Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Mr. Krugman himself thinks it's "the best thing by far written on the subject to date" (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-in...)
I don't know about the viability of the sort of economy Charles Stross uses in this book, but I found it refreshingly thought through. Might also be worth noting that he goes into some interesting concepts with regards to cryptocurrencies.
I'm a big fan of Charles Stross, but it may be worth pointing out that Krugman goes on to say that this is partly because it's the only thing written on the subject to date.
(In particular, he's distinguishing "interstellar finance" as in Neptune's Brood from "interstellar trade" as in his own earlier paper.)
For example: they leave at the speed of light for a star 50 light years away. On Earth 50 years pass but no time passes for the colonist. So when they arrive they are technically where the earth was 50 years before. They set up shop and transmit their wonderful ideas and technology, which takes 50 more years to be received. Which means it's 100 years out of date.
Meanwhile the Earth beams its ideas to the colonists. Even on they day the land, the colonist can tune into their favorite sitcom without missing an episode (because of course they were traveling side by side with those transmissions and the subsequent fifty years were following behind in a lovely tail of vapid entertainment). So the Earth's information is still quite useful to them.
And this disparity in value can never be corrected. If the Earth moans about the uselessness of the colonist 100 year old ideas and sends suggestions, the colonist will have been listening to the Earth for 100 years anyway before they hear those suggestions and will already moved far beyond them. Yet still be 50 years behind.
So a trade in ideas also seems unworkable.
With the Sol system being permanently decades ahead of the colonies, a steady stream of resource haulers back would provide additional mass for Sol citizens to utilize, making it a fair trade in some circumstances. The problem arises when the trade becomes imbalanced or needs to stop, there's a lag time of decades to push out such an order.
Also, so as long is the energy to ship it is less than the energy to create it by fusion, it would be economical to ship elements heavier than iron. But that would mean annoyingly slow speeds.
The really annoying thing is that by adding trillions of people to the universe, we apparently won't really improve the rate of idea creation. I really hope I'm missing something on this.
Care to elaborate?
If it is existence of, then that's just human bias/arrogance.
But the odds that we will find an alien species that happens to be on a level of development interesting to either party looks less likely. We don't carry on commerce with chimps or dolphins and they are obviously much closer to us than any alien would be. Of course we may as well look for them, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also, I enjoy using the word silly at every opportunity.
It's a little odd to compare non-technological species with those capable of interstellar travel. We don't do commerce with chimps/dolphins because they don't have anything of value to us (at least, not that we can't just take ourselves w/force).
Plus, encountering aliens isn't the same thing as encountering aliens we'd trade stuff with. You never mentioned that qualifier until the follow-up.
So anything evolving at a different time period in a different environment (in the unlikely event it developed intelligence at all) would be so far beyond us, we would be, at best, as interesting as dolphins. Even if their development were ahead of us by only 1/100 of one percent of the time stars have been around, that still put them a 1.3 million years in advance of us. About the divergence time between us and a chimp. And chimps do make things, they clean twigs to scoop edible bugs and use leaves for umbrellas. But we have no interest in these things and they have no understanding of our idea of commerce even if we did.
But aliens per se? Sure. Indeed there maybe even bacteria as close as Mars and Europa.
How it works for physical good is clear. But how can one society produce one category of ideas cheaply while another produces a different category of ideas cheaply?
Different brain organization?
I take the opposite view, that over great enough distances only information is a viable source of trade. That is, assuming quick enough communications.
"Many critics of conventional economics have argued, with considerable justification, that the assumptions underlying neoclassical theory bear little resemblance to the world we know. These critics have, however, been too quick to assert that this shows that mainstream economics can never be of any use. Recent progress in the technology of space travel, as well as the prospects of the use of space for energy production and colonization (O’Neill 1976) make this assertion doubtful; for they raise the distinct possibility that we may eventually discover or construct a world to which orthodox economic theory applies."
Not just advantages - some organisms rely on extremely complex symbiotic relationships and environmental stimuli (e.g. fungi in the genus Morchella). Reproducing these conditions, even with advanced technology, could be extremely challenging or impossible, which could create enough demand to justify physical transportation of goods. (This is essentially the plot to the science fiction novel I'm writing.)
That was the main idea in Frank Herbert's Dune - "the spice". It's a good strategy to follow a tested winning idea, good luck with your writing!
With even informational signals taking years to decades to centuries each to reach their destinations, our current knowledge of physics implies that a civilization basically needs to achieve indefinite cultural lifespan before they can do anything interstellar whatsoever.
So once you've got people who can maintain records and culture over centuries on detailed matters (or who just plain live that long), it's really not that much of an obstacle. But it's a nastily high mountain to climb in terms of bootstrapping your interstellar empire.
Depressing to see even Scientific American's sub-editors failing to catch grocer's apostrophes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenium_Falcon#Depiction
A reference to the Millenium Falcon completing the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs"
The explanation or rationalization of this 36 year old joke explains that so does driving in Los Angeles....
How much longer till we get to Disneyland? Just another 10 miles honey.
Regardless, I always preferred 'less than 12 parsecs' as a measurement of the maneuvering within a gravitational well.
"See this knight? My great-grandfather recruited it into this CIV V game 72 years ago. Now it is time for it to fulfil its destiny and crush the archer built by the Bob's great uncle"
Also, the laser would spread out, but it would still be mostly in one direction.
Wasn't Pham also regarded as terribly naive for believing that public key encyrption would be secure? When they are discussing things in the bar scene where they first meet the skroderiders....
Yet, for example in Australia (at least Tasmania) under British colonial period, raw materials such as wood for housing was imported from Carelia (through Britain), although local better materials (e.g. rooting-resistant Huon pine trees) could be found in abundance. Sometimes the logic is defied by other human behavioral factors, sometimes the simple economical reasoning does not tell the whole story, so I wouldn't be surprised if water will be traded.
"A few billion years of natural selection and evolution on any given planet will produce an array of wonderful and useful lifeforms, that could be unique enough to be of interest elsewhere."
Considering our history in messing up the natural habitats and ecosystems, and also considering that we ended up with restrictions on introducing living organisms in many places here on Earth, I'm also not surprised if stronger restriction will be set up for trading such things on even more separate environments such as planets. I see instead good prospects for interstellar tourism, with clients willing to travel vast distances just to see those living "Bunny rabbits and butterflies" in their natural environment.
Yes, though you'd still need to have a biological assembler from the original biosphere, for the genetic code is just a set of instructions for nanomachinery common on Earth, not a XYZ blueprint. Most of the information that form living creatures is embedded in the workings of replication machinery, not in the DNA itself.
(see also GEB for more detailed discussion about where exactly the "information" lies in systems)
Also my beryllium futures contract's electromagnetic time latency premium is too high!
They would just mine planets directly via robots.
Hopefully if they were nice aliens they would only mine uninhabited, lifeless planets.
They could be millions or billions of times more intelligent than us. And imagine a mind the size of the Earth, or the size of Jupiter, with the energy of their entire star.
The fact that the human brain is limited to fitting through the birth canal is a great example. With c-sections that isn't particularly relevant, and computers/AI aren't limited in size or energy requirements at all (or at least not anywhere near the same constraints that humans have.) So imagine if brains that constraint was removed and you made brains dozens, hundreds, or even millions of times larger.
You could build a computer the size of a planet, though it would require a ridiculous amount of technological ability. The energy of a star doesn't mean literally as hot as a star, but something like thousands of solar panels to efficiently collect as much of the energy as possible for powering the enormous computer. It was just an example of what the limits of technology might be.
A bright future for mankind, but less great for womankind. We may need to figure out how to use elephants as surrogate mothers.
B) We are still evolving. The big overwhelming FACT of civilization didn't halt our evolution, it just changed the nature of the selection pressures. Whereas raw, physical survivability was once the prime selection factor, civilization has made reproductive desirability, social cooperation, and parenting ability (all inter-related but nonidentical) the larger selection pressures on human genomes.
C) The big new adaptation that made us humans what we are was only maybe intelligence. It was probably extelligence: the ability to store knowledge in the social group rather than the individual. That way, you can build your collective knowledge over time.
D) You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
Modern computers are millions of times faster than the human brain, and can in theory be made much more energy efficient and compact and probably cheaper.
Yes we are still evolving, though at a ridiculously slow pace. And the traits that are currently spreading aren't exactly good. The genes responsible for sociopathy are becoming more frequent since we don't live in small communities anymore. Intelligence is being strongly selected against at the moment as counter-intuitive as that seems. Less intelligent individuals tend to reproduce far more frequently for whatever reason.
"Extelligence" doesn't really explain much. Sure a mind on it's own might not accomplish much, but we still have to explain what it is about human minds that allow them to think and learn in the first place. Can apes be taught language? If they were would they gain higher level intelligence or does it take more than that? I bet it isn't that simple.
>You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
I don't know where your preference comes from but I would love to see the planets get converted into giant computers and minds. We should optimize the universe for our values, rather than preserving the random state it was put in by nature.
Congratulations! You're the first person outside /r/hpmor to make my Chemical Shed List for Irresponsibly-Applied Phlebotinum! When shit gets real, I will take you out behind the chemical sheds and shoot you.
People like the so-called random state things were put in by nature. Saturn, for instance, is pretty the way it is. Hell, think about it this way: what if I suggested that your house you actually live in is simply suboptimal as a house, and should instead be converted into a huge brain I can use for thinking? After all, it's just another step in my optimizing the universe for my values, which apparently include adolescent dick-waving and solving lots of math problems rather than a human civilization with people to talk to.
Well, you shouldn't want to do that, because after all, you need a place to live. More broadly, even if you've "gone virtual" (as you indicate some desire to do in occasional hard-SF threads), you're still a human being, and you're supposed to have sentimental attachments. Sentimental attachments are, after all, what make us human in the first place.
This whole "planet-sized X" thing, for all X other than planets, is basically just another adolescent power fantasy. Consider that if Ultimate Power, or some semblance thereof, seems to be your goal in life, there may in fact be something wrong with you. I can't actually think of anything a human being wants other than raw power that is served by wrecking entire planets.
Real life is not a scifi novel, not even the finer grade of scifi novel.
>"Extelligence" doesn't really explain much. Sure a mind on it's own might not accomplish much, but we still have to explain what it is about human minds that allow them to think and learn in the first place. Can apes be taught language? If they were would they gain higher level intelligence or does it take more than that? I bet it isn't that simple.
Actually, gorillas have been taught simple sign-language before and can form coherent sentences. Chimpanzees have been observed learning and passing down more advanced tool-using skills than we thought they were capable of. Human children, raised without exposure to language and culture, don't naturally turn out as civilized "human beings" of the kind we expect to meet.
The Big Secret is culture.
I have no idea what kind of goals and desires a futuristic civilization will have. I can imagine a lot of possible goals that could be possibly benefit from giant computers and other mega-projects. But even short of that, you could still just say why not?
The universe is our sandbox. The sand isn't intelligent, it doesn't care what shape it's in. And it wasn't put in it's current shape for any particular reason. But we can build beautiful castles in it that we appreciate. We can play and have fun in it, and it won't matter to the sand one way or the other, but it will matter to us. And at the end of the day the tide will probably wipe it all away anyways.
Apes still have massively reduced brain sizes and are missing many of the adaptions humans had. As far as I am aware teaching them language was only partially successful and they still are nowhere near human level. And it still tells us absolutely nothing about how the brain actually works.
> civilization has made reproductive desirability, social cooperation, and parenting ability (all inter-related but nonidentical) the larger selection pressures on human genomes
Looking at the people that have the biggest families, it's hard to say what, exactly, is being selected for. They seem to like children.
> You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
We've been converting the earth into a tool.
And, look at that, it's killing us.
Admittedly, since we've known that overexploiting the Earth's resources would do that for something like 50 years now, I don't so much blame humanity in general as the narrow but powerful subset who decided it was better to overexploit and destroy civilization than to make a bit less money.
It hasn't really started killing us yet -- the population is expanding. This civilization may and probably will collapse, like the Romans, but I'm not sure exactly how a civilization could grow exponentially forever, so it's kind of inevitable.
In other words, we are a newborn intelligent species, and newborns generally find that everyone around them is older.
The problem, of course, is that eventually you might well exhaust the resources of your local solar system. A sufficiently long-lived civilization will do so, no matter how sustainable they are, unless they manage some kind of trick to conquer entropy or basic conservation laws.
Which means you'll need a worked-out interstellar legal framework for laying claim to uninhabited solar systems as destinations for colonies when the time comes to "move house".
And all of this is presuming you're operating at a high enough level of technology and civilization to even gain entry to the Interstellar Club in the first place.
"When we reach the stars, we won't need planets."
The kind of competition and resource exhaustion you're talking about is on a scale where interstellar conquest is kind of a moot point.
Hmmmm... Now I'm imagining a huge set of future Highly Developed Civilizations conducting some kind of scientific conference to share their progress on the matter of the Last Question, since they all realize the bind they're in and would rather work on the problem scientifically now to get increased or unlimited resource sustainability rather than pillage the universe and end up fighting wars with relativistic weaponry in a few billion years.