in Centauri. Here, we are the underdogs, struggling for survival in a cold and hostile galaxy. The prose... needs work.

Timeline plots 2,200 AD (sic) for the exodus from Earth on ark-ships. Nice to see we're still Christian! (But by the term "Exodus" I suppose we'd have to be.) Off we go for 16,000 light years to this "galaxy" in Centaurus (not -i; -i is the genitive). Whuuu? That looks... too close; albeit, yes, far beyond the bulk of Centaurus' nebulae and stars.

Checking up elsewhere, I find Omega Centauri at around the appropriate distance. This is a cluster as perhaps was a galaxy. Our Milky Way ate this galactic-scale Theia, and ejected bits of it - like nearby Kapteyn's Star, which got flung on our direction. Also ejected might be its blackhole but who knows. In 2012 Ian Douglas wrote Singularity about this semidigested exgalaxy.

More: the dating (18,000 AD) looks like we got to this region at lightspeed. Everyone on those ships only experiences a year or decade in all that time. These are not Generation Ships. More to the point is that the dating looks like an affectation, basically. Who's to talk to, back on Earth?

I don't argue that arkships are needed. I assume plenty of space colonies in the Belt and maybe Mars. But space life isn't for every human. If there's a coming disaster on Earth there might not exist the infrastructure to shove them all on Venus cloudcities and Callisto iglooes at once. If governments (maybe including some Belter governments) and corporations (absolutely including spacers) have a plan to get many millions off this system and into The Big Ω, then hey - go for it. Who knows, maybe other colonists have already fanned out to TRAPPIST-1 et al.

At present I've no plan to play any game from these tools, so - that's about all the posting I plan to do on it. The authors should thank me.

BLACK HOLE 7/11: 8200+ M_☉, ht Zim and SciMex. Stellar-mass would be 100 M_☉ so - yes, this is Galactic-Class. That 8200 M_☉ minimum in the abstract is actually too timid. It comes from its satellite-stars' velocities; acceleration pegs the lower limit 21,100 + M_☉ more like 39-47,000 M_☉.