Comment by bladedtoys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bladedtoys | Hacker News Reader

If it we were discussing a greater interstellar human civilization, (and let's face it, the idea of aliens is silly) there is one additional interesting problem: the time dilation colonist experience will mean they will be permanently behind the Earth by a number of years equal to the distance they travel. And their knowledge will be double that obsolescence.

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 Which means it's 100 years out of date.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.

However, a trade in ideas vs. resources might work if the Sol system ever became highly resource constrained.

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.

Yeah, they could just ship hydrogen back. They could also beam lasers at us although I image it would be awfully wide by the time it got here.

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.

That's not necessarily true. Divergent evolution of ideas means that there could be some truly primitive ideas that's still useful to us today simply because we never went down that particular tree in our development. It's hard for us to imagine, but that's the point. I mean just look at how many of our everyday gadgets hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. Zippers for instance:)

That's likely true, assuming that communications in the future will always be limited by the speed of light.

I take the opposite view, that over great enough distances only information is a viable source of trade. That is, assuming quick enough communications.

Why can't the usual comparative advantage arguments work? The USA trades with many African countries, even though there is nothing those African countries can do better than the USA - just like your colonists.

Comparative advantage when the commodity is ideas? Intriguing.

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?

> But how can one society produce one category of ideas cheaply while another produces a different category of ideas cheaply?

Different brain organization?

I don't see why it wouldn't work for ideas just as well as physical goods. Maybe you are smarter than me and can do research in physics and biology much better than me, but you can't do both - so we're better off if you do physics really well and I do biology not so well and we trade. There's no more reason that 2 planets cannot specialize in different kinds of science or math than 2 universities cannot have different strengths.

> and let's face it, the idea of aliens is silly

Care to elaborate?

I would think that maybe the intention is of encountering an alien species is silly because it's most likely not going to happen, not the existence of.

If it is existence of, then that's just human bias/arrogance.

I conjecture the odds that humans will colonize other stars is close to 100% (it's what living things do, expand maximally)

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.

I see no reason we would have the technology to terraform alien planets but not to genetically engineer some aliens to talk to or uplift local life forms to our own level of sapience.

> We don't carry on commerce with chimps or dolphins and they are obviously much closer to us than any alien would be.

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.

I mean we, chimps and, dolphins evolved on the same planet at the same time and have vast tracts of DNA in common yet the gap is huge.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com