
The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) [pdf] - dirtyaura
https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
======
AceJohnny2
I believe cstross's book Neptune's Brood is based on ideas from this paper.

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-
she...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-sheet-
neptunes-brood.html)

Which is funny, considering older Krugman's a fan of Stross's other book
series The Merchant Princes, which also tries to have a solid economic
backbone.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/more-science-
fic...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/more-science-fiction-for-
economists-seriously-time-wasting/)

~~~
Terr_
I'm struggling to remember the novel, but there was another book where some
aliens created an antimatter-generating system around a star, using the dip in
the star's brightness to tell if another civilization was tapping it.

One of their N-removed feudal client races would then come and conquer your
primitive society, unless you managed to decode the rest of their message and
further demonstrate you were advanced enough to operate your own government
across relativistic distances and timespans.

~~~
AceJohnny2
The premise sounds like Count To A Trillion by John C. Wright.

Of which I loved the idea, but was very disappointed by the realization.

~~~
Terr_
That's it, thanks.

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numlocked
This is by Paul Krugman??!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman)

That this is written by a Nobel Prize winner and NYT columnist definitely
makes it a bit more noteworthy.

~~~
javert
I think it makes it less noteworthy.

Among Krugman's other "accomplishments" is this 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."

~~~
jkyle
Krugman's response in a letter to Business Insider. Business Insider was
asking him about that quote and about his recent commentary on Bitcoin.

 _Well, two things._

 _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. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not
technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it
work as money? That's a very different kind of question._

 _And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that
they don 't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary
economics._ \-- Krugman, Business Insider Letter
[[http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-
inte...](http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-internet-
quote-2013-12)]

~~~
CamperBob2
How can you understand and write about economics if you get something as
fundamentally change-provoking as technology wrong?

~~~
fsloth
While politicians who like to defer responsibility to economists would want
their electorate to believe otherwise, economists are not soothsayers. They
are familiar with some ideal models for modeling economic systems of a few
variables that may or may not hold up depending on the actual market
conditions.

Economic forecasts are a bit like really bad weather forecasts - given a few
variables and that nothing changes they may hold up.

But they cannot predict what will change and what effects it will have. Like
the long term implications of internet.

For small systems with stable technologies like markets for a limited set of
products some macroeconomic rules may hold up pretty well. But for large scale
economies the economic decisions are as much political as fiscal, and the
soundness of the decisions can be found out only in retrospect...

------
nabla9
Krugman loves science fiction. He said that he wanted to stydy psycohistory
described in the Foundation series, but chose economics because it was the
closest thing you can actually study.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29)

------
andrewflnr
It seems to me that the scariest part of doing interstellar finance is the
concern that the institutions that, say, enforce bonds (or otherwise give them
meaning, I'm not sure of the mechanics) will disappear sometime during your
round trip. A lot can happen in 50 years, much more in a 500 year interstellar
round trip. I would expect interstellar trade to stick with "real" goods only
for this reason.

------
kbenson
Submitted multiple times before, but here's the only one I saw with comments,
in case some finds something interesting.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818706)

------
DavidSJ
See also Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage:
[http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf](http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf)

------
GregBuchholz
More interesting is what resources or products would be potential candidates
for interstellar trade.

~~~
api
Probably information -- art, music, culture, scientific discoveries,
technological blueprints (that could be "printed" anywhere), software, genetic
material, anything informational.

Information has the benefit of weighing nothing and being easily transmissible
at the speed of light.

This is also probably true for interplanetary trade, such as with a Mars
colony... though return of very precious materials via something inexpensive
like gun launch can't be totally ruled out.

Going full sci-fi mode: if something like consciousness uploading were
possible, it would also be possible for people to travel interplanetary and
interstellar distances at the speed of light _as information_ as long as
something at the other end existed to reconstitute them. So one mechanism of
interstellar colonization would be to send unmanned drone ships first, then
encode ourselves and go.

~~~
_random_
Yes, long-term everything could be printed via nano-robots. Even if not
directly but as a sequence of building different plants. So something like a
seed nano-robot colony + manufacturing blue-prints.

~~~
api
Interstellar migration could be not unlike booting an embedded device via a
slow serial link. First send the slow robotic "boot loader," then use it to
download the colonists to the new star system and boot up a civilization.

Matter is everywhere. Information is what it's all about, and information
travels at 'c'.

~~~
Normati
It might not be practical to send information as light. You'd need a powerful
transmitter so your signal can be detected among the noise from stars. It
might turn out that sending a spaceship is actually cheaper and just about as
fast. The spaceship can steer itself and doesn't spread out the further it
goes.

~~~
sanxiyn
I think galactic civilization will either solve noise problem or install
enough repeaters if that's cheaper. Repeater network will have enormous fixed
cost, but I don't think its variable cost will be higher than spaceships.

------
aswanson
Interesting. Krugman has said that he got interested in economics because it
was the closest thing in reality to psychohistory as described in Asimov's
Foundation series. Of course, any society capable of interstellar trade would
be beyond scarcity and hence economics as we know it. But fun, nonetheless.

~~~
caretcaret
You say that, but go back a few hundred years and you can make an analogous
statement about worldwide trade. Yet, our consumption of resources have
increased to meet the level of production, and scarcity still exists.

~~~
aswanson
You have to get a grasp on the scale of the cosmos to understand what I mean.
To get to the nearest star system, alpha centauri, you would need a
matter/antimatter reactor that would turn approximately 10 kilograms of mass
into pure energy to approach .8c, where c is the speed of light ( and the
assumption here is that we acheive near 100 percent efficiency in our
propulsion mechanism, which is impossible). Any society capbable of doing so
would be far beyond celestial scavenging for a few trinkets, in the same
manner that our global economy is beyond scavenging for artifacts from
brazilian tribal rituals, historical curiousity notwithstanding.

------
geoffreyhale
"It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the
analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of
a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in
economics."

------
crimsonalucard
I'm actually more interested in the theory behind how he got a grant to write
this. Interesting nonetheless!

~~~
GabrielF00
I think that line was a joke.

~~~
GregBuchholz
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award)

~~~
HCIdivision17
Man, the wiki page really makes him look like a short-sighted jerk. A lot of
those items are the stereotypical headlines that lack the needed context.

Like the $3k for if military should use umbrellas in the rain: well, _should_
they? Perhaps only officers, so soldiers have their hands free? Maybe we
should just contract a clip of some kind that will hold the umbrella to their
gear? Or maybe it's only worth it on base? I mean, how far will $3k even go -
a week or so of consultant time?

Or the $57k for measuring stewardesses. These are the people who may still be
moving about the cabin while everyone else is seated. How do we decide how
much a seat on a $100,000,000 plane needs? Can the seat be wider just above
the waist of the lady, such that the seats can slightly encroach on the isle?
(Big money to be had there possibly - though it's worth noting the 1975
flights likely still had an implicit assumption about stewardess ... styling.)
Is it reasonable the typical rider can squeeze past a stewardess? How often
and with what kind of difficulty? Will they be required to get out of the way
in the event of an emergency or should they stay to direct, potentially
blocking the path? In this case, we spent about $130 bucks a few hundred
times. An engineer needed those numbers somewhere down the line, and hopefully
some insight was gained. Never mind that someone had the (likely) enviable job
of measuring the fitting of a few hundred 1970s-style stewardesses.

I'm not saying a lot of the stuff's doesn't make me gloriously incredulous,
but it's super easy to just take something at face value and just mock it.
(Not that your linking it implies anything - people who mock like Proxmire
just get my goat.)

------
stox
Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them
up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?

s/world/interstellar trade routes/

------
widowlark
Its interesting to me that this is written by Krugman. I am glad to see that
he has read The High Frontier, Its one of my personal favorites.

------
BerislavLopac
This is essentially The Martian of the pre-Internet era.

------
java-man
Where is Figure II?

~~~
_ihaque
On page 7!

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

------
happyscrappy
"This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It
is chiefly concerned with the following question: How should interest charges
on goods in transit be computed when goods travel at close to the speed of
light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to
an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution
is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are
proved."

He goes on to say this work may have some galactic relevance and that the
force is with him.

------
unknown_apostle
He's so funny and smart, and yet guys like him are one of the bigger obstacles
on this planet to accumulating enough capital to finance space exploration.
Makes you think...

