6 ms·

The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978)

138 points by garrincha 10y ago

chrishacken 10y ago
I understand that this paper is sort of a joke (hence references to "the force"), but I don't understand the point of some of these research papers. > "How should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light?" Perhaps we should do more research on getting the goods to travel close to the speed of light before we start worrying about how to calculate interest charges on them.
- cadlin 10y ago
  The paper was written for fun. It wasn't published in a journal until after the author won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.
- mazelife 10y ago
  The fact that the paper is meant to be taken somewhat facetiously is signaled right there on the title page: "This research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Re-elect William Proxmire." "Proxmire was was noted for issuing his Golden Fleece Award, which was presented monthly between 1975 and 1988, in order to focus media attention on projects Proxmire viewed as self-serving and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. The first Golden Fleece Award was awarded in 1975 to the National Science Foundation, for funding an $84,000 study on why people fall in love." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire
  - mturmon 10y ago
    When I was a kid, a local radio station would broadcast their summary of his "Golden Fleece Award" on their morning show. It was always a highlight to laugh at the "obvious" foolishness. As I have gotten older, the tables have turned, and my youthful easy laughs ring hollow. It's very easy to pull research out of context and laugh at it. It's very hard to do impactful research.
    - mazelife 10y ago
      I fully agree with you on that. Pulling research out-of-context is still a go-to move by anti-science politicians [1]. Frankly, I'm half-tempted to track down that $84k study on why people fall in love. That's a fascinating topic that underpins so much of the human experience; more power to any scientist who thinks they can make heads or tails of it. [1] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmil...
      - polymatter 10y ago
        I saved you the trouble. The author writes about how the Golden Fleece award affected her research (http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-golden-fleece-award-loves-labours-almost-lost#.WD4KcH3IZTQ http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-golden-flee...). She receives at a lot of hate mail - some quite disturbing - and never again receives any more funding from NSF. However, she has had a prolific and distinguished career. The paper in question is (http://www.elainehatfield.com/uploads/3/2/2/5/3225640/7._hatfield__berscheid_1974.pdf http://www.elainehatfield.com/uploads/3/2/2/5/3225640/7._hat...) "A little bit about Love" by Hatfield, Elaine & Berscheid, Elaine (1974). It was "facilitated in part by NIMH grant MH 16661 and NSF grants GS 35157X and GS 30822X". It is mostly a review of scientific thinking of the topic at the time and is surprisingly readable and enlightening read.
- xenophon 10y ago
  According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics." I think this paper is a great example of the playfulness inherent to an effective "hacker" mindset -- do something fun and interesting, and perhaps useful conclusions will follow. Perhaps they won't, but hey, you still had fun.
  - mamon 10y ago
    >> According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics." So, if I understand correctly (as non-native English speaker), the usual in economics is: "ridiculous analysis of serious subject" ??
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - dsjoerg 10y ago
      Yes that is the implication exactly.
vaadu 10y ago
Krugman? This is the Nobel laureate that said the stock market would NEVER recover from Trump's election.
- devoply 10y ago
  Economists are priests. Sometimes their prophecies don't work out, because the connection to god is not clear.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Trump isn't president yet and hasn't done anything yet. Once that happens we'll find out for sure. Right now we don't know for sure whether Trump will do bad things and so stock markets reflect that.
- Vannatter 10y ago
  True, but he quickly retracted that comment and admitted that it was something he said in the heat of the moment without thinking things through fully: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/the-long-haul/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/the-long-haul/?_...
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    "He will, in fact, be a disaster on every front. And I think he will eventually drag the Republican Party into the abyss along with his own reputation" I imagine if he will retract this. Krugman keeps making wrong predictions without almost never acknowledging it, and contradicting himself in a grand scale. His contradictions are documented by a dozen of economists blogs. It's amazing how people keep listening to him.
- gdulli 10y ago
  To be fair, Trump said a lot of extreme things and has since shown a pattern of walking them back. Now that we know we have no idea what he actually believes or can/will implement it makes less sense to speculate.
- ajmarsh 10y ago
ra1n85 10y ago
"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." -Paul Krugman Paul does not have the best track record.
- Allower 10y ago
  but but nobel prize! seriously though, Krugman is a moron, completely out of touch with reality
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Somebody will be tempted to defend him saying: "Well, he takes risks, it's expected that he will fail sometimes." The problem is not that he fails. The problem is that he never acknowledges his failures nor questions his assumptions behind the failed predictions -- he just mixes them up and say something in the lines of "I was right all the time".
  - fulafel 10y ago
    He does talk about "getting it wrong" on his blog fairly regularly. Example: http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/06/10/the-decade-behind/ http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/06/10/the-decad...
  - Chathamization 10y ago
    That's not true. In fact, he's even brought up underestimating the impact of the internet multiple times as an example of when he was wrong. For instance: "And what about me personally? I don’t have a turban and crystal ball hidden in a back room, and I’ve made some pretty wrong predictions in my time. The thing, however, is that all of these bad predictions involved stepping outside the models I understood. I underestimated the payoff to the internet; well, I was speculating about technology, and while that’s my right, I don’t have any special expertise."[1] [1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/non-prophet-economics/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/non-prophet-econ...
- stale2002 10y ago
  It is a joke article. It is a serious economic analysis on a funny topic.
nabla9 10y ago
Krugman is huge scifi nerd. He chose to study economics because it was the closest thing to psycohistory in real life. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/the-deflationist http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/the-deflationis...
careersuicide 10y ago
Any discussion of interstellar trade deserves a mention of the fantastic Charles Stross book "Neptune's Brood". I went into it expecting more or less a sequel to "Saturn's Children" but what I got was a treatise on monetary policy for economies that span multiple star systems. The concept of slow and fast money and its implications is utterly fascinating and the book is worth reading just for its explorations of the topic (the plot isn't too bad either). A quick Google search brought me to this post by Krugman[0]: I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date. 0: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-interstellar-finance/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-in...
- uncletaco 10y ago
  I loved that book. For the curious, the way interstellar trade works is through a simplified bitcoin network transmitted over light beams (because the only assets worth trading are digital). The biggest difference is each node in the network is actually a planet and a transaction between planet A and B is only confirmed when planet C validates the transaction. Planet C is usually decided on a nearest neighbor basis (If I recall correctly).
Johnny555 10y ago
I'd be interested to know what possible commodity would be worth trading among star systems -- even if some star system has a planet made entirely of diamonds, surely it would take far less energy to made them here than to ship them between stars? Likewise, it seems that endless amounts of gold (platinum, rhodium, whatever) could be harvested from our own solar system before it's worth shipping here. Even if there's some alien truffle delicacy that only grows in the shade of a tree bathed in UV light from an alien star, surely that could be cultivated here in an artificial habitat far easier than shipping it light years across the galaxy?
- elihu 10y ago
  Novel life forms and technology could be valuable, especially technology that's hard to replicate (due to proprietary processes/trade secrets or whatnot). Fissionable materials might be valuable to planets that have none of their own and want to make use of nuclear power. People are a resource of their own that may be wanted on sparsely inhabited planets (especially if birth rates on technically advanced planets are similar to those in developed nations here on Earth).
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago
  Information. Personally I imagine we're better off when we share information for free, but I haven't tested the hypothesis.
  - dghughes 10y ago
    Aww dang it, I didn't see you wrote information first. And here I am thinking I was being insightful.
- scarmig 10y ago
  Thinking in the very long term... energy? Though even that, it seems it'd be cheaper to transport the people to the energy than vice versa.
  - Johnny555 10y ago
avian 10y ago
Link to the original PDF that does not endlessly nag you to subscribe to the newsletter: https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
djschnei 10y ago
On a related note; this is one of my favorite podcasts http://contrakrugman.com/ http://contrakrugman.com/ Also related; Krugman is probably my least favorite modern day "economist".
bladedtoys 10y ago
Fun article but, has figure II been lost to history? If so then an better scanned version of the pdf should be the first thing we buy from a distant civilization.
- Khoth 10y ago
  "Readers who find figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary"

138 points by garrincha 10y ago

I understand that this paper is sort of a joke (hence references to "the force"), but I don't understand the point of some of these research papers. > "How should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light?" Perhaps we should do more research on getting the goods to travel close to the speed of light before we start worrying about how to calculate interest charges on them.

cadlin 10y ago
The paper was written for fun. It wasn't published in a journal until after the author won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics.
mazelife 10y ago
The fact that the paper is meant to be taken somewhat facetiously is signaled right there on the title page: "This research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Re-elect William Proxmire." "Proxmire was was noted for issuing his Golden Fleece Award, which was presented monthly between 1975 and 1988, in order to focus media attention on projects Proxmire viewed as self-serving and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. The first Golden Fleece Award was awarded in 1975 to the National Science Foundation, for funding an $84,000 study on why people fall in love." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire
- mturmon 10y ago
  When I was a kid, a local radio station would broadcast their summary of his "Golden Fleece Award" on their morning show. It was always a highlight to laugh at the "obvious" foolishness. As I have gotten older, the tables have turned, and my youthful easy laughs ring hollow. It's very easy to pull research out of context and laugh at it. It's very hard to do impactful research.
  - mazelife 10y ago
    I fully agree with you on that. Pulling research out-of-context is still a go-to move by anti-science politicians [1]. Frankly, I'm half-tempted to track down that $84k study on why people fall in love. That's a fascinating topic that underpins so much of the human experience; more power to any scientist who thinks they can make heads or tails of it. [1] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmil...
    - polymatter 10y ago
      I saved you the trouble. The author writes about how the Golden Fleece award affected her research (http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-golden-fleece-award-loves-labours-almost-lost#.WD4KcH3IZTQ http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-golden-flee...). She receives at a lot of hate mail - some quite disturbing - and never again receives any more funding from NSF. However, she has had a prolific and distinguished career. The paper in question is (http://www.elainehatfield.com/uploads/3/2/2/5/3225640/7._hatfield__berscheid_1974.pdf http://www.elainehatfield.com/uploads/3/2/2/5/3225640/7._hat...) "A little bit about Love" by Hatfield, Elaine & Berscheid, Elaine (1974). It was "facilitated in part by NIMH grant MH 16661 and NSF grants GS 35157X and GS 30822X". It is mostly a review of scientific thinking of the topic at the time and is surprisingly readable and enlightening read.
xenophon 10y ago
According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics." I think this paper is a great example of the playfulness inherent to an effective "hacker" mindset -- do something fun and interesting, and perhaps useful conclusions will follow. Perhaps they won't, but hey, you still had fun.
- mamon 10y ago
  >> According to Krugman, the paper is "a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics." So, if I understand correctly (as non-native English speaker), the usual in economics is: "ridiculous analysis of serious subject" ??
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - dsjoerg 10y ago
    Yes that is the implication exactly.

vaadu 10y ago

Krugman? This is the Nobel laureate that said the stock market would NEVER recover from Trump's election.

devoply 10y ago
Economists are priests. Sometimes their prophecies don't work out, because the connection to god is not clear.
witty_username 10y ago
Trump isn't president yet and hasn't done anything yet. Once that happens we'll find out for sure. Right now we don't know for sure whether Trump will do bad things and so stock markets reflect that.
Vannatter 10y ago
True, but he quickly retracted that comment and admitted that it was something he said in the heat of the moment without thinking things through fully: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/the-long-haul/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/the-long-haul/?_...
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  "He will, in fact, be a disaster on every front. And I think he will eventually drag the Republican Party into the abyss along with his own reputation" I imagine if he will retract this. Krugman keeps making wrong predictions without almost never acknowledging it, and contradicting himself in a grand scale. His contradictions are documented by a dozen of economists blogs. It's amazing how people keep listening to him.
gdulli 10y ago
To be fair, Trump said a lot of extreme things and has since shown a pattern of walking them back. Now that we know we have no idea what he actually believes or can/will implement it makes less sense to speculate.
ajmarsh 10y ago

ra1n85 10y ago

"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." -Paul Krugman Paul does not have the best track record.

Allower 10y ago
but but nobel prize! seriously though, Krugman is a moron, completely out of touch with reality
fiatjaf 10y ago
Somebody will be tempted to defend him saying: "Well, he takes risks, it's expected that he will fail sometimes." The problem is not that he fails. The problem is that he never acknowledges his failures nor questions his assumptions behind the failed predictions -- he just mixes them up and say something in the lines of "I was right all the time".
- fulafel 10y ago
  He does talk about "getting it wrong" on his blog fairly regularly. Example: http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/06/10/the-decade-behind/ http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/06/10/the-decad...
- Chathamization 10y ago
  That's not true. In fact, he's even brought up underestimating the impact of the internet multiple times as an example of when he was wrong. For instance: "And what about me personally? I don’t have a turban and crystal ball hidden in a back room, and I’ve made some pretty wrong predictions in my time. The thing, however, is that all of these bad predictions involved stepping outside the models I understood. I underestimated the payoff to the internet; well, I was speculating about technology, and while that’s my right, I don’t have any special expertise."[1] [1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/non-prophet-economics/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/non-prophet-econ...
stale2002 10y ago
It is a joke article. It is a serious economic analysis on a funny topic.

nabla9 10y ago

Krugman is huge scifi nerd. He chose to study economics because it was the closest thing to psycohistory in real life. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/the-deflationist http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/the-deflationis...

careersuicide 10y ago

Any discussion of interstellar trade deserves a mention of the fantastic Charles Stross book "Neptune's Brood". I went into it expecting more or less a sequel to "Saturn's Children" but what I got was a treatise on monetary policy for economies that span multiple star systems. The concept of slow and fast money and its implications is utterly fascinating and the book is worth reading just for its explorations of the topic (the plot isn't too bad either). A quick Google search brought me to this post by Krugman[0]: I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date. 0: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-interstellar-finance/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-in...

uncletaco 10y ago
I loved that book. For the curious, the way interstellar trade works is through a simplified bitcoin network transmitted over light beams (because the only assets worth trading are digital). The biggest difference is each node in the network is actually a planet and a transaction between planet A and B is only confirmed when planet C validates the transaction. Planet C is usually decided on a nearest neighbor basis (If I recall correctly).

Johnny555 10y ago

I'd be interested to know what possible commodity would be worth trading among star systems -- even if some star system has a planet made entirely of diamonds, surely it would take far less energy to made them here than to ship them between stars? Likewise, it seems that endless amounts of gold (platinum, rhodium, whatever) could be harvested from our own solar system before it's worth shipping here. Even if there's some alien truffle delicacy that only grows in the shade of a tree bathed in UV light from an alien star, surely that could be cultivated here in an artificial habitat far easier than shipping it light years across the galaxy?

elihu 10y ago
Novel life forms and technology could be valuable, especially technology that's hard to replicate (due to proprietary processes/trade secrets or whatnot). Fissionable materials might be valuable to planets that have none of their own and want to make use of nuclear power. People are a resource of their own that may be wanted on sparsely inhabited planets (especially if birth rates on technically advanced planets are similar to those in developed nations here on Earth).
TaylorAlexander 10y ago
Information. Personally I imagine we're better off when we share information for free, but I haven't tested the hypothesis.
- dghughes 10y ago
  Aww dang it, I didn't see you wrote information first. And here I am thinking I was being insightful.
scarmig 10y ago
Thinking in the very long term... energy? Though even that, it seems it'd be cheaper to transport the people to the energy than vice versa.
- Johnny555 10y ago

avian 10y ago

Link to the original PDF that does not endlessly nag you to subscribe to the newsletter: https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

djschnei 10y ago

On a related note; this is one of my favorite podcasts http://contrakrugman.com/ http://contrakrugman.com/ Also related; Krugman is probably my least favorite modern day "economist".

bladedtoys 10y ago

Fun article but, has figure II been lost to history? If so then an better scanned version of the pdf should be the first thing we buy from a distant civilization.

Khoth 10y ago
"Readers who find figure II puzzling should recall that a diagram of an imaginary axis must, of course, itself be imaginary"