The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) | Hacker News Reader

The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978)

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138 pointsgarrincha47 comments

Any discussion of interstellar trade deserves a mention of the fantastic Charles Stross book "Neptune's Brood". I went into it expecting more or less a sequel to "Saturn's Children" but what I got was a treatise on monetary policy for economies that span multiple star systems. The concept of slow and fast money and its implications is utterly fascinating and the book is worth reading just for its explorations of the topic (the plot isn't too bad either).

A quick Google search brought me to this post by Krugman[0]:

  I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!)
  And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far
  as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.

0: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-in...

I loved that book. For the curious, the way interstellar trade works is through a simplified bitcoin network transmitted over light beams (because the only assets worth trading are digital). The biggest difference is each node in the network is actually a planet and a transaction between planet A and B is only confirmed when planet C validates the transaction. Planet C is usually decided on a nearest neighbor basis (If I recall correctly).

Krugman is huge scifi nerd. He chose to study economics because it was the closest thing to psycohistory in real life.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/the-deflationis...

I'd be interested to know what possible commodity would be worth trading among star systems -- even if some star system has a planet made entirely of diamonds, surely it would take far less energy to made them here than to ship them between stars? Likewise, it seems that endless amounts of gold (platinum, rhodium, whatever) could be harvested from our own solar system before it's worth shipping here.

Even if there's some alien truffle delicacy that only grows in the shade of a tree bathed in UV light from an alien star, surely that could be cultivated here in an artificial habitat far easier than shipping it light years across the galaxy?

Information.

Personally I imagine we're better off when we share information for free, but I haven't tested the hypothesis.

Aww dang it, I didn't see you wrote information first.

And here I am thinking I was being insightful.

Thinking in the very long term... energy?

Though even that, it seems it'd be cheaper to transport the people to the energy than vice versa.

Every form of interstellar travel I'm aware of requires lots and lots of energy -- it seems hard to imagine a source of energy that's capable of being transported between star systems that's not dwarfed by the energy used to transport it.

Novel life forms and technology could be valuable, especially technology that's hard to replicate (due to proprietary processes/trade secrets or whatnot).

Fissionable materials might be valuable to planets that have none of their own and want to make use of nuclear power.

People are a resource of their own that may be wanted on sparsely inhabited planets (especially if birth rates on technically advanced planets are similar to those in developed nations here on Earth).

The excellent Atomic Rockets site is designed as a reference for realistic sci-fi, and has a page on MacGuffinite, aka something that makes space exploration economically viable. The long story short is that there's really not all that much that can't be done here on Earth or at least in low orbit.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/macguffinite.ph...

Information.

I doubt this. In fact I doubt the idea of interstellar trade.

Beyond a certain point of post-scarcity, everything stops being scarce, including invention and innovation.

We're already at that point with artefacts like music. Aliens could turn up tomorrow with centuries of unique music, and after the initial decade or five of novelty the music would end up as yet another playlist on Spotify, among countless others - so many no individual human could ever listen to more than a tiny fraction of them.

That's a rather silly example, but the point is still valid: if you imagine the same trend occurring in physics, biology, and technology, you end up at a place only a few centuries from so much novelty and invention is being produced that it's no longer a scare commodity. External sources might add a few minor tweaks to the generation system, but when even game changer technology stops being scarce, what is there left to trade?

Maybe we would be so far behind they would find something lost to them hundreds of thousands of years ago.

It's funny you say music I've always thought every pop song has been made but then someone makes a new song that everyone loves.

> I doubt the idea of interstellar trade [...] Beyond a certain point of post-scarcity, everything stops being scarce, including invention and innovation.

Right but wouldn't you need interstellar trade to reach this milestone of post-scarcity? Otherwise you'd have to assume all forms of invention are achievable with the resources you start with.

Wouldn't game theory make you want to limit the resources and capabilities of your neighbor in case they try to do the same thing to you? So this idea of post-scarcity is never met because the uncertainties of attack from any number of other space-faring civilizations requires that you invest a significant chunk of your resources into your military. You could also have internal turmoil - the human race splits into distinct civilizations with different political, social and technological goals.

> what possible commodity would be worth trading among star systems

Apart from information which has been mentioned twice I'd say habitable and highly hospitable land (Earth-like planets) as well as access through or even ownership of territory. Space might be big but if we're limited by the speed of light then these things have immense value and still considerable value if we're somehow able to get around it.

One time pads for encryption(Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep").

Spice

Link to the original PDF that does not endlessly nag you to subscribe to the newsletter:

https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

Fun article but, has figure II been lost to history?

If so then an better scanned version of the pdf should be the first thing we buy from a distant civilization.

"Readers who find figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary"

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

-Paul Krugman

Paul does not have the best track record.

Somebody will be tempted to defend him saying: "Well, he takes risks, it's expected that he will fail sometimes."

The problem is not that he fails. The problem is that he never acknowledges his failures nor questions his assumptions behind the failed predictions -- he just mixes them up and say something in the lines of "I was right all the time".

He does talk about "getting it wrong" on his blog fairly regularly. Example: http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/06/10/the-decad...

That's not true. In fact, he's even brought up underestimating the impact of the internet multiple times as an example of when he was wrong. For instance:

"And what about me personally? I don’t have a turban and crystal ball hidden in a back room, and I’ve made some pretty wrong predictions in my time. The thing, however, is that all of these bad predictions involved stepping outside the models I understood. I underestimated the payoff to the internet; well, I was speculating about technology, and while that’s my right, I don’t have any special expertise."[1]

[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/non-prophet-econ...

It is a joke article. It is a serious economic analysis on a funny topic.

exact quote:

>"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

Krugmans response to criticism:

> First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.

>But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing.

He was partly right that most people have nothing to say to each other. But that doesn't seem to stop them from talking anyway.

Not sure what you're trying to say here - that Krugman's words should not be considered seriously because "it was all in fun"? That he commented on a space in which he not qualified to do so "because someone told him to"?

Has the Internet's impact on the economy been greater than the fax machine's? What was the impact of the fax machine? Has it been greater than the impact of the telephone? The telegraph?

On a related note; this is one of my favorite podcasts

http://contrakrugman.com/

Also related; Krugman is probably my least favorite modern day "economist".

I understand that this paper is sort of a joke (hence references to "the force"), but I don't understand the point of some of these research papers.

> "How should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light?"

Perhaps we should do more research on getting the goods to travel close to the speed of light before we start worrying about how to calculate interest charges on them.

The paper was written for fun. It wasn't published in a journal until after the author won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.

The fact that the paper is meant to be taken somewhat facetiously is signaled right there on the title page: "This research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Re-elect William Proxmire."

"Proxmire was was noted for issuing his Golden Fleece Award, which was presented monthly between 1975 and 1988, in order to focus media attention on projects Proxmire viewed as self-serving and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. The first Golden Fleece Award was awarded in 1975 to the National Science Foundation, for funding an $84,000 study on why people fall in love."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire

When I was a kid, a local radio station would broadcast their summary of his "Golden Fleece Award" on their morning show. It was always a highlight to laugh at the "obvious" foolishness.

As I have gotten older, the tables have turned, and my youthful easy laughs ring hollow. It's very easy to pull research out of context and laugh at it. It's very hard to do impactful research.

I fully agree with you on that. Pulling research out-of-context is still a go-to move by anti-science politicians [1]. Frankly, I'm half-tempted to track down that $84k study on why people fall in love. That's a fascinating topic that underpins so much of the human experience; more power to any scientist who thinks they can make heads or tails of it.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmil...

I saved you the trouble. The author writes about how the Golden Fleece award affected her research (http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-golden-flee...). She receives at a lot of hate mail - some quite disturbing - and never again receives any more funding from NSF. However, she has had a prolific and distinguished career.

The paper in question is (http://www.elainehatfield.com/uploads/3/2/2/5/3225640/7._hat...) "A little bit about Love" by Hatfield, Elaine & Berscheid, Elaine (1974). It was "facilitated in part by NIMH grant MH 16661 and NSF grants GS 35157X and GS 30822X". It is mostly a review of scientific thinking of the topic at the time and is surprisingly readable and enlightening read.

According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

I think this paper is a great example of the playfulness inherent to an effective "hacker" mindset -- do something fun and interesting, and perhaps useful conclusions will follow. Perhaps they won't, but hey, you still had fun.

>> According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

So, if I understand correctly (as non-native English speaker), the usual in economics is: "ridiculous analysis of serious subject" ??

Yes that is the implication exactly.

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