
The Theory of Interstellar Trade - alokrai
http://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-theory-of-interstellar-trade
======
lisper
Any civilization that has mastered interstellar travel will almost certainly
also have mastered atomic transmutation as well. So as long as all the
interesting stuff is made of atoms, and the atoms over there are the same as
the ones over here (which AFAWCT they are), there are only two possible
"goods" that could be worth transporting between star systems: information,
and free (in the physical, not the economic sense) energy. You don't need a
space ship to transfer either of those, you just convert them into photons and
let Maxwell do the work. The idea that it might be worthwhile to actually
_ship_ something (including ourselves) to another star system is based on very
quaint notions of identity binding and what it takes to produce things.

~~~
Johnny555
It's very inexpensive to create nearly exact replicas of artwork, yet people
are still willing to pay a lot of money for the original.

So maybe people will be willing to pay lots of money for hand-crafted alien
artwork.

~~~
commieneko
That is similar to the answer I came up with in high school, about 40 years
ago.

Artwork, objects of note, curiosities with provenances, tourists, off the grid
information that needs to remain _really_ secure, spies, traitors, patriots,
displaced peoples, artefacts bound to a religious, gifts, bodies, deceased
bodies, prenatal bodies, slaves, sex objects, objects of devotion, objects of
derision, pariahs.

I actually wrote a short story about a trade empire that was built by a race
of aliens (they looked like lizards) that had odd religious beliefs that
required them to build monasteries all over the galaxy, and staff them with
praying monks.

The monk's duties were very simple, each day they had to silently read from a
small paper prayer, then burn the strip of paper over a candle. The rest of
the day they partied, got drunk, had sex (monks could be of either gender), or
wrote non-prayer literature.

Writing prayers was an unforgivable sin, the prayers had to come from the home
planet. There was a huge fleet of trade ships created to deliver the paper
prayer strips in bulk.

In return for the land for the monasteries, the alien lizards would give rides
on their space fleet. They had single use vouchers that went from point to
point, and they had travel passes which allowed general travel. Basically a
bus pass for the galaxy. And since they had a monopoly on FTL ships, they
delivered mail.

One day the prayer ships stopped coming. Everybody goes bananas. Nobody
travels. Economies collapse.

Plus somebody has to feed the monks, and keep them entertained or else they go
on party binges. Can't let them starve, because the ships might start coming
again.

A generation later the ships start showing up again. No explanation given, and
it's impolite to ask. The kind of impolite that gets you cut out of the prayer
circuit.

That was all backstory, the actual story starts with an undercover agent from
Earth getting sent to the lizard homeworld to try and find out WTF. He only
has partial passage and a small consignment of trade goods. The backstory got
backfilled as the agent wheeled and dealed his way towards the home world. I
did have an ending, but I think I'll not spoil it in case I ever want to try
and rewrite the story.

My 17 year old prose stank, unsurprisingly; even at that tender age I could
smell it. Not sure I can do better now, but who knows.

~~~
girvo
Well I think the idea and world you’ve described is awesome, so I encourage
you to give it another go if you have the time!

~~~
pferde
Indeed, I would love to read a story like that!

------
SECProto
Vaguely on topic - the novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge touches on
this subject a fair bit.

 _potential spoilers follow_

Essentially, no spacefaring civilization is stable over long time scales, a
culture (the Qeng Ho) get by through predicting which planetary system will
have the economy to support refueling an interstellar craft (in the centuries-
later future when they arrive). Trade advanced/secret technology development
info for said refueling. The story has way more to it, but I loved it as a
known-physics-following scifi story. I expect the audience of this site would
also love it (and probably, many have already read it)

~~~
matt-snider
Love this book. The prologue is one of my favourite beginnings to a book and
hints at how epic/vast the book's universe is:

> The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light-years and eight
> centuries. It had always been a secret search, unacknowledged even among
> some of the participants. In the early years, it had simply been encrypted
> queries hidden in radio broadcasts. Decades and centuries passed. There were
> clues, interviews with The Man's fellow-travelers, pointers in a half-dozen
> contradictory directions: The Man was alone now and heading still farther
> away; The Man had died before the search ever began; The Man had a war fleet
> and was coming back upon them. With time, there was some consistency to the
> most credible stories. The evidence was solid enough that certain ships
> changed schedules and burned decades of time to look for more clues.
> Fortunes were lost because of the detours and delays, but the losses were to
> a few of the largest trading Families, and went unacknowledged. They were
> rich enough, and this search was important enough that it scarcely mattered.
> For the search had narrowed: the man was traveling alone, a vague blur of
> multiple identities, a chain of one-shot jobs on minor trading vessels, but
> always moving back and back into this end of Human Space. The hunt narrowed
> from a hundred light-years, to fifty, to twenty - and a half-dozen star
> systems. And finally, the manhunt came down to a single world at the
> coreward end of Human Space.

~~~
ddingus
I am going to read that book.

Thanks for posting that excerpt. It is a near perfect, "and then ehat
happened?" Hook!

------
imh
>A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems
are proved.

>This paper represents one small step for an economist in the direction of the
theory of interstellar trade.

>These complications make the theory of interstellar trade appear at first
quite alien to our usual trade models; presumably it seems equally human to
alien trade theorists.

This is wonderful and hilarious and full of cheeky fun (so so much more than
I've quoted). It's perfect for the sigbovik crowd. Thanks for posting!

>This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject...

------
skookumchuck
Interstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of
light. Pretty much nothing else is practical.

The real problem is bootstrapping it. Because weight is so incredibly
expensive to send interstellar, the only thing that could work is sending a
nanorobot with an ability to self-replicate and build a receiver and a factory
once it arrives.

Then information is sent to the factory, which proceeds to bootstrap a
civilization.

~~~
jakecrouch
> Interstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of
> light. Pretty much nothing else is practical.

What's your reasoning for this? You would only have to accelerate at 1g for 3
years to hit 99.5% of the speed of light. You can use an electromagnetic
shield for dust. It seems conceivable that this will be possible eventually,
even if warp drives are not possible.

~~~
analog31
Indeed, and the benefit of traveling at 0.995 c is that a container of
information doesn't suffer from degradation by the inverse square law as it
travels over a large distance. It might actually cost less energy to transport
information to far flung destinations that way, interstellar snail mail if you
will. Some amount of information has to accompany the robot anyway, at the
very least, its initial operating instructions.

Of course whoever can get there at 0.996 c can take advantage of a market
arbitrage. ;-)

~~~
titanomachy
> a container of information doesn't suffer from degradation by the inverse
> square law

Neither does a well-focused laser?

EDIT: apparently it does, unless you manage to focus your laser _very_ far
away. Not sure how practical that is.

------
gangstead
I've read this before but this is the first time I noticed that Krugman wrote
the paper in 1978 and the references include a paper about faster-than-light
travel written by him, published 1987.

~~~
godelmachine
I read the Wikipedia article on this paper today and turns out Krugman wrote
this when he was feeling quite low being embroiled in the rat race.

------
brudgers
regular PDF,
[https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf](https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf)

------
pseingatl
From the point of political economics, charging interest is not necessarily a
given. Economies exist where interest is prohibited.

~~~
gibybo
In name perhaps, but the concept of an economic good having potentially
different values at different times is universal. An economic system that
tries to pretend it doesn't exist may work in the sense that a mathematical
system without a 0 works. We can still analyze the system using the concept
and develop insights using it as a tool, even if they don't recognize it
themselves.

------
gsanghera
> The ship's velocity can then be represented by a rotation of the axes; the
> rotation of the time axis is shown in Figure II. (Readers who find Figure II
> puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course,
> itself be imaginary).

------
azeotropic
So riddle me this -- how did Adam Smith's work (published in 1776) influence
the initial settlement of Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620)?

I'm guessing Krugman hadn't actually read Wealth of Nations, since anyone who
had couldn't possibly have made this mistake. That's pretty shocking.

~~~
georgecmu
I'm guessing you parsed it wrong.

"Could this be as influential as Adam Smith's work on the initial settlement
of Massachusetts and Virginia" refers to Adam Smith's work on the initial
settlement of Massachusetts and Virginia, not to purported Adam Smith's work
influence on the initial settlement of Massachusetts and Virginia.

~~~
mirimir
Right, "on" here means "about". English can be annoying.

~~~
credit_guy
So what is that influential work written by Adam Smith and concerning the
settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts?

~~~
mirimir
_The Wealth of Nations_. He looked at what Spain, England, etc got out
discovery and colonizing America.

~~~
credit_guy
That’s a very oblique way of referring to the Wealth of Nations. There are
only 4 references to Massachusetts in a 750-page book.

~~~
mirimir
OK, "peripherally about".

