The Economics of Science Fiction
hanson.gmu.edu
hanson.gmu.edu
Sci-fi typically depicts contact with other races through spacefaring on FTL ships, and then trade being established through that channel. But I think it's exponentially more likely that rather than developing the means to travel into the stars, we (first) develop the technology to allow FTL or instantaneous communication. And from there we'd pick up other civilizations' signals, and soon we'd work out the protocols and have access to some sort of galactic internet. Communication technology has been advancing faster than locomotive technology for a long time now.
People always talk about the internet reaching a point where we all work from home - well there should be a corresponding 'work from your home planet' notion.
One of the great concepts in Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is a galaxy wide internet and the malevolence in it is effectively just a super virus. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson has something what you describe also with a great "information economy", albeit earth based.
I read it before I knew what the Internet was, so when I first got access to Usenet after reading it, imagine my surprise.
FYI, Children of the Sky (sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep) is planned for October, but I'm sure you probably know :)
Robert Sawyer's Rollback addresses the some of the human issues that lightspeed interstellar communications entail even with nearby star systems.
When we talk about vast interstellar empires of thousands of starships travelling faster than light, we really should think about the vast expense of that. No doubt, the amount of energy required to build and maintain a fleet of such things would be tremendous, therefore it would be expensive. Consider this, the vast energies required for even a single ship to approach c (I believe I read someplace it would take the mass of Saturn to drive a resonable size ship to those speeds), now multiply that by any notional fleet. We have no modern notion of how to even convert that much mass (and drag it around).
In other words, sci-fi economy:modern economy::sci-fi energies:modern energies
Sci-fi economics could be truly fascinating as a sub-genre, but I don't know of any texts that do a decent job of it.
"These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization"
Dyson swarms don't launch themselves, thousands of individuals have to work to manufacture, launch and maintain each panel. And you can't do that if everybody is poor, living a subsistence life, scratching food from the land.
I further suggest that we could start it if we spent an equivalent of the energy we put into the cold war.
Like, suppose you deposit your money in a bank account at, say, a couple percent interest, then head off for about ten years at something near the speed of light. You only age five years, and return looking forward to ten years' worth of interest on your priciple, only to learn that the bank "adjusted" the compounding rate, so you only got the five years' worth reflecting the time you yourself experienced.
Who's right? What if it were a loan you took out, instead?
It's kind of interesting, if a little contrived. Relativistic effects between stock exchanges might be a little more relevant at the rates computers are starting to trade, these days.
Fundamentally, interest is set by what can be done with some capital - what high yielding investment can be made with it in the allotted time period for the loan. If there's some booming technology which offers returns of 12% (because it's just that awesome) per year, but my factory only offers 3%, why would the banker lend me money at <3% when he could make his loan to someone in the tech field and get <12%?
Similarly, if I'm hopping on a rocket to go mine on Alpha Centauri and time dilation cuts my years in half to just 5 years of work, then why would the banker give me money when he could give it to someone who will stay home and get 10 years of work done? I might be the better deal, but if so, I had better return with some awfully expensive rocks 10 years later.
Of course, this implies that investing and then going on a relativistic cruise is a good idea. But why not? That capital you are investing came from somewhere. Where did it come from? It came from someone working hard and then not consuming. Someone(s) chose to work hard and generate $1 million of value, say, but then chose not to go out and hold an orgy of buying $1 million of chocolate and flatscreen TVs. That $1 million of value remains and presumably circulates and supports further investment and growth, which themselves will compound and compound. When that investor returns centuries later, he deserves whatever is left of his investments.
(Given the past few centuries, I wouldn't place high odds on his investment growing to Bill Gates sizes, or there being anything left at all. So such investors would be doing us an even bigger favor than it seems.)
http://eh.net/book_reviews/benjamin-franklin-and-invention-m...
The US is almost unique in going 200 years with consistent growth, no invasions, no hyperinflation, no confiscatory dictatorships, etc. There's a serious issue of bias here - where are all the bequests which didn't survive 200 years to impress us? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_finance)
If an investment firm has access to a thruster capable of relativistic time dilation, then the loaning arm of the entity has incentive to be moving as fast as it can, while charging market interest rates: The bank experiences less time, and therefore multiplied returns on interest.
I can certianly see there being a case for some sort of aristocracy or 'first world' which lives in dilated time, and therefore benefits from the dilation. Of course, they sacrifice reaction time to do so..
That said it is obvious that the reference frame that will be chosen is the fixed reference frame of the distant stars.
Let's take an example - imagine our slowest timeframe is at X and our fastest timeframe Y is dilated to 1/10 of X. And let's say the current ROIs per man-year in X are at 3% (it's a mature well-developed economy, the home planet) but ROIs in Y are an amazing 20% per man-year. X bankers will still prefer to lend to Xers rather than Yers. Imagine they lend to a Yer. 10 X years later (1 Y year later), Yer repays the loan with 20% interest. Great. But imagine they had lent to a Xer. 10 years later, the Xer repays the loan with 34.39% in interest! (3% compounded annually.)
And the exact same logic applies if the banker lives in Y. Xers are still better investments. A Y banker loans to an Xer for 1 Y year, and a year later gets the loan back with 34.39% interest, as compared to the best his fellow Yers can do, which is just 20% per year.
So interest rates need to scale with the dilation. If they scale too little, then all money will flow to the slowest timeframe. If they scale too much, the money flows to the fastest timeframe. Modulo the cost of moving between timeframes. (Imagine if Yers got returns of 40% per Y year/per 10 X years. Then X bankers would be clamoring to lend to Yers.)
The link about doomsday nonsense seemed promising, but it was some mathematical speculation the kind the article started criticizing.
Is this really happening right now?